"You've seen me naked."
"I've seen you naked fast. Haven't seen you naked slow." His eyes traveled and I felt it, everywhere, warm and deliberate. "You're stunning."
"Flattery."
"Fact." He pulled his own shirt over his head. I reached for him and he caught my hand and pressed his lips to my palm and the tenderness of it almost undid me worse than anything rough ever had. "Patience."
"I don't have patience. We've established this."
"New lesson."
He laid me down and stretched beside me, propped on one elbow, and kissed me again. Long, deep, his free hand running the length of my body—shoulder to hip and back, mapping me with his fingertips. I arched into the touch and he eased me gently back down and the message was clear: his pace, and I was going to let him set it.
I let him.
He kissed down my throat. My chest. Took my nipple into his mouth and worked it with his tongue until my fists clenched in the sheets, then moved to the other and gave it the same devastating focus. Lower, the flat of my stomach, the jut of my hip. He kissed a path along the crease of my thigh and I shivered. His breath ghosted against my skin, his hands anchoring my hips, and the anticipation was doing half the work for him. He spread my thighs and settled between them and put his mouth to the inside of my knee and I almost told him to stop teasing and then didn't, because the patience was its own kind of heat and he knew exactly what he was doing with it.
His mouth found my pussy and the first stroke of his tongue was long and purposeful and my hips rolled up and his palms pinned them back down. He ate me with the same patience he'd brought to everything else: measured strokes, his tongue circling my clit, steady and relentless. I grabbed his hair. His fingers slid inside me, two, curling forward, and his mouth sealed over my clit and sucked.
"Dane—God—"
"I've got you."
The orgasm built in layers. Gathered low, tightened, spread, and when it broke it rolled through me in long waves instead of last night's sharp detonation. I came with my back arched and my fist in his hair and his mouth still on me, drawing it out, carrying me through it until my thighs stopped shaking and my breath came back in ragged pulls.
He kissed his way back up my body. I pulled him to me and tasted myself on his mouth and the intimacy of it, his tongue, my taste, his hands cradling my face, pulled at a knot behind my ribs that I didn't have a name for yet. His weight settled over me and I wrapped my legs around him and pulled him closer, wanting the full length of him against me, wanting no space between us at all.
"My turn," I said.
I pushed him onto his back and took my time with him. Kissed his chest, the scar from the fence in El Paso, the hard plane of his stomach. His breathing changed under my lips, deeper, rougher, the control he'd held all night fraying at the edges. He was hard, his cock straining, and I wrapped my fingers around him and stroked, watching his face while I worked him.
"Jenna—"
"Patience," I said, and the look he gave me was worth every second of buildup.
I lowered my mouth to his cock. Took him in with a long, wet drag of my tongue flat on the underside, and his whole body went taut. His hand found my hair, not guiding, just holding on. I worked him the way he'd worked me: deliberate, thorough, no rush. Took him deeper and hollowed my cheeks and his hips bucked and the groan that tore out of him was raw and involuntary and I felt it between my own thighs. I kept going, pulling back to trace the head with my tongue, then taking him deep again until his fingers tightened in my hair and his breathing was ragged.
"Come here," he said. Rough. "I need to be inside you."
I crawled up his body. He gripped my hips and I straddled him and reached between us and guided his cock inside me and we both went still.
Face-to-face. His grip on my hips, my palms on his chest, and for a second neither of us moved. The fullness of him and the openness of his expression were almost too much and exactly enough at the same time. His thumbs traced circles on my hip bones, featherlight, and the tenderness in it after everything rough and fast we'd already done to each other made my breath catch.
"Hi," I whispered. Which was ridiculous, and intimate, and exactly right.
"Hi." His voice was wrecked. "Move when you're ready."
I started to move.
A rolling rhythm, unhurried. His grip guided my hips but didn't control them, and his eyes held mine and the eye contact was more intimate than any of the rest of it, more exposed than I'd ever been with anyone. His thumb found my clit and traced easy circles and I rode him with my palms flat on his chest and felt his heartbeat under my fingers, steady and strong.
"You feel incredible," he said.
"So do you." I rolled my hips and he groaned and I did it again because that sound was becoming my favorite thing in this city. "Don't hold back."
He sat up. Changed the angle. His arms wrapped around me, pulling me flush against his chest, and I was in his lap with my legs around his waist and we moved together in a rhythm that was just ours. His forehead against mine. His breath mixing with mine. His palms spread wide on my back. I could feel his heartbeat against my own, both of them running hard, and the closeness of it was almost unbearable.
I could feel every inch of him, the shift of muscle in his thighs, the tension in his arms, the way his breathing fractured when I tightened around him. He thrust up into me and I gasped and his grip on my back tightened and we found it again, that rhythm, deeper now, the kind that built from the inside out.
