He huffed something that was half a laugh and half a groan, and let me.
That was the thing that undid me — not the heat or the weight of him in my hand, but that he let me. That a man wound this tight, who could have flipped us in a heartbeat, would hold himself still under my hands and take it, and let me learn him the same way he’d learned me. I found the slow drag that pulled his stomach tight and his breath to rags. When I dragged my thumb over the slick gathered at the head of him, his hips jerked up into my fist before he could think to stop them and the sound he made was wrecked. The night before he’d been the one on my kitchen floor, holding on, carrying me up the stairs. This morning he’d knelt and given and taken nothing back. Now he was mine to take care of, and for once I was the one doing it.
“Christ.” His voice had gone to gravel. “Just like that — fuck, your hands.” He made himself look at me, jaw tight. “You’re going to make me come right here, standing up. You know that.”
“That’s it.” Rough, against my ear, the words coming apart between his teeth. “Christ — just like that. Don’t stop.” I twisted my grip at the top of the stroke and a groan tore up out of his chest, helpless and low. “You feel what you do to me?” Filthy and wrecked and sweet, all in one breath. “Been wanting this since the first day. You’re gonna make me—” The rest broke off into a sound he couldn’t shape into a word. Every bit of it took the last of the shy out of me and put something brazen in its place. I had never once felt like I was holding the upper hand in a room with a man. I had it now, and I used it.
His control didn’t so much break as bend. He came off the tiles for me — one hand fisting into my wet hair — and kissed me hard, rough, more teeth than tenderness, a man holding onto the one thing keeping him upright. But he didn’t take over. He let me keep the rhythm, let me run him right to the edge and over it, and when he went, he went hard — his whole body drawing up, the muscle of his stomach snapping tight, a groan torn out of him I felt in my own chest more than heard, his cock pulsing in my fist as he spilled hot and thick over my fingers, the water carrying it off us as fast as it came.
Then he was done, all that size gone soft and heavy, and he dropped his forehead to my shoulder and breathed. “Give me a minute,” he said into my skin, rough and ruined, and I giggled — actually giggled, a sound I’m not sure I’d made since I was about nine — because I had done that. Me. I was, in that one moment, extremely pleased with myself.
We were, predictably, out of hot water long before either of us was willing to call the moment done.
He lifted his head and looked at me then — sated, loose, unguarded in a way I had never once caught on him. “Your taps are a war crime.”
“You get used to them.”
“I’d like to.”
“Me too.” It came out small, and the color came up with it, because I’d meant it and he heard that I did.
By the time I’d toweled the water out of my hair, he was dressed and downstairs.
I stood at the mirror in an old soft top and older jeans and listened to my house make sounds it didn’t make: a cupboard I hadn’t opened, my kettle being filled by somebody who wasn’t me. I caught myself in the glass —a woman grinning at herself in an empty room like the before-and-after in an advert for a better life.
The kettle clicked off, and I knew what he was making before it reached me. Flat white. Extra hot. Caramel shot.
He stopped in the doorway, dressed, and set the mug at my elbow without a word — exactly hot enough. Then he stood behind me, both of us in the mirror, and put his mouth in my wet hair.
“I’ve got to go.” He kissed the top of my head. “I’ll see you tonight.”
“You know where I live.”
He turned me around and took my face in both hands — big enough that his fingers slid back into my wet hair — and said it against my mouth. “I do.” Then he kissed me, deep and wet and in no hurry about it, one more time. “Drink that while it’s hot,” he said, when he finally let me go. “You let it go cold every single time.”
“I do not?—”
“You do.” And he was already moving — the stairs, the front door — a minute later his truck turned over and pulled out, andleft me standing in my own hall with my mouth still warm and the rest of me a good deal less composed than it had been a minute before.
I drank the coffee while it was hot. Mostly to spite him.
I was two-thirds down it and smiling like a loon at my own wall when somebody knocked.
It would be Steph — we’d had brunch on the books since Thursday, and she runs early on the mornings the baby has her up before the birds. I pulled the door open with the loon-smile still on me, already halfway into a hello.
It was Liam.
“Oh.” The smile rearranged itself into something more careful. “I was expecting Steph. We’re having brunch.”
My brother stood on my porch in jeans and a faded UT tee, no jacket, no badge — just Liam, out at my cottage on a Saturday morning, and a shade sheepish about being caught at it. He came up the step and into the open doorway, and I stayed put in it, the door wide at my back and him not quite over the threshold. “Hey. I, uh.” He scrubbed the back of his neck. “We didn’t see you out at the ranch on your days off. Like usual. Just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’ve been busy.” True, and the whole of what I planned to say about it.
He nodded, slow. And then his eyes went — just for a second — past me and across the road, to the drive where a truck had sat twenty minutes ago and didn’t now. “Saw your neighbor pulling out when I rolled up.”
“Are you spying on me?” It came out faster and harder than I’d meant it to.
He huffed a laugh. “No, Soph. I happened to roll up the exact second he was leaving. Swear to God.” The laugh went. “What’s going on there?”
