I shifted behind her, keeping her back tucked against my chest, her top leg hooked carefully over my hip. My hand stayed on her pussy, steadying her, grounding both of us. When I guided my cock into her, I paused there, breathing hard against the side of her neck.
“Still okay?” I asked, my voice nearly gone.
She nodded, her cheek brushing the pillow. “Yeah. More.”
I kissed the place beneath her ear. “Words, Pip.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I want you.”
My forehead dropped to her shoulder.
Holy fuck.
Those four words did something catastrophic to me. Not because I hadn’t heard want from her before. I had. I’d heard it in gasps, in kisses, in the desperate little way she said my name when she stopped trying to pretend we were simple. But this was morning after a night of intense fucking, and today we were sore and soft. This was her choosing me again when the night was over and the house was waking and neither of us had the cover of darkness to hide behind.
I eased into her slowly.
So slowly it almost hurt to keep myself controlled.
Her breath caught, her body tightening around me, and I stopped before I was fully inside her. Every instinct I had screamed to sink deeper, to chase that perfect heat, but the sound she made pinned me in place. My hand slid up to cover hers against the mattress.
“Breathe,” I whispered. “I’ve got you.”
“I know,” she breathed.
And I knew she meant it.
I moved again by inches, letting her body adjust around mine, letting the ache stretch through both of us until it turned into something deeper, something almost unbearable in how intimate it was. Her fingers curled into the sheet. Mine threaded through them. I kissed her shoulder, her neck, the messy spill of her hair, whispering her name like it was the only word I trusted myself with.
Bliss.
Not Pip.
Bliss.
She heard the difference. I felt it in the way her body softened, in the way she let out a shaky breath and pushed back the smallest amount, taking more of me.
“That’s it,” I murmured, my voice breaking around the words. “We don’t have to prove anything.”
Her laugh was barely there, more breath than sound. “That might be the least Cade Mercer thing you’ve ever said.”
I smiled against her shoulder, wrecked and helpless. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Your reputation would never recover.”
“My reputation’s already dead. You killed it somewhere around the time you stole my coffee and started calling me Cross Check out of spite.”
“I did make you more interesting.”
“You made me insane.”
Her breath hitched when I finally sank fully into her, slow and careful, until there was nowhere left for either of us to go. I stopped there, buried inside her, my chest pressed to her back, my arm wrapped around her middle like I could hold both of us together by force.
Neither of us moved.
For a few seconds, the whole room narrowed to that. Her body around mine. My mouth against her skin. The pale light. The quiet. The almost painful fullness of being this close to someone and still wanting closer.
“Cade,” she whispered.
