Knees cushioned by the fireside rug, Nellie settled between Sawyer’s thighs and looked up at her once. Sawyer looked back beneath hooded eyes and bit her lower lip, nodding once. As she was certain the CEO was more than accustomed to being obeyed, Nellie dipped her head and put her mouth to the wet heat of Sawyer’s pussy.
This was the kind of fieldwork Nellie Fuller could lose herself in fully. Sawyer’s taste, the shape of her, the way the hood of her clit felt beneath Nellie’s tongue as she licked her way up this new territory. Sawyer’s thighs tensed on either side of her head, but Nellie’s hands were at her hips—holding, steadying—as she moved her tongue in the long, flat strokes that the initial debrief had suggested, and then the circles, and then both alternating, and she felt Sawyer’s breathing lose its regulated rhythm completely.
She brought two fingers into it, thrusting into Sawyer’s pussy while her mouth stayed on her clit. Sawyer’s hand found her hair. Her other hand was fisted against the couch arm.The sounds she was making were low and uninhibited and increasingly more breathless.
Sawyer Alburn was a woman accustomed to composure encountering its outer boundary. Triumphantly, Nellie moved her fingers in a steady, curling stroke and kept her tongue exactly where it was until Sawyer’s grip tightened in her hair and her back arched off the overstuffed cushions and the long, shuddering exhale came, her pussy clenching warm and rhythmic around Nellie’s fingers.
Once the death-grip on her scalp had been relinquished, Nellie eased herself up from her sore knees and came to settle beside Sawyer on the couch. They lay without speaking for a moment, Sawyer’s chest still rising and falling with the comedown of her orgasm, Nellie looking at the ceiling and feeling, in a way that was entirely pre-linguistic, the deep satisfaction of a job thoroughly well done.
The fire had burned lower and the storm, as if on cue, had begun to settle itself into something quieter. The big gusts were spacing out. Rain still hit the roof but steadily, evenly, without drama.
The full reality of what had just happened settled over Nellie piece by piece, as Sawyer lay beside her, close and quiet. Nellie could feel the length of her, the intimacy of it, the actual physical reality of the person she had spent weeks wanting to either shake soundly or press her mouth against, and she had now done both, roughly in that order. She tracked the sensation of every inch where their skin touched and thought about nothing in particular. This was, all things considered, a nice change of pace from thinking constantly about all the things.
Then Sawyer moved. Just shifted, turned her head, and Nellie watched from the corner of her eye as she stared at the ceiling briefly, then at the dark window, calculating.
“I’ve got—” Sawyer started and then hesitated. “A lot to catch up on. In the morning.”
Something in Nellie’s chest went very still.
It was all she could do to bite back a protest as Sawyer sat up slowly and reached for her shirt.
Nellie pulled her knees to her chest and kept her expression easy—or tried to. She was suddenly back to being very tired of managing her face around this woman, but asking Sawyer Alburn to stay felt, right now, like reaching for a bird that had just landed. She was afraid to spook her. She was afraid that saying the wrong thing would send her back out into the rain for good, back to the professional distance that had already cost them both too much time.
So, she said nothing.
She lay on the couch and watched Sawyer reach for her clothes and listened to the rain and waited to see what would happen next.
16
CHAPTER 16 – SAWYER
Sawyer woke up reaching for someone who wasn’t there.
Her arm was already extended across the other half of the bed before full consciousness arrived to inform her how foolish this was. The sheets on that side were flat, cool, undisturbed—the perfect record of a night she had spent alone. The ceiling of her cavernous bedroom taunted her with its usual clean, expensive indifference. Nothing like a certain cottage with low oak beams and considerably more coziness.
Sawyer withdrew her arm and lay staring at it.
Six years since she’d last wanted to reach for someone in the morning. She hadn’t missed it—or told herself as much on the occasions when it crossed her mind, which were fewer and further between than most people probably assumed. She’d built plenty to be proud of in those six years. Her company was thriving. Her ten-million-dollar penthouse apartment was quiet. Her schedule was hers. She slept well.
Yet, these days, she was not, in fact, sleeping well.
She’d been awake at 1:00 a.m. At 2:30. Briefly, disastrously, at 3:15, when she’d gotten up and answered three emails just to have something purposeful to do with herself. She had returned to bed at 3:40 and lain there constructing arguments for why leaving the cottage last night had been reasonable and necessary and the correct thing to do, which was a project that had failed every iteration she’d tried.
Sawyer pressed the heels of her hands against her closed eyes and reviewed the evidence. Last night, she had driven forty-five minutes through a thunderstorm, stood on Nellie Fuller’s porch soaking wet hoping to be let in, had sex on an overstuffed couch that was frankly not engineered for such a feat, and then—in what her own conscience was now cataloguing in stark terms—dressed herself, cited professional obligations, and driven home.
At 11:30 p.m.
In the rain.
Because she had a lot to catch up on.
She moved her hands from her eyes and surveyed the ceiling again. It had not become any more comforting in the slightest.
The problem, as Sawyer could admit to herself in the privacy of this room and approximately nowhere else, was not the leaving. She’d needed to leave. Not because of the work, but because staying would have required her to lie there in the dark next to Nellie and feel everything at once without any kind of plan for what to do with it. She had no timeline, no pros and cons list, no executive decision framework for how to reconcile her emotions with the very real, very expensive threat that Nellie Fuller posed to her company.
So, she had left. Which was, her conscience now observed with its infuriating frankness, still cowardice regardless of how carefully she articulated the reasoning.
Sawyer muttered a few curses to the ceiling and got up.
