I stood. Kissed him. His hands clamped on my hips and he lifted me, my thighs wrapping around him, and I didn’t know where we were going until my back hit the bed.
The military-neat sheets rumpled under us instantly. Good. The man needed chaos in his life.
He settled between my legs, and I felt him—hot, hard, pressing but not entering. He paused. His forearms braced on either side of my head, his body a wall of heat above me, his lips hovering over mine.
“I’ve wanted this since you called me a bouncer,” he said.
“Maritime specialist.” I hooked my ankle behind his thigh and rocked my hips up.
He pushed inside me and the breath left me, stretching around him, the fullness of it hitting every oversensitive nerve. He gave me a moment, held still, teeth set, the control visible in every line of him, his forehead pressed to mine so I could feel every breath he took. The intimacy of that stillness undid memore than the sex had. He was waiting for me. Watching my face. Making sure.
“Move,” I whispered.
He started to move. Slow at first. Deep. Each stroke purposeful, his hips rolling in a rhythm that found a spot inside me and my back arched off the mattress. He braced one hand beside my head, used the other to tilt my hip into him, and the new angle made us both swear.
“More,” I breathed.
He gave me more. His pace built, still controlled but harder now, and he bent to my breast, teeth grazing my nipple before his tongue soothed the sting. I wrapped my legs around him and shifted the angle and we both groaned.
“Right there.” I grabbed the back of his neck. “Don’t you dare stop.”
“Couldn’t if I wanted to.” His voice was hoarse, barely a whisper. He pressed his forehead to mine. “You feel—Christ, Marley. Watching you and wanting this and you’re better than anything I—”
He kissed me instead of finishing, hard and deep, and the taste of both of us sent a clench through my whole body.
He reached between us, his thumb finding my clit, circling in time with his thrusts. His cock inside me, his thumb on me, his lips at my throat—it built into a wave I couldn’t outrun. I came a third time on a cry that I buried in his shoulder, my nails scoring his back, my whole body tightening around him in pulses that went on and on.
He followed. His rhythm broke, his hips stuttering, and he buried himself deep and groaned my name into my neck, low, rough, shattered. I held him while he came apart in my arms. This man who controlled every room he walked into, who’d been a wall of composure since the day I met him.
“Oh my God.” I dropped my head back on the pillow.
“Yeah.” He was still inside me, his weight warm on top of me, his breath hot on my neck. He found my fingers, threaded his through mine, and held.
We lay there. The creek moved beneath the house with its tidal rhythm. Tree frogs started up outside, building their nightly chorus. The air through the open door carried salt marsh and the warmth of a Lowcountry evening that refused to cool down because it knew you didn’t want it to.
He rolled to his side and drew me with him, my back to his chest, his arm heavy around my waist. His lips pressed to the spot behind my ear.
“I’ll make coffee,” he said after a while. “You take yours black.”
“How do you know that?”
“Three days of watching you drink it on your boat.”
I turned in his arms to look at him. His face in the blue-dark was calm, open, the usual vigilance dialed down to a quiet I hadn’t seen before. I could feel his heartbeat under my palm, still elevated, slowing by degrees. The steady beat. The night air through the door. The tide turning in the creek below, and the tree frogs singing their idiot hearts out in the spartina.
I didn’t want to leave.
That thought landed in my chest and sat there, immovable. Not this boathouse. Not the jasmine or the heart pine or the tide beneath the floor. Him. How he’d said you were right and meant all of it. How he’d checked my gear before his own. How he was holding me now, steady and unhurried, as though he had nowhere else to be and no one else to hold.
I’d spent years making sure I could leave anywhere. Reckoning was mobile for a reason. My whole life was designed around the exit.
Wanting to stay was the most terrifying thing I’d felt since the morning I realized my research partner had put his name on my work.
Beau’s breathing was slowing toward sleep, his arm warm and heavy across my ribs. Outside, an engine rumbled on the Intracoastal. Low, distant, wrong for this hour. My body went alert before my brain caught up—filed-down valve seats, photographed research, a center-console at the old fish house pier.
The world hadn’t stopped because we’d fallen into bed. The cartel was still out there. My regulator was still sabotaged. And I was lying in the arms of a man I’d known for three days, feeling safer than I had in years.
The engine faded south. The tree frogs resumed. Beau’s hand tightened once on my hip, reflexive, protective, even in half-sleep.
