Lex is gazing at me.
The look is unbearable.
It is the look of a man who, ninety minutes ago, threw himself between a woman he cares for and a rifle. It is the look of a man who met his daughter for the first time days ago.
"Don't," I say.
"Don't what?"
"Don't look at me like that. Not yet. I am holding it together by my fingernails, and if you look at me like that for one more second, I am going to come apart."
"Come apart on me."
I drop the bandage scissors. I climb into his lap.
Chapter 19
Maeve
Choosing
Iclimb into his lap, and I come alive instead.
My knees bracket his hips on the edge of the bed, and my hands find his face, and I kiss him the way I have wanted to for seventeen days and would not let myself.
His good hand spreads at the small of my back and drags me flush against him, and I feel the whole hard ridge of him through two thin layers of cotton, already straining, already insistent against the seam of me. My body answers before my mind does. I am wet before he has touched me anywhere that should make me wet.
"The arm," I manage.
"Forget the arm."
"Lex."
"Maeve. Forget the arm."
I forget the arm.
His good hand finds the hem of my sweater and drags it up one-handed, and I lift my arms, and it is gone. Cold air. Then his mouth. He pulls my breast into the heat of it, his tongue dragging across the nipple until it draws up tight and aching, and he scrapes his teeth there once, and the pull of it goes straight down through my belly to the place already clenching onnothing. I grind down against him. The friction is not enough, and it is everything. I do it again.
I shove his shirt up over the hard plane of his stomach, the muscle jumping under my palms, and he lets go of me just long enough to drag it off, and then I have him bare to the waist in the dark — the broad chest, the dark hair, the old scars, the forearms inked black to the wrist, the white bandage the only soft thing on him. He is enormous like this. I put my mouth to his sternum, where his heart is slamming, and I feel him shudder under it.
I rise off his thighs just enough to strip the rest away, and as the last of it goes, I feel the whole day go with it — the woman in the federal hallway, the woman on the floor of the SUV with his body over hers. I leave her on the floor of the safe house. The woman who sinks back down is the one who has decided what she is doing with the next fifty-something days of her life.
I drag his sweatpants down off his hips and he springs free, heavy against his own stomach, and for a second I just look at him.
He is big everywhere, and he is big here. Thick and long and flushed dark at the crown, the broad head already wet with precum; a bead of it catching the only light in the room. The length of his jumps once against his abdomen, like even that is straining toward me. I have not let myselflookat him like this, slow and greedy, with just enough lamplight to see exactly what I am about to take.
Then I wrap my hand around him.
He fills my palm and overfills it, thick and hot and impossibly hard, the skin like silk stretched over iron, and I feel him pulse once against my grip. I stroke him root to tip, slow, and drag my thumb through the slick gathering at the crown, and the sound he makes is low and wrecked, and I feel it land somewhere behind my own navel.
A thick vein runs down the underside of him. I trace it back down with my thumb. His hips jerk up off the bed before he can stop them, chasing my hand, his good hand fisting in the sheet — this controlled, silent man who gives nothing away, undone by my fist around his cock. The sight of it pulls a fresh rush of heat between my legs. I am dripping for him, and he has not even been inside me yet.
I rise up on my knees over him. I notch the broad head of him against me and drag it through the slick, swollen center of me, once, twice, pressing the flat of him to my clit until my thighs shake.
Then I sink down.
The stretch of it. The stretch. He is too much for the first inch and then my body gives and takes him, and I lower myself onto him slow, thick inch by thick inch, feeling every ridge and vein of him drag against my walls as they open around him, the burn going molten the deeper he goes, until I am seated to the root and the head of him is pressed somewhere high and deep that catches my breath and keeps it.
