I fell asleep on the thought, the way I'd fallen asleep on the sound of my mother's voice—involuntary, unguarded, with the pleased surprise of a man who'd discovered a new way to put himself under.
The next time I came up out of sleep, I came up because something good was happening below my waist.
I didn't open my eyes right away.
I lay there with my hand under my head and the warmth of the sheet over me and the slow, building pleasure of a wet mouth on me, working unhurried and patient, and somewhere in the fog of my body the message arrived from the suite that the woman whose mouth this was had decided, sometime in the last few minutes, to wake me up the way she'd decided to wake me up, which was not by speaking.
I made a sound somewhere between a groan and a laugh.
I cracked one eye.
The blanket had been pushed down. The room was still dark. The faintest gray had started somewhere in the seam of the curtains where the harbor was. Rebecca Lynn was between my legs with her hair fallen forward in the way it had fallen forward over me last night, and her hand was wrapped around the base of me, and her mouth was working me in a slow, deliberate, attentive rhythm.
She felt me wake up. She slid me out of her mouth. Looked up.
Her face went a little bashful.
"I—" She bit her lower lip. "I wanted to do you, too."
I let my head fall back against the pillow and laughed up at the ceiling.
"Sweetheart."
"What?"
"Keep going."
I felt her smile against me before her mouth came back.
She took her time. She had the same patience with this that she had with everything—the care of a woman who was not in a rush to get to the destination. Her hand worked me in slow strokes while her mouth worked the head, and every now and then, she'd take me deeper than I'd expected and look up at me through her lashes to see what that did to my face. What it did to my face was its own answer.
I let her have me.
I lay there with one hand under my head and the other in the loose fall of her hair, not directing, justthere. I let myself watch her.
She had the focused attention I'd watched her play with. Same intent face. Same studious care. The hands of a woman whose hands knew how to do a precise thing and didn't have to think about it. She made a humming sound around me at one point—pleasure, satisfaction, the sound of a woman doing something she'd been wanting to do—and that nearly ended the proceedings on the spot.
I held myself back.
"Baby," I said. "Slow down a second."
She slowed.
"Look at me."
She looked at me.
I kept my eyes on her face the way she'd kept hers on mine last night when I'd been the one over her. I let her know, with the look, that I was aware of every move she was making and that I appreciated all of them.
She watched me watch her.
Then she went back to it, still watching me.
I let myself go this time. The build came up—not in a rush, but in an accumulation, layer on layer, the kind of build that didn't surprise you when it landed because you'd felt it coming the whole way. Heat through the hips. Tightness behind the spine. Thereachin the lower belly that was the body deciding it was time.
When I came, I came hard, and she stayed with me through it, taking what I gave her.
She slid me out of her mouth at the end and pressed a slow kiss to my hip.
