He looks at me, both eyebrows raised. “You mean?—”
“Yeah. I mean, like, the roof. The party. All of it. Let’s go find something that isn’t on any ‘must-see-in-Austin’ list.”
He laughs, slow and delighted. “I thought you’d never ask.”
CHAPTER 9
ASHER
This iswhat happens after the after-parties: the cheap champagne is gone, the stars are all showing their true grade of tarnish, and I’m utterly, bottomlessly drunk on wanting Emma Rowan. I mean panting, pulse-in-my-throat, finger-shaking obsessed, crazy with her taste on my lips and the bone-deep ache to drag her off the dim-lit hotel hallway into the nearest private space and not come up for air until Texas, and maybe the entire West, runs dry.
Funny thing about pretending for the cameras: sometimes you forget what’s fake and what’s real, and tonight the boundary is so blurred it’s not even a line, just a pulse between her body and mine as she stumbles, giggling, into my chest outside her suite. Her hair’s a mess from the wind and her last three interviews, and there’s a smudge of mascara trailing like a comet down her cheek, but she’s never looked more electric.
Or more hungry.
“For the record,” she whispers as I nuzzle her temple, “I’m only letting you in because I know you’re as drunk as I am.”
I bristle—not at the dig, but at how her lips hit the tight corner of my jaw, the place I know is my tell. My knees buckle a little. “For the record, Em, that’s a motherfucking lie.” My voicedrops to the floor between us. “You’re letting me in because every time I look at your mouth, you forget what you were about to say.”
She’s too quick tonight, lean muscle and will, so she shoves the keycard into my hand and darts down the carpet ahead of me, swaying her hips like a dare. “That’s because you stare at it like you want to eat me alive.”
We’re inside the suite before she’s even fully got the door closed. I have one perfect second to memorize the chaos of her against the bland chic of the room—the midnight gold of her dress, the shine of sweat on her clavicle, the wild, reckless gleam in her eye—before she’s on me, in a whirl of fingernails and hot, clumsy hands. If there’s a God, he’s a deviant, because nothing’s ever tasted better than her gasp as she flattens me against the wall and kisses me feral, starved, desperate.
Our kiss is brutal—a clash of teeth, a tangle of tongues—but she leans into the chaos like it’s oxygen. This is the girl who rolls her eyes at Hollywood polish, and now she’s devouring me with a hunger so honest, so stripped of performance, it borders on indecent. I catch her hands as they fumble with the buttons of my shirt, and instead of helping, I haul her up, dress and all, and she laughs into my mouth, like she’s never been this happy to be manhandled.
“Jesus, Em, you taste like a guilty secret.”
She fists her hand in my hair and hisses, “Maybe you should take better care, then,” and bites my lower lip hard enough to bruise.
This is my favorite flavor of foreplay: no script, no choreography, just the two of us tripping over the edge, ripping at clothes until there’s nothing between us but friction. Her hands are everywhere, urgent and insistent, but I pin her wrists above her head and inhale. At this angle, I catch the sweat-and-perfume note in the softest line of her neck. She shudders against me.
“Shower,” she pants, as if the word’s supposed to mean something. “We should— god, we’re both so sweaty.”
I shake my head slowly. “No fucking way.” I scrape my teeth along her jugular, and she twitches. “I want you exactly how you are—hot and desperate and filthy.”
I expect her to run with it, to counter, but I see her eyes widen, green gone dark with shock. Maybe nobody’s ever told her that before. The notion that this girl, loved and watched and dissected by the world, has never been wanted for exactly herself makes something in me snap.
I flick open her dress at the nape and shuck it down her body, not gently, until the whole thing pools in an absurd green puddle at her feet. She’s only in a black thong and a matching lace-up bra, both of which I want to wear as a necklace. She stands there—backlit by a hotel lamp, dumbstruck by her own skin—but I can’t hold back. I scoop her up, one hand under her thighs, and toss her onto the bed, following her down.
“God, look at you,” I breathe. I kneel at the edge and run my hands up her legs, fingers mapping bruises and knots from tonight’s shoes and a decade of dancer’s discipline. She trembles.
“You’re so fucking?—”
She cuts me off with a glare. “Don’t say ‘beautiful’ or I’ll puke.”
I grin, grazing her hipbone with my teeth. “I was going to say ‘dangerous.’”
She melts, just a little, and I know she loves being told she’s a threat. I hook my finger in her panties, slow so she can stop me, but she arches up instead, and I draw them down, tossing them to the floor. The sight of her open, waiting, is almost enough to finish me.
When I dip my head between her legs the first time, she flinches and clamps her thighs against my jaw, shivering. I lap at her until her hips jerk, then look up.
“If you want me to stop, say red. Promise?”
She nods so hard her skull nearly cracks the headboard, then arches her spine like a drawn bow when I drag my tongue through her slick, swollen folds. The taste hits me like lightning—champagne and salt, the musk of arousal, something uniquely her—and I groan into her heat, unable to stop myself. Her thighs quiver against my cheeks as she claws at the sheets, my name escaping her lips in desperate, broken hisses. Every circle of my tongue makes her writhe, every flick against her clit sends electric tremors through her limbs. Her body responds with such raw honesty it shocks me; there’s no performance here, no calculated moans—just Emma, stripped bare, drowning in pleasure.
When I curl two fingers deep inside her slick, velvet heat, she bolts upright with a strangled cry, both hands fisting in my hair, grinding herself against my mouth with savage need. The sounds she makes—Jesus—primal, guttural noises that vibrate through her core into mine. I murmur filthy praise against her most sensitive flesh, telling her how fucking divine she tastes, how perfect her cunt feels clenching around my fingers, until she convulses violently, thighs clamping around my head as she comes apart in waves, collapsing back in a mess of breathless sobs and delirious laughter.
She’s boneless when I crawl up her body and cup her face in both hands. She blinks, grins, then wipes a stray tear off her cheek.
