Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
I step forward and she lets me, my hands finding her waist, her palms coming up to my chest.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I am,” I confirm.
“Why?”
I think about Josie on the docks earlier. Don’t wait until the threat is neutralized to figure out what you want.
“Because I can,” I say. “And I wasted a lot of time when I could have been doing this instead.”
A flash of emotion crosses her face before she reaches up and pulls me down to her, and I go without resistance. My mouth finds hers in a kiss that starts slow and stays that way, deliberate and thorough, the kind of kiss that doesn’t have anywhere urgent to be.
Her hands move to the buttons of my shirt, working them slowly, and I let her, my hands burying in her hair to tilt her head back slightly. She hums when my mouth finds her neck.
When the last button gives, she pushes the shirt off my shoulders and runs her palms flat across my chest, my ribs, the plane of my stomach, like she’s relearning the geography of me. Not urgent. Deliberate. The way you touch something you intend to keep.
“You’re still so—” she starts, then stops herself.
“So what?” I ask.
She looks up at me, a small curve at the corner of her mouth. “Never mind.”
I reach behind her and unhook her bra with one easy flick. Her expression shifts from amused to unguarded lust. I ease the straps down her arms, kissing her shoulders, and drop it somewhere behind me without looking.
“So what?” I ask again, quieter this time.
“Unfairly built,” she says against my mouth, and I feel her smile.
I walk her backward to the bed, her knees buckling when we reach its edge. I grasp the waist of her leggings and she lifts her hips cooperatively, and I pull them down and off in one motion, leaving her in nothing but a scrap of cotton that I take care of next.
Then I just look at her and she stares back without shame.
She tilts her chin up slightly. “You’re doing it again.”
“Looking at you?”
“Staring,” she corrects.
“You’re worth staring at,” I say, and her face softens in a way that makes my chest ache.
I put one knee on the mattress and lean over her, my mouth finding the curve of her throat, the hollow of her collarbone, the soft swell of her breast. She inhales sharply when my lips close over her and she arches into me, her hands coming up to grip the back of my neck. I take my time. More than she wants me to, judging by how her fingers press harder.
“Cole.”
“Mmm.”
“You’re doing that on purpose.”
“Doing what?” I murmur against her skin.
“Going slow.”
“I am,” I confirm. I move lower, my mouth tracing the curve of her waist, the soft skin below her navel, and she makes a sound that she tries to muffle against her wrist.
I lift my head. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Hide your sounds… your words.”
She looks down at me, chest rising and falling, eyes dark. “Do your worst.”
And I do. I part her legs, savage her pussy with my mouth, and pin her down when she thrashes too much for me to concentrate. When her body draws tight and the orgasm takes her, I lick at her harder to drive her higher. It’s my name she screams and then murmurs over and over again as I bring her down to where she’s loose and boneless against the sheets.
I work my way back up her body slowly, her hands finding my shoulders, my jaw, pulling me up to her mouth. She kisses me with a lazy, heated thoroughness that starts to build again, her hips shifting beneath me with a wordless request I understand perfectly.
I settle my weight over her, moving her legs to force them around me. She digs her heels into the back of my thighs, and when I finally thrust into her, she exhales against my neck in a long, shuddering breath of relief.
I stay still for a moment, just breathing her in.
“Hey,” she says against my jaw, voice low and warm.
“Hey,” I say back.
She laughs quietly at that, and I feel it everywhere, and then I start to move and the laughter gives way to something better.
The other times have been urgent, driven by adrenaline or fear or five years of compressed wanting finding its way out all at once. But tonight we move like a couple who has decided we’re not going anywhere.
Tessa’s hands move restlessly over my back, my shoulders, the nape of my neck. She whispers into my ear that I don’t have the presence of mind to fully process the words, fragments of sentences and my name and sounds that aren’t words at all.
At some point she shifts, pulling me closer, changing the angle, and I groan against her temple.