He walked out.
Thatnight,inbed,I lasted approximately four minutes.
Midge was asleep on the pillow. The house was quiet. The kind of quiet that expensive suburban houses achieved naturally—thick walls, good insulation, the particular silence of a structure built to keep the inside in and the outside out.
I was still in the dress. I hadn't taken it off. I'd tried. My hands had found the tie at my waist and my brain had said take it off and my hands had said no, because the silk still smelled like his kitchen and his hands and the ghost of his palm on my ass, and taking it off meant the evening was over and I wasn't ready for the evening to be over.
Don't touch yourself.
His voice. In my head. In the dark. The basement frequency, playing on a loop.
Your orgasms belong to me.
My hand slid between my thighs.
The lace was still damp. Still ruined. My fingers found myself through the fabric—swollen, aching, so sensitive that the first contact made my hips jerk off the mattress—and I pushed the lace aside and touched bare skin and the relief was so immediate, so total, that I almost sobbed.
I thought about his cock. In my mouth. The weight of it on my tongue, the stretch of my jaw, the way his hand would find my hair and grip. The way his breathing would change—rough,broken, the composure finally, finally cracking. The way he'd sound when he stopped being careful. That voice, the basement voice, saying my name—Cora—sayinggood girl—sayingdon't stop—
I came.
Fast. Hard. My back arching off the bed, my free hand fisting the white sheets, my body clenching around nothing and everything and the phantom of him. The orgasm ripped through me with a force that was almost violent—a sustained, full-body contraction that started between my legs and radiated outward in waves, through my stomach, my chest, my throat.
The moan that came out of me was long and loud and shameless. It tore free from somewhere deep—below the walls, below the silence, below the twenty years of never making noise because noise meant being heard and being heard meant being found—and it filled the room and rolled down the hallway and echoed off the walls of a house that was very quiet and had very good acoustics.
I lay there. Panting. Hand between my thighs. Staring at the ceiling.
The silence rushed back in. The house settled around me—thick walls, good insulation, the particular quiet of expensive suburban construction.
He couldn't have heard that.
There was no way he heard that.
Right?
Chapter 9
Santo
Theeggsneededthirtymore seconds. It was torture. Thirty more seconds of thinking of her.
Her moan had come through the door soft, but unmistakable. A long, low sound that started somewhere deep and climbed and broke open at the top. The breaking was the part that nearly killed me. Not the volume. Not the breathlessness. The breaking—the quality of surrender in it, the moment when the sound stopped being controlled and became something involuntary, something torn loose, something she couldn't hold back.
I'd been doing a walkthrough. The last one of the night—checking the alarm panel, testing the new motion sensors, the habitual circuit of a man who'd secured his perimeter and needed to verify the security because otherwise I wouldn’t sleep. Fourteen steps down the hall. The guest room door on my left. The keycard lock glowing its small green confirmation—locked, sealed, the electronic certainty I'd installed that afternoonspecifically because the woman inside had picked my deadbolt with a bobby pin and a piece of wire.
The sound stopped me the way a hand stops you—physical, intimate, a force applied to the center of my chest that halted all forward motion.
My palm had found the wall. My forehead had found the door. And through the wood—thick, solid, the kind of door that cost money and absorbed noise effectively—her voice came to me.
She was thinking about me.
I knew it.
My cock had been hard before the sound registered. Some animal part of me had identified her through the door—her breathing, the shift of sheets, the particular rhythm of a body moving with purpose—and responded before the conscious brain had time to intervene. By the time the moan came I was aching. Full. Heavy with want, my erection pressed against the seam of my sweatpants with an insistence that bordered on pain.
I did not touch myself.
I stood in the hallway with my forehead against her door and my hand flat on the wall and my cock demanding things my hands refused to give it. Not because the contract required it. The contract said nothing about my own restrictions. The rules I'd written were for her—her orgasms, her body, her pleasure held in trust until I decided to return it.
