“I have some idea.” Her voice was barely there. “I have a very detailed idea, actually.”
The corner of his mouth lifted. There he was. “How detailed?”
“Grant.”
“Just asking.”
“Stop talking.” She pulled the cashmere top over her own head and reached back to unhook her bra, and the sound he made when he looked at her was worth every second of the last three months.
His hands found her. Reverent and rough at the same time—palms skimming her ribs, thumbs tracing the undersides of her breasts, mouth dropping to her collarbone with a groan that vibrated through her skin. She arched into him, fingers digging into his shoulders, and felt him hard against her thigh, straining, the restraint costing him visibly now.
She reached for his belt. Got it open, got the button, shoved his jeans down his hips with hands that were still shaking. He kicked them off. And then there was nothing between them—his body pressed against hers, skin to skin, the full length and heat and weight of him.
“Tell me what you want,” he said against her throat. The same words, the same low command, except this time she could feel him trembling with the effort of holding back, and the question wasn’t about her—it was about him, asking permission to stop being careful.
Emmy Woodhouse had built a career on knowing what other people wanted. She had intake questionnaires and compatibility matrices and a sixth sense for desire that other people couldn’t articulate. She had never, not once, been asked that question by someone whose answer she actually needed.
“You,” she said. “Now. Stop being patient.”
Something broke in his expression. The last thread of control, snapping.
He reached for his jeans on the floor. Wallet. Condom. The foil packet tore. She watched him roll it on and her stomach clenched with a want so sharp it bordered on pain.
He settled between her thighs, braced above her on one arm, and looked at her.
“Stay with me,” he said.
She wrapped her legs around him.
He pushed into her, and the fullness of him knocked the breath from her lungs. He was big—she’d known that, objectively, abstractly, in the way you know that a man who is six-three and two-hundred-thirty pounds is going to be proportional—but knowing and feeling were two entirely different things and feeling waseverything.
Grant went still. His jaw was tight, his arms trembling, the effort of holding back written across every muscle in his body.
“Em.” His voice was strained. “You okay?”
She dug her nails into his back and pulled him deeper.
He groaned—a sound that started in his chest and ended somewhere primitive—and then he moved. Not slow. Not careful. She’d told him to stop being patient and he’d listened. His hand gripped her thigh, hitching her leg higher, changing the angle, and the first real thrust hit something that made her vision go white. She cried out and he did it again, and again, setting a pace that was relentless and precise—this was the other Grant, the one who ran an offense with his body, who processed the physical world faster than anyone she’d ever met, who knew exactly where to apply force and how much and when.
Emmy had always been loud—during arguments, during celebrations, during every uncontainable moment of her uncontainable life. She was loud now. She was saying his name and she was sayingpleaseand she was saying things she’d never said to anyone because no one had ever made her feel like this—like she was coming apart at the molecular level, like every defense she’d ever built was dissolving under his hands, like the only real thing in the world was the place where their bodies met.
Grant pressed his forehead to hers. His breath was ragged, his rhythm faltering, and she could feel him getting close—could feel it in the way his hand tightened on her hip, the way his body tensed against hers.
“Em—I’m?—”
“I know.” She pulled him closer, legs tightening around his waist. “I know. Let go.”
He drove into her one last time, deep and hard and shuddering, and when he came it was with her name on his lips, and the sound of it, wrecked and bare, pushed her over the edge with him.
She came with his body still shaking above her, the orgasm rolling through her in waves that made her gasp and clutch at him and bury her face against his neck while the world narrowed to the two of them and then expanded again, slowly, like surfacing from deep water.
Grant collapsed beside her. Then immediately gathered her against him, one arm hooked beneath her, pulling her into his chest with the casual possessiveness of a man who had no intention of letting go.
They lay there. Breathing. The streetlight still amber through the window.
And when the last wall came down—when she stopped performing, stopped strategizing, stopped trying to arrange this into something manageable and just let it be messy and real and terrifying—what she found underneath was simpler than any framework she’d ever built. Two people. No armor. Choosing.
Emmy pressed her face against his chest and listened to his heartbeat slow.
