I didn't stop. Sealed my mouth over her and worked her with a relentless rhythm that had her fisting the sheets with one hand and my hair with the other. Her back was arched, chin tipped toward the ceiling, and I watched—from between her thighs, I watched this woman come undone and knew with a certainty that scared me that I would do this every day for the rest of my life if she'd let me.
This is it.The thought arrived without permission.This is what it's supposed to feel like. This is the thing you spent fifteen years trying to manufacture with the wrong person.
I slid two fingers inside her while my tongue kept its rhythm. She cried out—a sharp, beautiful sound that bounced off the bedroom walls. I curled my fingers, found that spot, pressed, and her response was immediate and violent.
Her thighs clamped. Her back bowed. Her hand in my hair pulled hard enough to sting. And then she wascoming—not a quiet, controlled climax but a full-body detonation that ripped through her in waves. She said my name. Said it twice. The second time was barely a sound, just air shaped around two syllables while her whole body shook.
I brought her down the way I'd built her up. Gentle strokes. Soft pressure. Easing her through the aftershocks as her breathing went ragged and her thighs trembled against my shoulders.
When I kissed my way back up her body, she was glassy-eyed and flushed, wearing that boneless, satiated look that was, without question, the most gorgeous thing I'd ever seen on a human face.
"Hi," she said again. Dazed. Half-laughing.
"Hi."
"That was—" She blinked at the ceiling. "Okay. I need a second."
"Take your time."
"You're being smug."
"I'm being patient."
"Same energy." She pulled me up by the shoulders and kissed me—tasting herself on my mouth, not caring, a confidence that torched me. Her hand slid down my stomach, found me through the thin cotton of my boxer briefs, and the noise I made was not patient.
“Fuck me now,” she breathed against my lips.
I reached for the nightstand. She used the intervalto strip my briefs off, and when I rolled the condom on and turned back to her, she was propped on her elbows, hair wild, chest still flushed, grinning at me with a satisfaction that bordered on predatory.
"Come back here," she said.
I lowered myself over her. Forearms braced on either side of her head. Her legs came up, calves hooking behind my lower back, and I held there—poised at her entrance, forehead pressed to hers, breathing the same air.
A beat. Two.
Her eyes found mine. Open. Unguarded. Trusting me with her body, trusting me with her morning, trusting me with a version of herself that existed nowhere else.
Tell her.The voice in my head was insistent, almost angry.Tell her you're falling so hard you can't see the ground. Tell her you're scared. Tell her she's the best thing that's happened to you in two decades and you don't know how to keep her without destroying her.
I pushed inside her.
Her lips parted. A sound escaped—low, throaty, the sound that made men start wars. Her nails found my back.
I moved. Not fast. Deep, deliberate strokes that let me feel every inch of the connection. Her body welcomed me, tight and wet and warm, and I had toclose my eyes. Looking at her face while I was inside her was overwhelming. Too real. Too close to the edge of whatever cliff I'd been approaching for weeks.
"Callum." Her voice, rough. "Look at me."
I opened my eyes.
She held my gaze. No shield, no deflection, no joke to cut the intensity. Just her. Brown eyes shot through with gold and green, watching me with an honesty that peeled back every layer of defense I'd built.
I hooked my arms under her knees and lifted her legs up, guiding them over my shoulders. The angle shifted and she gasped, her head dropping back against the pillow.
"Oh—" A sound that was halfway to a sob. "Oh, that's?—"
Deeper. The new position let me drive into her with a completeness that bordered on overwhelming. I could feel everything. Her thighs against my shoulders. Her hands clutching the sheets above her head. The way she rocked her hips to meet each thrust, hungry for it, greedy in a way that made me feel like a god and a demon at the same time.
Her breasts bounced with each stroke—a rhythm that matched the one building in my blood. I watched, transfixed, as her body absorbed every movement I gave it. Not passively. Willow was never passive. Shemet me, matched me, arched and rolled and took what she wanted.
