So that’s what I do.
I roll us over, pressing him back into the mattress. His hair is a mess, and his glasses are on the kitchen counter where I left them earlier, and there’s a look on his face of naked awe. I bite his shoulder, gentle, then run my tongue over the mark, grinning as I taste the salt of his skin.
“Fuck,” he says, eyes gone dark. He rakes his hands down my back, stopping at the curve of my ass, squeezing like he wants to bruise his name onto my skin.
I rock against him, slow at first, sliding my thighs apart until I’m straddling his hips. He’s already hard again, and the friction makes me moan, low and sweet. He grabs the base of my throat and pulls me down to kiss him. It’s messy and hungry, and I love it, love the way it says everything he can’t fit into words. That he needs me. That he feels safe to let go with me. That I’m not just a placeholder until something better comes along.
I reach between us, wrap my hand around his cock and stroke him, slow at first, then faster because I can’t help myself. He groans into my mouth, thrusting up into my palm. For a second I want to tease him, draw it out, but then I realize that’s not what either of us wants right now. We want to burn up the space between us, to erase every lingering trace of what his parents tried to poison. It’s a little reckless, a little wild, but that’s how we started, isn’t it? In risk, in the willingness to lose it all for a shot at something real.
I guide him inside me, savoring the stretch, the fullness. He grabs me by the hips, holding me in place as I take every inch, and for a second it’s almost too much, the pressure at the edge of pain, but then all the nerves rewire to pleasure and I want more—always more. I move faster, angling my hips the way he likes, the way I like, the two of us chasing the same gravity well down to where there’s nothing left but this.
“Jesus, Audrey—fuck, just like that—never stop?—”
He grabs my wrists, thumb brushing my pulse, then pins my hands behind my back, forcing my chest out. The leverage makes me arch, breasts exposed, and he surges up to suck one nipple into his mouth, biting just hard enough to send heat straight to my core. The suction and the sting, the helplessness of being held open and claimed, flips every nervous system switch I have. I ride him faster, grinding down with each stroke, and the slap and squelch of our bodies meeting fills the room with the sounds of exactly what we are—hot, messy, wanting.
He’s so deep it’s almost too much, but he won’t let me go. Just keeps holding me in place as his voice wrecks out of him, “You’re not going anywhere.”
The words hit like a spell, blood humming, and my body shudders with the truth of it. He’s right. I don’t want out. I want more. More of him, more of this, more of the ecstasy and high-wire risk that comes from knowing I’ve finally let myself want something as much as I want him.
“Don’t stop,” I pant. “Don’t you fucking dare stop.”
He groans like I’ve just unlocked some steel trap inside him, and shifts one hand to my hips, the other back onto the mattress so he can buck into me with sudden, wild force. The new angle hits something insane inside me and I spasm, muscles clenching so hard around him that he gasps, eyes going wide and almost panicked, like he’s barely holding onto his senses.
“You’re incredible,” he growls, wrapping me in his arms again and dragging his teeth over the curve of my neck. “God, you’re fucking incredible.”
It’s like every filter is gone, every careful phrase replaced with raw, hungry truth. I claw at his back, his shoulders, wanting to mark him, to rip out his soul and keep it in my pocket. I think he feels it, too—maybe always has, from the very first night—but now all the artifice is ripped away and all that’s left is this pure need, this wild, mutual hunger. No armor. No Swedish blonde persona. Just me, the version I’ve been too scared to let anyone see since I was six years old and learned that loving people means losing them.
He fucks up into me so hard I can barely breathe, and when I come it rips through me like a soldering iron, burning away every last doubt, every memory of anyone who ever told me I was too much, not enough, impossible to love. I scream his name, voice bending into something raw and animal, and hefollows me right over the edge, pulsing deep inside me, his body shuddering with the force of it.
We cling to each other for a long time, neither of us able to talk, both of us trembling as if the storm is still passing through. My vision fuzzes at the edges, colors popping in the darkness behind my closed eyelids, and I can’t tell if I’m going to faint or just ascend into some higher plane of bliss. Maybe both.
Then, as my pulse levels off, so does my brain. It’s all there—the awe, the dumb animal contentment, the aftermath of being held so tightly and loved so absolutely that it almost hurts. I collapse onto his chest, boneless and full, and we just stay like that, our bodies sticky and sweat-slick, hearts slowly settling into rhythm.
After a minute, Logan’s hand finds my hair and starts petting, soothing. It’s almost laughable, the contrast between what we just did and the tenderness of this. He tucks my head under his chin, and we lie there, breathing each other’s breath, marinating in this new, unbreakable thing between us.
“You’re more than enough, Logan,” I whisper—the words I’ve spent my whole life needing to hear, offered now to someone who needs them more. “I see you. You’re everything.”
His arms tighten around me, and all of a sudden his body is shaking.
I just hold him.
CHAPTER 27
Logan
“You know,” Audrey says as she stares at one of the many monitors in the lab. “We just might have to admit defeat on this one and bring in some outside perspective.”
“We’re not bringing in outside perspective.”
“Logan—”
“We’ve been at this for over a week. We know this system better than anyone. Some consultant is just going to tell us to try things we’ve already ruled out and then charge us six figures for the privilege.”
She spins her chair to face me, pulling her curls up into a messy bun that makes her look like a sexy mad scientist. When she came back from Sweden, her hair was straightened to within an inch of its life, her face was perfectly made up, and her glasses had been replaced by contacts. But now, a little over two months later, the curls are back, the makeup is minimal, and she’s even started wearing her glasses again. I feel like I’ve gotten the real Audrey back, the one who doesn’t give a fuck if her hair is wildor her brain is three steps ahead of the room, because she knows exactly who she is and doesn’t need to front for anyone.
She’s also wearing the blue T-shirt that says ‘Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda’ with one of her pleated tartan skirts. Mary Janes on her feet. I love this look more than any dress she brought back from Stockholm.
This right here is the woman I fell head over heels for that first day in the Carmichael conference room.
