“I don’t hate it.” I moved my hands to the back of his head to guide his mouth back down to mine, then remembered what I’d been about to say. “Is all of this feeling, I don’t know, different to you?”
“Yeah,” he said quietly, then finally kissed me again. “I don’t hate it.”
Chuckling, I pushed his shirt off his shoulders and sat up like a puppet on his strings when he moved back to pull my shirt up over my head. For a moment, he just looked at me, eyes on mine before they dropped to my chest.
I had on a new black lace bra. One of the garments he’d bought me and had placed in his dresser here, and he groaned as those eyes drank me in like he’d eat me up if he could. As if he’d read the thought, he suddenly closed his fingers around my ankles and spread them wide, then grinned as he shoved myskirt up to my hips and hooked his fingers into the waistband of the matching panties.
“I picked these out myself,” he murmured, sliding the panties down too slowly for my liking. My breathing hitched, my nipples peaking against the lace. “I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve pictured you wearing them.”
“Yeah?”
He made a soft, almost scoffing sound and glanced up at me after tossing the panties into the relative darkness of the room. “Oh, yeah.”
“You’d think you’d have kept them on a bit longer if you spent so much time anticipating the moment,” I teased quietly, beyond relieved he hadn’t actually left them on. “What did you do, all of those times you were picturing it?”
He cocked a dark eyebrow at me, his expression devilish as he shrugged. “What do you think I did, the fucking dishes?”
Heat crept from my chest to my cheeks, my heart suddenly hammering in my ears. “You didn’t do the dishes, did you?”
“Nope.” He pushed my ankles even further apart and crept between my legs, lowering his mouth to the inside of one of my thighs. “You’ve been driving me crazy since long before I ever got inside you, baby, but nothing, not even my wildest fantasies, comes close to the real thing.”
Clearly done talking, he nipped the inside of my thigh and then moved his mouth further up. My insides clenched in anticipation, an involuntary moan escaping before he’d even touched me. I felt him tremble slightly in response to the sound, and I lay back. My bones turned to jelly at the thought that a mere quiet sound from me could do that to a guy like him.
At the first touch of his tongue to my slit, I arched my back and slid my fingers into his hair, once again struck by how surreal it was to surrender like this. I still couldn’t believe how naturally it came with him, but it really did.
Right now, I had no desire to take control. No fears about what might happen if I just let go. Only one thought broke through the haze of need clouding my mind, and that was that I trusted him. Implicitly.
And not even that scared me as much as it should have.
As he slid a finger into me, sucking my clit into his mouth at the same time, I nearly shrieked at the sudden pleasure of the momentary overload. Then he started moving his finger and his tongue in unison and my hips rolled, my body already chasing the orgasm I knew now from experience would be creeping up on me before I even knew it.
The familiar pressure built up at the root of my very being, and a tiny part of me was scared to let it go. Alex wasn’t having it, though. A second finger joined the first, his tempo picking up until I didn’t have a choice.
I leaped head first off the cliff, my toes curling and my muscles locking up as a truly sensational orgasm spilled over me. Alex licked me clean in the aftermath, then kissed me hard without worrying about the taste of me in his mouth or the wetness on his jaw.
I moaned again, a primal sound that had come unexpectedly from someplace deep inside. Because it felt like I’d marked him somehow. Like I’d written my name on his soul and now he was mine.
My skirt and his pants disappeared while we were kissing, a tangle of hands and limbs until he sat back on his knees and helped me up to straddle him. I wrapped my arms around his neck and lowered myself down, my breath catching at the thick length of him slowly sliding in.
Pure bliss ghosted across his features when he bottomed out, suddenly not a trace of tension or even arrogance remaining. It made me wonder if he was giving himself over to me as I did thesame with him, but I didn’t stop to ask, just slanting my lips over his once more and moving slowly up and down above him.
He didn’t stop kissing me, just moaning openly into my mouth when I started moving faster. Speeding up his thrusts to meet mine, he lay back on the bed and gripped my hips with one hand and my hair in the other.
We moved together just like that until I felt him tense and went tumbling right over the edge with him. Weirdly, in that moment, I wished there wasn’t a condom between us, and though I knew it was probably just because my brain was nowhere near online right now, I wondered if we would have made a baby together if there hadn’t been.
In the aftermath, I realized that was probably something else we needed to talk about. Condoms. Babies. The future.
We finally settled into the bed, our limbs tangled together, as he pulled me into him. His arm was heavy over my waist and my head was resting against his shoulder, and I decided a conversation that serious could wait.
This felt too amazing to ruin the moment. Right now, we could just be us, enjoying this quiet, intimate bubble before the world came crashing back in.
I knew, even now, that it wouldn’t last, but I let myself believe in it anyway. That we would have a future together and that in that future, we could have every conversation we needed to have because we would still be together to have it.
CHAPTER 36
ALEX
Iwoke up early with Jane still fast asleep beside me, tucked into my side with one hand curled loosely on my chest. Pale, wintry light shone in through the windows, and for once, my phone wasn’t the first thing on my mind. Neither was work.
