He pulls back just far enough to look at me. His eyes are different now, stripped, intent, darker in the dim hallway light. The look on his face is intent and hungry. The way a man looks at something he's about to take apart.
"This changes everything," he says. Not a question. Not a warning. A statement of fact delivered in the same tone he'd use to read a contract clause, except his pupils are blown and his hand is in my hair and the composure is a ruin.
"I know." I run my thumb along his jaw, feel the muscle tighten under my touch. "I should tell you I'm on birth control. IUD."
"Good." His hand slides through my hair, fingers curling at the base of my skull, tilting my head back so my throat is exposed to him. The possessiveness of the gesture makes my breath catch.
"I don't want anything between us," I say, and the words come out low, rough, meaning more than the practical.
"Neither do I." His mouth grazes the underside of my jaw, and the scrape of his teeth against the tendon there sends a jolt straight down through my center. "I'm clean. Tested. I don't share."
The last two words aren't medical. They're territorial, delivered against my skin with the quiet certainty of a man establishing terms, and my body responds to the claim in them before my brain can mount an objection.
"Good," I say, and pull his mouth back to mine.
6
GREER
His mouth finds my neck. My back finds the wall. The hallway is narrow and dim and the wallpaper is peeling and the house still smells faintly of lavender no matter how many windows I open, and none of it matters because his hands are sliding up my ribcage and his teeth graze the tendon where my neck meets my shoulder and the sound I make is low and involuntary and nothing like the sound a woman makes when she's thinking clearly.
We don't make it upstairs. The living room is closer, my mother's living room, with the fireplace and the bookshelves and the two armchairs, and I pull him toward the couch with both hands fisted in his shirt, and he follows. The back of my knees hits the seat cushion of the sofa and I sit, pulling him down over me, and his weight settles against me like an answer to a question I didn't know I was asking.
His hands are deliberate. My sweater over my head. His fingers at the clasp of my bra, efficient and certain, like a man who approaches everything with competence and has decided to apply that competence here. The bra falls away and the cool air tightens my skin, and he stops. Looks. His gaze moves over my bare chest with the focused, unhurried attention of a manmemorizing something he intends to revisit, and the weight of being looked at like that, by this man, in this dim room, makes my nipples harden before he touches them.
When his mouth finds my breast, the heat of it after the cold air is a shock that bows my spine off the cushion. He takes my nipple between his lips and sucks, slow, firm, unhurried, his tongue circling the peak while his hand cups the other breast, his thumb dragging across the nipple in lazy strokes that match the rhythm of his mouth. The sound I make is embarrassing and I don't care. He switches sides, and the cool air on my wet skin where his mouth just was makes me whimper, and the whimper makes him press his hips against mine, and through his trousers I can feel exactly how hard he is, the rigid length of him against my inner thigh, and the knowledge of what that hardness means, what it wants, what it's going to do, turns the heat between my legs into a slick, aching pulse.
"You're shaking," he murmurs against my sternum.
"I'm cold."
"You're lying."
"I'm very good at it. Must be the company."
He laughs, a real sound, low and surprised, like a man who has forgotten what his own laughter sounds like, and the vibration of it against my skin does something devastating to the last of my restraint. My fingers find his belt. His hand catches my wrist, pins it above my head against the arm of the sofa, and the look he gives me is controlled and hot and absolutely wrecking.
"Slow down," he says.
"Make me."
His mouth covers mine. The kiss is different from the hallway, deeper, more deliberate, the kind of kiss that takes inventory. His free hand traces down my body, over my breast, pinching the nipple just hard enough to make me gasp intohis mouth, across the flat of my stomach, along the waistband of my jeans. His fingers are unhurried. Each touch is precise, intentional, mapped. He undoes the button of my jeans like he has all the time in the world, and the patience of it is its own form of torment, because my hips are lifting toward his hand and he's not giving me what my body is demanding.
"Callum."
"Mm." His mouth is at my ear, his breath warm, and his fingers slide my clothing and find me. The slick, swollen heat of me, already soaked, and the groan he makes against my ear when he feels how wet I am is guttural and possessive and makes my inner walls clench around nothing.
"You were saying?" he murmurs, and his fingers begin to move. Two of them, sliding through the wet folds, parting me, circling my clit with slow, deliberate pressure before dipping lower and pressing inside. The stretch of his fingers, the curl of them against the front wall, the heel of his palm grinding against my clit with every stroke, is so precisely calibrated it borders on cruel.
I was saying his name. I was saying it like a demand, and now I'm saying it like a plea, because his fingers are stroking me with the same methodical precision he brings to everything, and the pleasure builds in slow, tight spirals, and he's watching my face with an attention that would be clinical if not for the way his jaw is set, the way his breathing has gone ragged, the way the hand pinning my wrist has tightened until I can feel his pulse in his fingertips.
He brings me to the edge and holds me there. Deliberately. He pulls his hand back when my thighs clamp around it, returns when the tension ebbs, reading my body with the fluency of a man who pays attention to details for a living and has decided to pay attention to this one with everything he has.
"You're doing this on purpose," I gasp.
"Obviously."
"I hate you."
