Not the way men look when they're already moving and you're just in the direction they're looking. The way he looks at everything, fully, deliberately, like he's decided this is worth his complete attention and nothing else exists until he's done.
"I've been thinking about this," he says, "since the night you walked into my bar."
"That was weeks ago."
"I know exactly how long it's been."
He says it without apology. The flat certainty of it—I've been counting—does something to me that his hands haven't even gotten to yet.
He drops his head and kisses me.
Morning-rough and unhurried, his mouth firm on mine, one hand coming up to cup my jaw and tilt it exactly where he wants it, and I feel the controlled strength of that grip, not hard, just complete, the grip of a man who knows precisely how much pressure everything requires.
I arch into him.
His free hand moves to my breast.
Not tentative. His palm covers me fully and his thumb drags across my nipple through the thin fabric and my entire spine lights up and I make a sound into his mouth that he swallows without comment. He does it again, slower, watching my face while he does it with those dark eyes that never stop cataloguing.
"Ronan—"
"I hear you," he says.
He pulls the fabric up and his mouth replaces his hand and I stop making coherent sounds entirely. His tongue is warm and unhurried and the specific, focused way he does everything is the same here, nothing wasted, nothing accidental, every point of contact deliberate, and I have both hands in his hair and I am not being quiet.
"God," I manage. "You're—"
"Not done," he says against my skin.
He's not.
His mouth moves down, unhurried, mapping everything between my breasts and my stomach with the same methodical attention he gives an engine that deserves to be understood. I feel the roughness of his jaw against my skin, the contrast of it, warmth and scratch and the occasional deliberate press of his mouth in places that make me forget my own name.
He hooks his fingers in the waistband of my underwear and looks up at me.
Checking.
I lift my hips.
He pulls them down and off and then his hands are on the inside of my thighs, pressing them apart with a slow, steady pressure that doesn't rush, doesn't ask, just opens me up like he has every right to be exactly here, and that certainty, the complete absence of hesitation, unravels something I didn't know I'd been holding.
He looks at me.
Allof me.
"Christ," he says quietly. Like a thought he didn't mean to say out loud. Like the first involuntary thing I've gotten from him.
I feel that word in every nerve I own.
Then his mouth finds me and I stop thinking in complete sentences.
He is… precise. Focused. The way his hands are precise, the way his eyes are precise, the way he rides and works and moves through the world as if nothing he does is accidental. His tongue moves slowly at first, learning, cataloguing, and then he finds the thing that makes my thighs try to close and pins them open with his forearms and does it again.
And again.
"Ronan—" His name comes out broken. My hands find his hair and grip and he makes a low sound against me that vibrates all the way up my spine.
He looks up once. Dark eyes over the plane of my stomach.
