"You don't." His thumb circles, presses, and his fingers curl hard against the spot inside me that makes my vision fracture, and the orgasm crests through me like a wave breaking, my back arching off the sofa, his name in my mouth, his hand between my thighs, his eyes on mine the entire time, watching me fall apart with the focused, consuming attention of a man who is filing away every detail. Every sound. Every reaction. Learning me the way he learns anything: thoroughly, precisely, with the intent to use what he's learned.
The aftermath is quick and graceless. My hands tearing at his belt, his trousers. His shirt goes over his head and I get my first real look at him, the lean, hard lines of his torso, the definition across his stomach, the trail of dark hair below his navel. He's built the way I should have expected: controlled, maintained, nothing wasted.
I press my mouth to his chest, taste salt and rain and the warm skin underneath, and feel his breath hitch when my teeth find the ridge of muscle above his hip.
He kicks his trousers off and I reach for him, wrap my fingers around the hard, hot length of him. He's thick and heavy in my hand, the skin like velvet over iron, and when I stroke him from base to tip, my thumb sliding through the slick bead of moisture at the head, his whole body jerks.
The sound he makes is guttural, pulled from somewhere deep, and his hips push forward into my grip with a need that strips away every layer of composure he's ever worn.
"Greer." My name in his mouth sounds like a warning and a prayer at the same time. His hand closes over mine, tightening my grip, showing me the pressure he wants, the pace, and for a moment I have the power, I have this man who controlseverything at the mercy of my hand, and the headiness of it is almost better than the orgasm he just gave me.
"I want you inside me," I tell him, and my voice doesn't sound like mine.
He doesn't need to be told twice. He pulls my hand away, pins both my wrists above my head with one hand, and lowers himself over me. His free hand hooks under my thigh, lifts my leg against his hip, and the angle opens me to him in a way that makes me gasp before he's even inside me. The head of him presses against my entrance, hot and blunt, and the anticipation of it, the hovering, is its own exquisite torture.
"Look at me," he says.
I look. His eyes are almost black in the dim light, focused and fierce, and when he pushes inside me, slow, one long continuous slide, the stretch of him fills me so completely that the breath leaves my body in a shudder. The sensation is overwhelming, the thickness of him pushing against my inner walls, the fullness so deep it borders on too much.
He holds there, buried, his jaw locked, the muscles in his arms taut from the effort of not moving, and the fullness of him is almost overpowering, the pressure and the heat and the intimacy of being pinned beneath a man who is watching my face like it's the only thing in the world.
"God," I whisper, and my voice is wrecked, and I don't recognize it.
"Tell me what you feel," he says, low, against my mouth.
"Full. I feel full of you. I feel you everywhere."
Something shifts in his expression. The control cracks, just a fraction, and he pulls back, almost all the way out, the drag of him against my sensitive walls making me moan, and then drives forward, and the sound that comes out of both of us is raw and simultaneous and the sofa groans beneath us.
He sets a rhythm that is relentless and deliberate, deep strokes that hit a spot inside me that makes my vision white out at the edges. Each thrust pushes the air from my lungs in a sharp exhale, and I can hear myself making sounds I've never made, broken, desperate sounds that would embarrass me if I could think about anything beyond the feel of him moving inside me. My wrists strain against his grip. My hips rise to meet each thrust, and the wet sound of our bodies is obscene in the quiet house, and I love it, the mess of it, the gracelessness, the slick slide of skin on skin. His mouth finds the curve of my neck and his teeth close on the skin there, not gently, and the sharp edge of pain braids with the pleasure until I can't separate them.
"Harder," I tell him, and he gives me harder, driving into me with a force that scoots us both up the sofa, and the bookshelves rattle, and my mother's journals shift on their shelf, and there is something profane and perfect about being fucked on June Holden's sofa by an Aldrich while the rain comes down and the dead clock keeps its silence in the hall.
"You have no idea what you look like right now," he says against my throat, and his voice is shredded, barely recognizable. "What you feel like. How tight you are."
The words land in my body like sparks, igniting something deeper than the physical, and I arch against him, taking him deeper, and the angle shifts and he hits a place inside me that makes my vision go white and a sound tear out of me that I will never admit to making.
He releases my wrists. His hands grip my hips and he pulls me up, rearranges me like I weigh nothing, and I'm in his lap now, straddling him, sinking down onto him at an angle that is deeper and sharper and makes me cry out.
His hands are on my waist, guiding my movement, and from here I can see his face, the tendons in his neck standing out, the flush across his chest, the way his stomach muscles contractevery time I roll my hips. He is beautiful and completely undone, and the power of it, the power of reducing this controlled, dangerous man to gasps and need, is intoxicating.
I roll my hips and watch his head fall back against the sofa, his throat exposed, his hands gripping my waist hard enough to leave marks. I do it again, slower, clenching around him as I rise, and the sound he makes is wrecked, almost pained. I set my own pace now, riding him in slow, deep circles, and every downstroke seats him so deep inside me I can feel him in my throat.
"You feel incredible," he says, and his voice is ragged, barely a voice at all. His thumb finds my clit, circling in time with the movement of my hips, and the dual sensation, him inside me and his hand on me, is too much and not enough simultaneously. "I want to feel you come like this. Around me."
"Then don't stop."
He doesn't stop. His thumb keeps its rhythm and his hips thrust upward, meeting me on every downstroke, and the pressure builds in layers this time, deeper and wider than the first orgasm. I can feel it gathering low in my belly, radiating outward, tightening every muscle in my body, and when it breaks it breaks through my whole body, my thighs clamping around his hips, my nails raking down his chest, his name tearing out of me in a sound that is close to a scream and closer to surrender.
My body clenches around him in waves and he follows me over with a groan that starts in his chest and ends against my throat, his whole body going rigid, his arms locking around my waist, his hips driving up into me one last time as he comes inside me with a possessiveness that I feel in my teeth. The heat of him spilling into me is intimate and raw, and I feel every pulse of it, and I hold him there with my thighs and my arms and my body and I don't let go.
His hand grips my hip hard enough to bruise, and I don't mind. I want the bruise. I want evidence that this happened, because tomorrow I might need to convince myself it was real.
We stay like that for a long moment, tangled together, his forehead pressed against my collarbone, my fingers in his hair, both of us breathing hard. The rain has softened to a steady murmur against the windows. The room smells like sex and sweat and bourbon and the old-wood smell of the house, and my thighs are trembling, and his hands are still on my hips, thumbs tracing slow circles on my skin, possessive even in the aftermath.
Eventually we rearrange ourselves on the too-narrow sofa, his arm under my head, my leg hooked over his. The light through the curtains has gone from gray to charcoal, and somewhere outside the storm is passing over the mountains and taking the last of the afternoon with it.
"The workers," I say, because even now, even here, the question doesn't stop. My hand rests on his chest, rising and falling with his breathing. "How did my mother know their names?"
