“My grandmother is three rooms and two hallways away, half blind, and currently trying to crowdfund a male stripper. She’s occupied.”
He lifted me onto the blackjack table. The felt was cool against the backs of my thighs and the absurdity of the situation—sitting on a blackjack table in a casino that hadn’t opened yet during an eighty-five-year-old woman’s birthday party—should have been enough to kill the mood. It was not.
He pushed my dress up my thighs slowly, watching my face the whole time, reading me the way he always did for any signthat I wasn’t okay with this. I was okay with this. I was more than okay with this. My body had been responding to his hand on my thigh for two straight hours and the anticipation had wound me so tight that I was vibrating.
He dropped to his knees on the brand new carpet of the High Rollers Lounge and looked up at me from between my legs. “You wore this dress on purpose.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This short ass dress with no stockings and you expect me to sit through dinner without tasting you? That’s cruel, Peach. That’s cruel and unusual punishment.”
He pulled my underwear to the side—didn’t take them off, just moved them—and his mouth was on me before I could respond. I gripped the edge of the blackjack table and my head fell back and the sound I made echoed off the walls of the empty lounge.
“Shhh,” he said against me, and I could feel him smiling. “Be quiet. We’re in my casino.”
“Then stop making me loud.”
“Never.” He licked me slow and deep and I bit down on my own hand to keep from screaming. His tongue was doing things that shouldn’t be legal in a gaming establishment, circling and stroking and finding that spot that made my thighs shake and locking onto it with precision that made me wonder if this man had studied me like a blueprint the same way he’d studied this building.
“You’re so beautiful,” he murmured against me. “Sitting on my table in my casino in this dress looking like everything I ever wanted. You know that? You’re everything I ever wanted, Peach.”
The praise hit different now. It always did with him. It wasn’t performance, wasn’t dirty talk designed to escalate. It was real.He meant every word and I could feel the sincerity vibrating against my skin along with his voice.
“Quest, I want—” I pulled at his shirt, trying to bring him up to me. “I want you. All of you. Right now.”
He paused. Looked up at me with slick lips and dark eyes and an expression that was a war between want and discipline.
“Not yet.”
“Quest. Fuck me.”
“You’re not ready yet.”
“I am ready. I’m telling you I’m ready.”
“Not yet, Peach.”
“Quest—”
“You’re not ready.”
“How do you know what I’m ready for?”
“Because I know you.” He kissed my inner thigh. “And when I’m finally inside you—” another kiss, closer to the center—“and I will be inside you—” his breath warm against my skin—“you’re going to feel every inch of me. And it’s not going to be rushed. It’s not going to be on a table. And you’re damn sure not going to have to be quiet.” He looked up at me. “So be patient for me. Can you do that?”
“I hate you.”
“No you don’t.” He went back down and finished what he started, and I came on a blackjack table in the High Rollers Lounge of the Banks family casino with his hand over my mouth and my legs around his head and Rita’s birthday party happening three rooms away.
He stood up, wiped his mouth, adjusted my dress back down, and offered me his hand to help me off the table. I took it and stood on legs that were barely functional.
“You good?” he asked with that half-smile.
“Better than that.”
We walked back down the corridor. I was smoothing my hair and adjusting my dress and trying to make my face look like a woman who had been admiring poker tables and not getting her soul extracted on one. Quest was beside me looking completely composed because that man could commit a felony and walk away looking like he just left a board meeting.
He opened the door to the private room and we stepped inside and I knew immediately that something had changed.
