1
ELLA
I’m hot all over, pinned beneath him, the world outside this office reduced to a muffled hum and a spray of fairy lights that ghost across the filing cabinet. His weight is a steady, dangerous thing, heavy across my ribs.
“Shiloh,” Cole breathes, dragging my lower lip with his teeth.
He’s the only one who calls me by my middle name. Always has, like some unspoken rule between us.
His hand slides lower, thumbs stroking the soft place where my hip meets my thigh. I arch into him, my fingers tangling into his thick, dark hair.
“Are you sure about this?” he asks, voice rough, his brown eyes lifting to meet my charcoal grey ones.
Not because he doubts me, I think; because he needs me to say it, to make it explicit. Because fucking me right here, on the mayor’s desk under a dim lamp, could wreck a lot of things.
Quinn will probably laugh her heart out if she ever learns about my sexual escapades in her father’s office, but the mayor will probably have a coronary. Good thing they’re both occupied outside.
I should stop this, stop me, stop him, stop us, but I’m too far gone to care. I’ve waited two decades for this, and I’m not going to let the chance slip through my fingers. Twenty years isn’t a number anymore; it’s a geography. It’s the space between the kid I was and the woman he’s allowing me to be in this moment.
“Yes.” It comes out fragile and fierce. “Yes, Cole. God, yes.”
“Good, because I don’t know what I’d do with this if you asked me to stop,” he admits, taking my hand and pressing it over his bulging pants.
Damn, he’s big. Cole has always given big dick energy, and I am not disappointed.
I squeeze once, and he groans, his mouth wrapping around the pulse at my throat. His big, rough hands skim the waistband of my pants before landing on my zipper, dragging it down. I lift my hips to help him, my breath hitching as cotton peels away.
He lifts the hem of my blouse but pauses for a moment, looks up at me, eyes dark with hunger and something else—reverence, maybe.
“Are you okay?” he asks, softer now.
I nod because I don’t have words for the way my stomach has dropped into my spine, and everything in me is finally home. “I want this.”
His answer is a slow, open-mouthed kiss that knocks the last of my restraint into a corner. His tongue is warm and commanding, his hands moving like he’s cataloguing all of me. He takes one of my D-cups into his callused palm, thumbs rolling my nipple until a sharp, delicious ache blooms and I cry out, loud and shameless.
Cole’s old enough to know what he’s doing. He’s practiced, patient, and he knows how to make me unravel without breaking me entirely. He slides two fingers between us, finds the wetness I’m already creating, and pushes forward.
“Fuck,” I whimper.
He matches his mouth to that word, teeth nipping at me, lips swallowing every moan I utter.
“You’re so fucking beautiful,” he rasps.
The compliment pins me harder than any touch. I bite my lip to stop the laugh that threatens to spill. This is reckless, so goddamn reckless, but it also feels like salvation.
When his fingers curl inside me, my breath catches. He doesn’t rush me, just watches my throat, my hands, and the tiny tremor in my parted thighs.
“Talk to me,” he says, voice low.
“I want you,” I manage, the sentence a hymn. “I’ve wanted you forever.”
His laugh is a rough exhale. “Forever sounds about right.”
He pulls back for a second to take off his belt, his 6‘2“ frame towering over me. The fact that this gorgeous specimen of a man wants me is a wonder. He’s hard where I’m soft, tall where I’m short, perfect where I’m not.
Before my terrible thoughts take over, his pants drop, and I see him—thick, warm, and hard. Something wanton and feral rises in me. I’ve fantasized about him in the dark corners of my head for more than a decade, but the reality is more urgent, tender, and untamed than any daydream.
He positions himself between my legs, and for a heartbeat, the whole universe waits.
