Peeled her clothes off slow. Unhooked her bra while my mouth worked the spot below her ear—the one I'd found in Wild Creek, the one that made her knees buckle. When they did, I caught her, carried her to the bedroom, and laid her out on the bed.
"Don't move," I told her. "Not until I say."
Her hands fisted in the sheets. Her chest heaved. But she didn't move.
I stood at the edge of the bed and looked at her. Not rushing, not fumbling, not driven by the blind urgency of that first night. This was deliberate. I wanted to see her. Wanted her to feel what it was like to be seen—not as the woman who fixed things, not as the sister or the daughter or the operations manager. JustMaggie. Bare and beautiful and shaking with want she'd been suffocating for a week.
“Do you know just how beautiful you are?” She was a vision spread out in front of me in nothing but her pink panties. Her hair fanned out like a golden halo, her body flushed and trembling with need.
"Jack." My name came out strangled. “Please…”
"Please what?"
"Touch me. God, please just?—"
I put my mouth on her hip bone. She jerked like she'd been shocked, and I bit back a grin. This was just how I wanted her: sensitive and needy. Stripped bare of every defense she’d put between us since I started working for her family. I tugged her panties down her long legs, tossing them somewhere.
I traced a line from her hip to her ribs with open-mouthed kisses, tasting salt and heat and the clean warmth of her skin. Her back arched off the mattress with a moan and her hands reached for me—instinct, need, the inability to stay still when every nerve was on fire.
I caught her wrists again. Pressed them into the pillow above her head. Held them there with one hand while the other traced down her body—collarbone, breast, the soft plane of her stomach, lower.
"I said, don't move."
"I can't—" She was panting, her hips rolling against nothing, her whole body straining toward a touch I wasn't giving yet. "Jack, I can't just lie here while you?—"
"Yeah, you can." My hand slipped between her legs, both of us groaning when my fingers found her clit. I rubbed slow, hard, torturous circles that had her eyes rolling shut. I lowered my mouth to the hollow of her throat. Spoke against her pulse. "You can because I'm telling you to. And because, for once in your life, Maggie Blackwood, you're going to let someone else drive."
The sound she made—half sob, half surrender—went through me like a current.
She stopped fighting.
Not all at once. In stages. The tension in her wrists went first, then her shoulders, then the rigid set of her spine. She melted into the mattress beneath me, one clenched muscle at a time, until she was open and pliant and trusting me with the full weight of her surrender.
I rewarded every inch of it.
I knew this body now. Not from fumbling in the dark—from one night that had lived in my memory for weeks now, sharp and detailed as a photograph. The spot below her ribs that made her hips cant sideways. The inside of her thigh, where the skin was softest, and a scrape of teeth made her moan so loud I felt it in my chest. The exact pressure that turned her breathing ragged, and the exact moment to ease off and let the anticipation build until she was begging.
She begged beautifully. That was something I'd learned in Wild Creek and confirmed now—Maggie Blackwood, who never asked anyone for anything, who would rather chew glass than admit she needed help, came completely undone when she let herself want badly enough.
"Please." Her voice was wrecked. Raw. Stripped of every wall she'd ever built. "Jack, please, I need?—"
“Don’t worry, beautiful, I know what you need.” My hand moved faster between her legs. My mouth trailed down her neck, my tongue tracing the shape of one of her nipples before tugging gently with my teeth.
She gasped. Her head tilted back into the pillows, arms straining against my hand pinning them in place. “Right there,” she whimpered. “Oh God, you’re gonna make me come.”
I groaned against her breast, determined to make her shatter. Her moans grew more breathy, her pleases moredesperate. She arched into my mouth. Her legs quaked around my hand before snapping shut. Her moan rang through her cabin, loud and uninhibited as she came.
And when it passed, she went limp beneath me. Liquid and pliable, while she caught her breath. “Fuck me,” she demanded, opening her legs wider. “Please, Jack. I need you.”
I told her she didn’t need me, but that didn’t mean hearing her say it didn’t light my insides on fire.
I knelt back on the bed and tore my shirt off. She sat up and ran her hands up my chest and into my hair, bringing my mouth down to hers. She kissed me like she was starved, like she’d been suffering just as much as I had these last two weeks since the motel. Her hands fumbled with my belt and zipper, their movements just as frantic as our mouths.
“Fuck,” I grunted when she wrapped her hand around my cock, stroking slow and hard. I looked down, watching as her hand moved along my length. As good as it felt, I needed inside her more.
I gripped her wrist, my hand shaking, and stopped her. “Lie down.” My voice came out hoarse. Wrecked.
And this time, she listened without hesitation. I tugged my jeans off the rest of the way and followed her like a moth to a flame.
