I pulled him up off his knees by the back of his neck, hauling him to his feet in one motion, and his mouth crashed into mine before he'd fully straightened. He tasted like me. Entirely, unmistakably like me, salt and heat and everything that had been happening on his knees, and the shock of tasting myself on his tongue sent a sound out of me that I felt in my chest.
He kissed me back with everything. Both hands grabbing my face, body pressing into mine, and I felt all of him, the hard line of his cock against my hip, the mess still wet on his chin smearing against my jaw, the shaking in his hands from being on his knees too long.
I wrapped both arms around him and lifted.
He went up without protest, legs coming around my waist, and I had him, all of him, his weight real and solid and considerable against my chest, his mouth still working against mine while I got my bearings and turned toward the hallway.
He bit my lip. Hard.
I tightened my arms and kept walking.
The house was dark past the kitchen light. I moved through it from memory, navigating the hallway, Troy's mouth at my jaw now and then my neck and the bite he left there was going to show for days and I didn't care. His hands were in my hair and his thighs gripped my hips and his body radiated heatlike something burning and every step toward the bedroom felt like the last several weeks of careful distance compressing into nothing.
My shoulder hit the door frame. Neither of us stopped.
The bedroom came into view, city light filtering through the curtains, and I moved toward the bed with him still wrapped around me and his mouth still at my throat.
I threw him.
Not viciously. But not gently either. His back hit the mattress and the breath came out of him in a rush and he looked up at me from where he'd landed with his hair wrecked and his mouth swollen and his eyes dark and satisfied, like being thrown onto a bed was exactly where he'd been trying to end up for weeks.
I reached for his jeans.
Got them open and hauled them down his thighs in one pull, and that's when I stopped.
The city light caught the fabric first. Something dark and sheer stretched across his hips, a scrap of black lace sitting low and deliberate. And below that, running from mid-thigh down to his ankle, sheer black stockings, lace at the top band, clinging to the muscle of his legs with an intimacy that hit me somewhere below rational thought.
I stood at the end of the bed and looked at him.
Troy held my gaze without flinching. Chin slightly lifted. Daring me to have a reaction he couldn't predict.
My hands were shaking.
“Fuck,” I said. The word came out stripped of everything except what it was.
Something flickered in his expression. Uncertainty cutting briefly through the heat.
I got onto the bed.
Ran both hands up the outside of his legs, palms against the sheer stockings, feeling the warmth of him through thethin fabric, the muscle beneath. He exhaled. My thumbs traced the lace band at the top of the stockings where they met the bare skin of his upper thighs and I pressed there, into the gap between lace and skin, and felt him shiver.
I left them on.
Ran my mouth along the inside of his thigh, lips dragging against the sheer fabric, teeth catching the lace band and pressing without biting, and the sound he made above me was low and startled and genuine.
My mouth moved higher. To the lace at his hips. I nosed along the waistband, breathing him in, the musk of him concentrated and warm through the fabric, and pressed my lips against the outline of his cock through the thin lace and felt him twitch against my mouth.
“Declan—”
“I watched you.” The words came out against his hip. “With Rafael. You didn't know I was home.”
The silence that followed lasted two full seconds.
“What.” His voice was barely there.
“The door wasn't closed.” I pressed my lips to the lace, open-mouthed, felt the heat of him through it. “I should have walked away but I couldn't move.”
His breathing had gone ragged above me. “Fuck.”
