“Take that off,” he said, nodding at the t-shirt I’d just put on twenty minutes ago.
I pulled it over my head. He watched me do it without moving, his eyes tracking every inch of skin that appeared, and when I was bare from the waist up he exhaled through his nose and his jaw clenched and I watched his whole body react to the sight of me.
“The pants too.”
I lifted my hips and slid them off and lay there in nothing and let him look because I wanted him to see me. All of me. The bruises, the raw wrists, the cut feet, every mark the last twenty-four hours had left on my body. I wasn’t hiding any of it.
He stood at the edge of the bed and looked at me for a long time. Not rushing. Not reaching. Just taking me in, his eyes moving from my face to my neck to my breasts to my stomach to my hips and back up again, slow and deliberate, like he was memorizing me. Then he took off the rest of his clothes and I saw all of him for the first time and my mouth went dry because this man was built like something that had been sculpted with bad intentions.
He didn’t lower himself over me right away. He climbed onto the bed and knelt between my legs and put both hands on my knees and spread them apart, slow, watching my face while he did it.
“I’ve been patient with you,” he said. His voice was low and calm but his eyes were on fire. “I’ve tasted you. I’ve made you come with my mouth, with my hands, in bathrooms and on blackjack tables and in the backseat of my car. And every single time, I stopped where you needed me to stop because you weren’t ready. But I need you to hear me when I tell you this, Mehar. I’m not stopping tonight.”
“I don’t want you to stop.”
“Good.” He ran his hands up my thighs, slow, thumbs pressing into my inner thighs until my legs fell open wider. “Because I’ve been thinking about being inside you since the night I picked your lock and put my face between your legs. You remember that night?”
“Yes.”
“You tasted like heaven and I’ve been starving ever since. But tonight I’m taking all of it. Every part of you that you’ve been holding back from me, I want it. You understand?”
I nodded because my voice had stopped working somewhere between his hands on my thighs and the look on his face.
“Nah, don’t nod. Talk to me. Tell me you want this.”
“I want this.”
“Tell me you want me.”
“I want you, Quest.”
“That’s my Peach.”
He lowered himself over me and I felt his weight and his warmth and his skin against mine and my breath caught because nothing in my life had prepared me for how safe I felt underneath this man. Every other man I’d ever been with, I needed to be on top. I needed to hold them down, pin their wrists, control the pace, control the angle, control everything because being underneath a man meant being vulnerable and being vulnerable meant being hurt. That was the lesson Ahmad taught me. That was the lesson my father taught me before him. The woman on the bottom is the woman who gets destroyed.
But Quest was hovering over me with his arms on either side of my head and his eyes locked on mine and I didn’t want to flip him over. I didn’t want to pin his wrists. I didn’t want to control a single thing about what was happening because for the first time in my life, I trusted the man on top of me with my whole body.
“I want you inside me,” I said. “All of you. Not just your mouth, not just your hands. I want to feel you.”
He pushed inside me slowly. So slowly I could feel every inch stretching me open and my back arched off the bed and I grabbed his shoulders and dug my nails in and a sound came out of my mouth that I’d never heard myself make before. He was big and thick and the fullness of him was overwhelming and I was not prepared for it. Every man I’d ever been with had either taken from my body or paid for access to it. Nobody had ever entered it like this, watching my face the whole time, checking my eyes, making sure the sounds I was making were pleasure and not pain.
“Fuck,” he breathed against my neck, and his voice was wrecked. The composure was gone. The CEO, the killer, the manwho never lost control, was trembling above me. “Mehar. God damn. You feel like…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He just pressed his forehead against mine and stayed still for a second, buried to the hilt, letting both of us adjust to the feeling of being connected for the first time.
“Don’t stop,” I whispered.
“I couldn’t if I wanted to.” He started to move, slow and deep, pulling almost all the way out and then pushing back in with a roll of his hips that hit something inside me that made my vision blur. “You’re so tight, Peach. You’re squeezing me so fucking tight.”
“Quest…”
“I got you. I’m right here.” He pulled back to look at me, his forehead damp, his jaw clenched, his eyes burning into mine. “You know you’re mine, right? You know that?”
“I know.”
“Say it.”
“I’m yours.”
