"I've been waiting for this since the day you laughed at my chart notes. I'll take as long as I want."
I switch to her other breast, teeth grazing the peak before I suck it into my mouth, and the moan she lets out is long and throaty and exactly what I want to hear.
She reaches for my shirt and I pull back long enough to let her strip it off. Her hands are on me immediately, fingers tracing the scars she can see and the ones she can only feel, the raised line across my ribs from shrapnel in Mosul, the puckered mark on my shoulder from a graze that bled more than it should have.
Her touch is professional in its precision and absolutely unprofessional in its intent, and the combination, a healer's hands mapping a healer's body, is specific to these two people and nobody else.
Then she pushes against my chest and I let her, because what she does next drops the floor out from under me.
She slides off the bed, sinks to her knees on the hardwood, and reaches for my belt.
The visual alone nearly ends things. Ireland Calloway on her knees in a rectangle of morning sunlight, red hair falling across bare shoulders, blue eyes looking up at me with a heat that is deliberate and unhurried and fully in control. This is not submission. This is a woman deciding to take me apart, and the challenge in her expression says she intends to be thorough about it.
She works my belt open with steady, capable hands and pulls me free, and the first contact of her fingers wrapping around my cock makes my jaw clench and my hand brace against the doorframe.
"Responsive," she murmurs. Her thumb drags across the head, slicking through the moisture already gathered there. "Good clinical presentation."
"Ireland."
"What? I notice vital signs." She leans forward and licks a slow, flat stroke from base to tip, and the groan that tears out of me is involuntary and guttural. "Your vitals are very promising."
Her mouth closes over me and she takes me in deep, her tongue working the underside in a slow, dragging stroke that makes my abs clench and my hand brace harder against the doorframe. She pulls back to swirl her tongue over the head, lapping at the slit, tasting me with a deliberate thoroughness that turns my breathing ragged.
Then she sinks down again, lips stretched around me, cheeks hollowing as she sucks, and the wet, slick heat of her mouth swallowing me inch by inch makes my vision go white at the edges.
My hand shoots to the back of her head and grips her hair. Her scalp is warm under my fingers, her red hair tangled around my knuckles, and the sight of her like this, lips swollen and shining around my cock, her jaw working as she takes me deeper, is so obscenely beautiful that my knees threaten to betray eighteen years of physical discipline. The groans she's pulling from me come from somewhere guttural and undone, sounds I've never heard myself make.
She hums around me and the vibration rolls through my shaft and up my spine and drags a curse out of my mouth that I don't bother censoring. Her free hand grips my hip, nails biting crescents into the muscle, and she sets a rhythm that is slow and deep and devastating, her head bobbing, her tongue pressing flat against the underside on every downstroke, the obscene wet sounds of her mouth filling the quiet bedroom.
"Enough." I pull her off by the fistful of hair I'm holding, and the slick pop of her mouth releasing me makes my cock twitch hard. She looks up at me with wet lips and bright eyes and the satisfied expression of a woman who just brought a man to his knees while she was on hers.
"Was there a problem with my technique?"
"Your technique is the problem." I pull her to her feet by her hair and her jaw and kiss her hard enough that she gasps into my mouth. I can taste myself on her tongue, and the raw intimacy of it makes my hands rougher, needier.
I spin her around and press her back against my chest, my mouth on her neck, my hands on her hips, stripping her shorts down her thighs. She kicks them off and I walk her forward to the bed and press her down onto it with one hand between her shoulder blades.
She turns her head on the mattress and looks back at me. The defiance is still there, hot and sharp and entirely unbroken, but her breathing is fast and her cheeks are flushed and her thighs are already parting. "I thought you said you'd been waiting."
"I have."
"Then stop making me wait."
I run my hand down her spine, over the curve of her ass, and between her thighs from behind. She's soaked.
The slick heat coating my fingers when I slide them through her folds pulls a groan from my chest, and the desperate whimper she lets out when I circle her clit, choked back behind her teeth, is the first crack in her composure.
"Don't hold back," I tell her. My voice is rough, commanding. "I want to hear every sound."
"Earn them."
I push two fingers inside her and curl them forward, and her back arches and her hands fist the sheets and the cry that rips from her throat is exactly what I asked for. She's tight and hot and clenching around my fingers, and the wet, obscene sound of my hand working her fills the quiet bedroom.
My thumb finds her clit and presses, and her hips jerk back against my hand.
"More," she gasps. "Boone, more."
I withdraw my fingers, flip her onto her back, and settle between her thighs. Her eyes are wide and dark, the blue swallowed by blown pupils, and she reaches for me, pulling at my hips, trying to drag me where she wants me.
