The slow stretch of him nearly undoes me. Thick. Deep. A low, molten pulse spreads through my hips and into the pit of my stomach as my body opens around him, and my nails presscrescents into his back because the sensation is so much, the fullness of him so complete that I need something to hold onto while my body figures out how to contain all of it. He stills. Waits. His forehead hovers close to mine, and when I open my eyes his are right there. Dusky and unguarded and looking at me like I am the only thing left in the world.
I can handle his body. I cannot handle his face. Not like this, with every wall down and his eyes on mine seeing everything I usually keep tucked behind a joke or a smile or a cheerful change of subject. In this moment, I am completely visible to him. The terror of that makes my chest tight and my eyes sting and I want to close them, want to disappear into the dark behind my eyelids where it’s safe.
But I keep my eyes open.
He moves slow and deep, pulling almost all the way out and then pressing back in with a control that I can feel trembling at its edges. The friction of it sends warmth blooming with every stroke, each one plunging farther, more deliberate, and a moan slips out of me that I don’t try to stop.
“Ella.” My name is tender on his lips, stripped bare somehow. Not the clipped way he said it the first week, like a nuisance. This is my name said by a man who has stopped pretending. “Stay with me.”
I am with him. I’ve been with this gorgeous, grumpy, guarded man since he scowled at me on the airplane. But being with him now, his weight on me and his hips rolling slow and his gaze holding mine, is a different kind of presence. His gaze steadies me even as his body takes me apart.
His tempo builds. Intensifies. The angle shifts and he hits a spot low inside me that sends sparks scattering through my senses. I press up into him, chasing it, wrapping my legs tighter around his hips, and the next stroke lands in the same place, dragging a moan out of me that I couldn’t hold back if my lifedepended on it. His hand slides under my lower back, tilting my hips, holding me there so he can hit that spot again. And again.
“God, Ella.” A groan breaks out of him, rough and low against my neck. “You feel incredible.” The gravel in his voice is gone. What’s underneath is bare and unfiltered and I don’t think he meant for me to hear it. “You have no idea what you’re doing to me.”
It’s not a line. I’ve heard enough of them to know the difference. A line is polished. A line works regardless of who’s hearing it. This is Alec telling me something that slipped past every filter he runs between his brain and his mouth. Those words land in the center of my chest and settle behind my ribs, warm and heavy.
His pace quickens. His breathing goes ragged against my neck, each exhale a rough burst of heat on my skin. The need inside me is building, tightening, coiling low in my belly with every thrust. I can feel his composure fraying in the way his hips lose their measured rhythm, in the grip of his fingers on my thigh, in the groan that vibrates against my collarbone when I arch up into him and take him deeper.
“Fuck.” The word is wrenched out of him, guttural and desperate, and the sound of Alec losing his ability to form complete sentences while buried inside me sends a spike of heat through my core that nearly tips me over. His mouth finds mine and the kiss is messy, open, nothing like his usual precision. “I can’t... you feel...” He doesn’t finish. Can’t finish. His breath shudders against my lips.
The second orgasm builds from somewhere deep. Not the sharp, sudden crest of the first one. This is slower, heavier, heat pooling and spreading, climbing steadily, and I know I have a choice. I can close my eyes. Disappear into pure sensation behind my eyelids where nobody can see what’s happening onmy face. That’s the instinct. That’s the old pattern. Pleasure kept private even with someone inside me.
I keep looking at him.
His jaw is tight. A tendon stands out in his neck. He’s close. Tension builds in his body, his thrusts getting harder, more urgent.
“Ella.” His voice is strained, broken. Almost pleading. Hearing that frayed tone in him pushes me right to the edge.
The liquid heat that’s been building inside me crests. Spills over. My back arches off the mattress and his name tears out of my mouth, raw and open, and I hold his gaze while the orgasm rolls through me because I chose to, because I am done hiding from this man. It pulls through my belly, my thighs, into my core where he’s still moving inside me, and the clench of my body around him drags a ragged curse out of his throat.
His control shatters. His hand fists the pillow beside my head, knuckles white. I feel him let go before I see it, the way his body tenses against mine, every muscle locked, and then his hoarse shout grates against my temple, low and rough and completely undone, and I feel him pulse inside me as his hips stutter and drive home and hold there. I hold him through it with my hands in his hair and my legs wrapped around him and my mouth pressed to his jaw while his body shudders against mine, and I can feel each wave of it move through him, feel his breath break against my skin, feel the exact moment the tension drains from every muscle in his body and his full weight sinks into me.
My arms tighten around him because I am not ready to let go of this. Whatever this is. However it ends. Right now, in this bed, he is mine and I am his and neither of us is pretending otherwise.
I press my palm flat against his chest. His heart is pounding, fast and hard and strong, hammering against my hand. I thinkof the night he told me the real reason he was on vacation. His voice in the dark, low and reluctant, admitting to a flaw in the machinery he manages so carefully. The way I’d lain in this same bed aching for this proud, stubborn man who thought needing help made him weak.
We’ve crossed a threshold tonight. Not just a physical one, but an emotional one too.
And I am in real trouble now.
Not because the sex was extraordinary, though it was. I’m in trouble because of the way he looked at me, and the way I looked back. Because somewhere in the middle of all that skin and need and pleasure, I stopped performing and he stopped controlling. And what was left was just us.
His heartbeat is slow and steady under my hand now. I leave my palm there, resting over it like I can keep it safe through the sheer stubbornness of wanting to.
Alec’s heart is the one with the condition. But mine is the one that’s not going to survive if I let myself fall any deeper than I already am.
CHAPTER 17
ALEC
Ella has turned the bed into a breakfast table.
Room service tray between us on the mattress. Fruit, avocado toast, a smoothie bowl so purple it looks medicinal, and a black coffee she poured for me without asking because she already knows I don’t take it with all the sugar and cream she prefers. She’s cross-legged against the headboard with the sheet at her waist and nothing above it, eating a strawberry, and I’m propped on one elbow in a position that gives me an unobstructed sightline to everything the sheet has given up trying to cover.
Six days ago I was running beach sprints at dawn and choking down steamed fish for every meal. Now I’m in bed at half past eight with a naked woman and a breakfast spread to feed an army, and I can’t find it in me to care about the schedule I’m not keeping. The absence of a plan should bother me. It doesn’t. That’s new.
“I fully expected to wake up alone, you know,” Ella says, biting into another strawberry. “I figured you’d be out there at the crack of dawn doing something aggressive. Running. Swimming. Intimidating the sunrise.”
