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I kissed his neck, his pulse quick under my lips. My fingers folded around his bicep.
His mouth moved, achingly slow, down my neck to my shoulder, his hand sliding a dress strap down my arm. The fabric whispered over my skin, and I shivered. He tugged me closer again. My spine arched with him. My head went back until it touched the window.
He kissed his way down my sternum until I said his name like a quiet little plea.
His hand slid up my thigh, slowly, mercilessly, so the need in me bloomed and spread. His thumb circled higher, higher, stopping a breath short of where I ached for him. I held onto his shoulder, anticipation thrumming in me from scalp to toes.
“Say my name again,” he said.
Of everything he could have asked me for, that was the thing he took.
I knew he was telling himself to stop. He wore it in how carefully he was breathing, even as he hooked softly into my underwear. He wore it in every place that knew exactly what to do with me.
“Don’t you dare stop,” I said under my breath. I needed him so much, I was ready to get mad about it. There was a fine line between virtue and cruelty.
Maybe it was the helplessness and honesty of it that knocked a little groan out of him and disarmed him enough to slide my underwear off, knuckles brushing my thighs, the cool air meeting me.
He kissed me again first. Then, when his restraint finally cracked down the middle and he touched me, slowly and deliberately, I let out a cry against his neck. His other hand tipped my jaw so my eyes found his for a breath, until pleasure pulled them closed. My hips met him, greedy as the rest of me.
His fingers swept over me until my breath went ragged and my hand fisted at the back of his neck. He found the exact pace that would undo me, but he held me just on the edge, waiting, until the ragged rise and fall of my breathing and the clutch of my fingers told him more. Then he gave me just enough and let it crest and break through me, heat flooding everywhere, my thighs shaking, my body clenched around it.
I stayed on the counter until the tremor left my thighs, the window cold against my shoulder blades. He kissed my wrist as my breathing settled.
But his pulse was still racing, his body still holding on to what touching me had done to him.
I slid my hand down the front of him, finding him satisfyingly hard and full in his jeans. He closed his eyes, allowing himself two seconds of it, before his hand closed around mine. He pulled it up to his chest, right over his heart, and his eyes found mine.
“You begging,” he said, gently swiping a lock of hair that had fallen across my face, “is extremely hazardous to my self-control.”
“Your self-control is the only thing I wish I could change about you.”
“It’s not going to be there for much longer.”
His arms folded around me. I leaned against his chest.
“I can’t do this while I still belong to them in any way,” he said, his hand still at my neck. “It’s going to take me a long time to forgive myself. I don’t know if I ever will. The last time I let myself want something this much, it didn’t survive me.”
I clung to him, my body still flooded with the soft aftershock of his touch and the vulnerable tenderness that came after it, and that made looking at him standing there, wounded and hungry, even more devastating.
Chapter Thirty-One
Wednesday and Thursday had vanished into party logistics and the exhausting task of trying to act normal.
After another night of excruciating self-denial and an alarm that went off horribly early, Damian sat opposite me at the table on Friday morning with a fresh mug of coffee in his hand. I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d be able to get through a morning of last-minute pool party errands when I had a meeting scheduled with a coven that wanted to feed me to its pet monster. I focused on the mundane things first, because they kept my heart rate low enough to eat a slice of toast. It was Friday, and the pool party was on Sunday. I had today to get the last of the prep completed, because I refused to waste a Saturday on Vivienne’s absurd demands.
“Are you sure you want to chauffeur me everywhere today? I have to do a dozen annoying things, including going to Healdsburg to roll fifty towels into perfect cylinders.”
“Yes. I’ll help you,” he said, mug halfway to his mouth.
I tore off a piece of crust. “I’m not sure I’d forgive myself for asking you to arrange loungers into organic feminine congregation zones.”
He looked at me over the rim of his mug. “You forget I’ve worked for Aurora for ten years. Arranging a pool deck seems blissfully innocent.”
“I don’t know what to say to that.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
We were on the road by seven-thirty. We had a long drive ahead, a long drive back, and everything in between would take longer than it should. We left under a ceiling of fog and salt air, the bay still ghosting the edges of town.
