The kiss was slow and thorough—his hands in my hair, mine at his jaw, both of us taking our time because we were on a promontory in the morning light with nowhere to be and no audience and the harbor spread out below us and the live oaks overhead and all the time in the world.
He turned us and backed me gently against the largest oak—the bark smooth from decades of salt air, the trunk wide enough to lean against comfortably. His mouth moved from mine to my jaw, my throat, the place just below my ear that he'd learned, at some point in the last week, was the fastest route to making me forget my own name.
"Grant," I said.
"Mm."
"I owe you something."
He lifted his head. Looked at me. The question in his eyes.
"You've been very generous," I said. "I haven't had the chance to—" I held his gaze. "Return the favor."
Something shifted in his expression, the warmth going dark.
"Louisa—”
"Sit down," I said.
He looked at the bench.
Then he sat.
I went to my knees in front of him on the path—the grass soft, the morning light filtering through the oaks, the harbor sound below—and looked up at him. His face, from this angle, was something—jaw set, eyes dark, watching me with the complete, arrested attention of a man who'd stopped thinking about anything except this.
I worked his belt with unhurried hands. The buckle—the Pendleton silver, warm from his body—came loose with the soft clink I'd become used to. I set it on the bench beside him with the same care he always gave it.
He noticed. Something moved in his face.
I freed his cock—already hard, the heat of him against my palm when I wrapped my hand around the base—and heard the breath leave him.
I pressed my lips to the head of him, soft, a question. His answer was a low sound from the back of his throat that was barely language.
I took my time.
His hands found my hair—not directing, not pushing, just there, the weight of them resting on either side of my head, a benediction rather than a demand. I worked him slowly at first, using my mouth and my hand in a rhythm I felt him respondto—the small, involuntary shifts of his hips, the way his fingers tightened slightly each time I hit a place that mattered.
"Christ, Louisa,” he said. Low. Rough. The voice he used when the control was slipping.
I looked up at him.
The expression on his face was—I wanted to keep it somewhere. The jaw loose, the eyes dark and completely present, no distance, no wall, no half-second delay between feeling and showing. Just Grant, undone, watching me with something that was gratitude and desire and vulnerability.
I took him deeper. His hips moved forward, involuntary—a small, helpless motion that he checked immediately. I responded by taking more myself, showing him it was all right, that this was mine to give and I was giving it freely.
His hands shifted in my hair. Still not pushing. But present.
Learning, I thought.
I worked him until his breathing broke. Until the careful control fractured into something more honest—his head dropping back against the oak trunk, a sound escaping him that he hadn't managed to contain, the involuntary sound of a man arriving somewhere he hadn't been in a long time.
"Louisa, babe—” Warning in his voice. Or offering.
I didn't stop.
He came with a long, low sound that belonged only to the two of us and the morning and the harbor below the bluff, his hands holding my head with a gentleness that felt enormous given everything else in his body. I took everything he gave, swallowed, and rested my forehead against his thigh while he came back down.
His hand moved in my hair. Slow. Warm.
