No. Don’t rush it. This is the moment you’ve been living for.
For once, I listen. She’s precious. She’s perfect. She’s mine, finally mine.
When she pulls back for breath, I follow her, needing to capture her mouth again because the absence of her touch feels like death. Her eyes are wide, pupils dilated, and there’s something in her expression that bubbles my chest with possessive satisfaction.
She’s looking at me like she’s seeing me for the first time. Maybe she is. Maybe she finally understands what she means to me, what she’s always meant. The lengths I’ve gone to for her. The things I’d do in her name.
My thumb traces across her bottom lip, swollen from our kiss. She’s real. I tell myself again and again. She’s here. She’s mine.
And this is only the beginning. “This should have been our first kiss.”
“Seriously,” her eyes droop, her voice husky, “you choose now to bring up my transgression.”
“What?” My heart sinks to my ass. “No, no! That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you m—”
I swallow her words with another kiss. Her protest drowns in my mouth. Then she arches against me, moaning, her body writhing, begging for more. I break from her lips only to trail down her jaw, my teeth scraping the delicate skin of her throat.
“Jesus, where did you learn to kiss like that?” She gasps, tilting her head against the door, offering herself like she knows I’ll bite, like she wants me to bite.
“I’ve never…” I stop myself from talking but not from marking her neck. She doesn’t need to know about how I’ve structured my entire existence around this single possibility. Shedoesn’t need to know that I’ve imagined this kiss a thousand different ways, that it’s played on repeat in my head during countless dark nights.
My fingers tangle in her hair as I glance up at her wrists. Pictures flash in my head. A hundred different ways Birdie is tied to my bed. Birdie’s cuffed wrists while she’s on her knees and my cock fills her throat. Birdie on a velvet-lined table, wrists bound with silk cords, movement is no longer hers to command, where I keep her exactly where I want her and finally take what I’ve starved myself of for years, above her a ceiling mirror where she can watch everything that I do to her body. Bound and trembling under me, every inch of her branded.
Birdie’s body pinned, arms and legs spread wide…wings stilled… preserved… forever.
Her wrists brush together as she follows the line of my gaze. A crooked smile curves her lips. “What’s the plan, Mr. Morra? Tie me up to your bed while you choke and spank me and pull my hair as you fuck me senseless every way you want?” She throws back at me what I once told her in the cabin. “Or are you going to reenact a scene from my books and show me how much of a good student you’ve been? Who is it going to be? Dom…” she hisses and curls her lip under her teeth, “Tino?”
“The daddiest daddy of all book stalkers. That’s your favorite, isn’t it?” I can’t hide the edge to my voice.
She shrugs playfully and thrusts her hips forward, pressing into me, reseeking proof of how far gone I am for her. “But not yours. I know what you have in mind.The Nightingale’s Whispers.” A tremble runs through her. “Holy fuck.”
You don’t know the first thing about what I have in mind for you, Birdie.
I claim both of her wrists in my grip, hard and tight, and savor her gasp and the anticipation in her eyes. But then I separate her wrists one in each of my hands and guide them to my chest.
Her glance drops to where she’s touching me. “Tristan, what are you doing?”
I don’t answer with words. My frantic heartbeat does the talking. Swallowing, I take my hands off hers. My fingers pause in the air before they drop to my sides. It’s not her who surrenders, it’s me.
Dazed, she holds my gaze. “You’ll let me touch you without your control?”
“Remember that day in the shower?”
“How can I forget?”
“What was the last thing you told me there?”
She roams my body with hooded eyes and licks her lip. “Mine.”
“I am yours, Birdie. Always have been.”
Something shifts and ignites through her. A different kind of hunger sharpens in the way she looks at me. “Then I’ll take what’s mine.”
Her fingers spread against my chest, hesitant at first but then bolder, skating over my muscles, curling in the fabric of my shirt. My pulse riots. I should hate this. Instead, I burn.
She works the buttons of my shirt and pulls the fabric out of my pants. Then she pushes my suit jacket off my shoulders. I take off my holster and lay it, with my gun and the radio, on the dresser, and she takes care of my shirt. When I stand half-naked before her, she trails every scar, every tattoo with deep concentration, as if she’s editing every inch of the man who has been before this moment, rewriting him into the man she now owns.
