Each exhale is sharp, ragged as his forehead presses to my collarbone, his large chest moving in tandem with mine.
I try to speak. Try to say anything. But only a whimper comesout.
Donovan pulls out slowly, still breathing hard.
After a second, he drags me upright into his arms, pressing a kiss to my jaw, and I feel like I’ve been dragged over a cliff I didn’t even know I was standing on.
“You good?” he murmurs.
“I…think so…?”
“Good.” He laughs once, dark and breathy. “Because we’re not done.”
I blink up at him, dazed, as he lifts me off the counter in one smooth, practiced motion.
“Donovan, where—”
“Bed,” he growls, carrying me down the hall like I weigh nothing. “Because that—” he kisses my throat, hard “—was round one.”
I tremble, as his mouth drags down my neck, slow and filthy.
“And I plan to fuck you through the mattress for rounds two and three.”
Chapter sixteen
~EMMA~
Sunlight spills through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Donovan’s penthouse in wide, golden ribbons, glinting off glass, steel, and stone. With Central Park stretching out below the windows, my world suddenly feels green, and calm, and unreal.
Doesn’t help that the entire place smells like expensive coffee, musky soap, and sex.
So much sex.
Barefoot on Donovan’s kitchen’s heated stone floors, I wrench open the fridge, thinking of the sex, but so much more.
More like Donovan’s request, the thought alone making my stomach dip.
“Move in with me.”
The words replay uninvited, lodged somewhere between my ribs and my throat.
Especially when I remember—
The bedroom. The couch. The kitchen counter.
The shower…
Twice.
I lean against the kitchen island, tracing my thumb along the smooth edge of the marble. This kitchen alone could swallow my entire apartment whole—three bedrooms, he’d said. Space for a nursery. Space to breathe.
Space to depend.
That’s the part that makes my chest tighten.
I cross the room slowly, pretending I’m just wandering, pretending I’m not cataloging exits like I alwaysdo when something starts to feel too important, too loaded.
There’s a bowl of fruit on the counter, a knife block with blades I doubt Donovan ever uses himself. A faint hum from the espresso machine cooling down.
