Avery
He pulled the blanket from his saddlebag like he'd planned every second of this, and I realized he had. The Pringles can. The rose. The blanket. This wasn't spontaneous. This was Cade, thinking about me every mile of the road between us.
He spread it over a flat area of ground, sheltered from the trail by a wall of brush. The sound of the waves was everywhere. Loud enough to swallow anything I might give him.
Good, because I planned to give him a lot.
He came back to me and picked up where he'd left off. This time unzipping my jacket. Slowly, all the way down to my navel, the leather parting and the air finding my skin underneath. I hadn't worn anything beneath it. His eyes dropped and stayed.
"Jesus, Avery."
He put his mouth on me before I could say another word.
Not my lips… my throat. Open and hot and dragging down to the hollow at the base of my neck, then lower, pushing the leather apart with his jaw.
His stubble scraped the inside curve of my breast and I grabbed his shoulders because my knees were already forgetting their job.
I pulled at his cut. He shrugged it off and I peeled his shirt over his head and there he was… every hard, inked inch of him. I'd imagined this. Alone in bed, hand between my legs. I’d imagined exactly this and it didn't come close.
He eased me out of the leathers. Jacket, then boots, then the rest. Peeling everything down my legs like he was unwrapping something delicate. When I was bare he stepped back and looked at me.
Not a glance. A look. The kind that makes you feel like the only woman who ever existed.
"Get down here," I said.
He dropped to his knees in front of me and pressed his mouth to my stomach, my hip, the crease where my thigh began. His hands wrapped around the backs of my legs and pulled me forward and I let myself go down onto the blanket. He wasn't rushing. He was worshipping me.
"Cade."
He looked up. Those eyes. Dark and patient and absolutely fucking feral underneath.
"I need your mouth."
He didn't make me say where.
He pushed my thighs apart and settled between them. The first stroke of his tongue made every day of waiting collapse into a single white-hot point. I arched off the blanket and grabbed his head as he groaned against me like my taste was something he'd been starving for.
His tongue traced me in long, slow, flat strokes, then circled tight and precise where I needed it most. When I started to shake he slid two fingers inside me.
Curling, pressing, finding the spot that made me lose language.
Not just control, but words, thought, everything except the sound of his name leaving my mouth like a prayer.
I came with the sky wide open above me and his name in my throat.
He didn't stop.
He worked me through it and right into the next wave. Softer this time, deeper, rolling through my whole body while I gripped the blanket and let it take me.
When I finally pushed his head away, gasping, he kissed the inside of my thigh and looked up at me with a wet mouth and a grin that said he could do that all day.
"Get up here," I said. "Now."
He rose over me, unbuckling his belt, and I reached for him. My hands shaking and impatient. I freed him from his jeans and wrapped my hand around his hard cock, feeling him pulse against my palm. Thick and hot and already leaking for me.
"Fuck," he breathed.
"You haven't felt anything yet."
I stroked him slow, twisting on the upstroke, watching his jaw tighten, watching his arms shake where he held himself above me.
I ran my thumb over the wet head and he hissed through his teeth.
A sound so raw it made me ache with how empty I’d been.
I wanted to taste him, wanted him in my mouth, wanted to hear what sounds he'd make when I swallowed him.
But not yet.
Now I needed him inside me so badly it hurt.
"Cade. I need you."
He didn't ask if I was sure. He knew. He lined himself up and pushed in. Slowly… and the stretch of him made me gasp and grab his arms and hold on.
He stopped. "You okay?"
"Don't you dare stop."
He sank the rest of the way in and we both went still. Just breathing. Full, and connected. His forehead against mine, his breath on my lips, his hips flush with mine. The whole world was that single point of contact.
"You feel…” he started.
"I know." I did. I felt it too. Like everything before this had been the wrong shape, and now it wasn't.
Then he moved.
A deep, grinding roll of his hips that dragged against everything inside me. Not fucking. Not yet. His body telling mine what his mouth couldn't say.
I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him deeper, matching his rhythm, and his breath caught in a way that made me feel powerful. I dug my nails into his back and dragged them down and he groaned into my neck. Not gentle, or careful, and I felt him twitch inside me.
I was making him feel this. After everything.
I bit his earlobe. "Faster."
The switch flipped.
His hips snapped forward, hard enough that I gasped, and whatever careful rhythm we'd built shattered into something raw.
This was fucking. His hand fisted in my hair and pulled my head back and I let him because it felt like exactly what I needed.
To be taken, to be wanted badly enough that gentle wasn't enough anymore.
"You feel so fucking good," I told him, and his grip tightened. "Don't stop. Don't you fucking stop."
He hitched my leg higher, hand behind my knee, and the angle shifted and I cried out, sharp and loud. He found that spot and drove into it, again and again, relentless, and I was climbing toward something that felt like it might split me open.
I raked my nails down his chest. Grabbed his ass and pulled him into me harder, deeper, meeting every thrust. The sounds coming out of me were feral. I didn't recognize them and I didn't care.
"Look at me," he said.
I opened my eyes. His face above me, jaw clenched, his body working hard and holding back. Barely. Waiting for me.
"Let go, Avery."
I shattered. Full-body, back-arching, screaming-his-name shattered. Clenching around him so hard he couldn't hold it. I felt him follow me over, as he buried himself to the hilt and pulsed inside me with a groan that came from somewhere deep.
He collapsed onto me. Heavy, sweating, his heart hammering against mine.
We lay there as our skin cooled. Neither of us said a word.
Then his chest shook with a quiet laugh.
"What?" I murmured.
"I like the petals more than the thorns," he said.
I shoved him and he rolled off me, grinning at the sky, and I curled into his side on the blanket, pressed my face into his chest and wrapped my hand around his cock… and squeezed.