“Stop leering at my hands and get to work,” I told Sunny, who was supposed to be working on her screenplay in the control room while I tinkered with my song in the live room. Except I’d ended upnotworking on the letters-to-Santa song, noodling over a few lyrics about kisses in a snowy graveyard instead, and Sunny wasn’t writing but was staring at my hands while I plucked at the guitar strings.
“I can’t help it,” she said in a wounded tone. “Your hand tendons are really distracting. And your wrists are all... wristy. Don’t even get me started on your forearms!”
I grinned wickedly. As surprisingly nice as it had been being around people yesterday, I still much preferred hiding. With her. In a soundproofed basement room far, far away from the movie crew.
I strummed the guitar at her, just to tease, and she slammed her laptop shut and stormed into the live room.
“Stop it!” she commanded, like I was Mr.Tumnus. And like Mr.Tumnus, I had no intention of listening. I strummed again, making sure that my wrists were being extra wristy (whatever that meant), and then she glared.
“You are a menace to my creativity.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
She took the guitar out of my hands and set it in its holder nearby. And when she turned to leave, I reached forward and grabbed her by her hoodie, spinning her to face me and pulling her to straddle my lap.
“Now who’s being a menace to creativity?” I murmured as my lips found her neck. I could feel the shudder pulling through her body as I kissed above the neck of her hoodie and licked a hot line up to her jaw. When our lips met, it was my turn to shudder. She tasted like gum and coffee, but in the best way. Like long nights at the studio. Like breakfast in bed.
Like Sunny here in my studio, quivering in my lap.
I slid my hands up her back and then to her waist, trapping her where I wanted her, with her soft, hot center rocking slowly over my stiffening length. She panted as I echoed her movements below with my tongue above: stroking, seeking, pressing.
I’d never had someone kiss me the way Sunny Palmer kissed me—like she would be perfectly content to kiss me for the restof eternity. Like there was no rush, no better thing to get to, nothing filthier in the world than letting me violate her mouth with mine while she shivered in my arms.
“Isaac,” she whispered. Her fingers were tangled in my hair, and when I pulled my mouth away from hers, her cheeks were stained crimson and her lips were swollen.
But her eyes—by now, I could recognize that look from a mile away.
“Don’t,” I said, lifting a hand to press my fingers against her mouth. “Don’t say it.”
She swallowed, her eyes still on mine. “But we shouldn’t— The more we do this—”
I replaced my fingers with my lips. I didn’t want her to say anything more about it; I didn’t want to hear her say again that this would interfere with me finding a muse. Because if she said that, then she was just a breath away from saying that she didn’t want to be my muse again. And after two new song ideas and adventures in libraries and Christmas markets and being repeatedly assaulted by her cat, I couldn’t lie to myself any longer: I wanted her to be my muse.
Not in a casual way, not in a pouty way, butviscerally. Existentially.
I wanted it to be her.
“How about,” I murmured into our kiss, “we just kiss, hmm? Just kissing.”
“Just kissing,” she repeated faintly. Her fingers twisted in my hair and she shivered against me. “No one’s ever regretted just kissing, right?”
I didn’t answer with words. Instead, I moved back to her neck, and a dark satisfaction curled through me at the helpless noises she made.
Maybe she didn’t want to be my muse, but she wantedthis. She neededthis.
I found the spiral hair tie holding her hair in its messy bun and tugged it free so I could gather the silky tresses in my hands and tug. I ran my fingernails over her scalp as I sucked on her neck, and then I brought some of her hair to my mouth to smell and kiss. I felt like an animal, like I needed her scent, but she didn’t seem to mind, because she was squirming in my lap like someone who hadn’t been touched in years.
Her mouth dropped over mine, frantic and searching, and I let her part my lips and kiss me until I saw stars.
Minutes passed, or maybe hours, and it was just the slick slide of her tongue and her soft lips, softer than anything—and then somehowjust kissingbecame good old-fashioned dry humping as she started grinding against my dick again. I could feel the plush heat of her pussy through her leggings, and the curve of her ass on my thighs, and my hands were overflowing with grabbable, moldable hips.
“That’s it,” I rasped as her mouth broke from mine, “do what feels good.”
Every urgent movement of her hips sent her cunt rocking over my erection, and with only her leggings and my lounge pants between us, it was murder, it was homicide. Filthy pressure from my base to my tip, coupled with the heart-stopping sight of her riding me, with the scent of her everywhere and the taste of her mouth on my own.
My body was already drawing itself tight as she wrapped her arms around my neck and started riding me with everything she had, hard enough that the chair bumped across the floor.
“Harder, baby,” I groaned, my belly clenching, my balls churning. Fuck, I needed to blow, and I didn’t care that it would be all over the inside of my pants, I just wanted to pump everything out of my body for her, I wanted to give her every single drop, and she gave a ragged cry as she fucked herselfthrough her cataclysm with several hard, rough bucks of her hips.
