My heels knock against the crossbars of the table, desperate for leverage or escape, but she’s got me, all of me, pinned by the gravity of her own momentum.
She leans forward, drape of hair tickling my lips, her other hand raking down my chest. I can smell the sweat on her, sharp and salt and sage, and it comes to me that I’d do this forever if she asked. I’d live right here, buried deep inside her pussy, let her ride me into the ground, if it meant I never lost this heat, this rush.
Her moan is low and strange, dragged through her teeth, chewing on the edge of her own hunger. She pops her hand off my mouth at the same moment she slams down, and the noise I make is obscene and involuntary, echoing off the empty kitchen.
I almost break, right there. She feels it, either the way I flex inside her or the way my whole body threatens to convulse, and clamps down hard, knees pressing in, thighs trembling.
“Not yet,” she growls, the command unsteady but absolute. “You don’t come until I say so.”
It shouldn’t be hot, the way she strips me down to nothing and then rebuilds me to her own pattern, but right now it’s all I ever want. I’m being rewired from the ground up. She’s teaching my skin how to feel things in ways a human body’s not designed for.
My hands slide up the slick planes of her back, nails grazing along the edges of her shoulder blades, and when I pull her down to me, teeth colliding with the side of her neck, she whimpers—a sound so raw and undressed I want to peel the skin off my chest and press her inside.
I want to say her name again, to get her attention or at least remind her of the person she’s breaking apart, but I can’t find air long enough to form the syllables. My head goes blurry at the edges, little pulses firing behind my eyes every time she grinds down hard enough to send electricity shooting out of my toes.
There’s something gluttonous in the way she moves, insisting on every aftershock, every ripple, draining all the voltage out of us before she lets me get close to coming. I can feel her startingto clench up around me, sharp little spasms, daring me to ignore her order, to lose it and pay the penalty.
If I had any control left, I’d try harder to impress her, prove that I can hold out, but the only thing keeping me from going over is pure terror, a sweaty, bone-deep fear of what she’ll do if I come before she wants me to.
She shifts, changes the angle, rides up on her knees, and the slick heat between us is obscene, the slap of her flesh, the drip of sweat off my own skin as I strain up to catch her with my mouth, anywhere, everywhere.
I sink my teeth into her shoulder just to anchor myself, just to keep from detonating right there on the kitchen table. She doesn’t even flinch. She just laughs, a low, delighted cackle, proud of what she’s doing to me.
I feel the build in her first, the sudden wild tremble that goes through her thighs, the way her nails claw at my wrist instead of the table. She drags her bottom lip between her teeth and closes her eyes, and I know she’s seconds away.
I want to tell her how good she looks, how the flush creeps up her chest, but there's no language for it, just this howling in my skull, this static that drowns out everything but the slap and shudder.
“Now,” she grates, the signal cracked and brutal, but it’s all I need.
I come so violently it arches my spine off the table, stars behind my eyelids, that ancient tidal wave tearing through and shattering me so thoroughly she has to hold me down until I’m done. She rides it out, both of us gone animal, spasming around me, trying desperately to hang on…
I wake up gasping, sheets twisted around my legs, chest heaving, skin burning.
My body is a live wire. Every nerve lit up. Every part of me straining for a touch that never happened.
My name is a strangled sound in the dark.
“Delaney…”
Damn.
Shame crashes in next. Hard, fast, choking.
What the hell is wrong with me?
I sit up, dragging a hand over my face. My pulse is still thundering. My body still aching. My mind still filled with the image of her standing over me, telling me to kneel.
I can’t do this. I can’t want her, not like this, not when she works for me, not when Sadie loves her, not when I’ve spent years rebuilding my life brick by brick.
I have no business dreaming about her.
Never again, I warn myself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Delaney
By the timeIvy drops me off at the ranch, it’s after midnight. The air is cool and clean, that late fall kind of cold that whispers across bare skin and sneaks under hemlines. My heels seem to clatter on the porch as I climb the steps, tugging my jacket tighter around myself.
