Page 268 of Power Play

18

Charm

The first gray light of dawn seeped around the edges of Ryan’s blackout curtains, painting the bedroom in charcoal and slate. He slept beside me with one arm flung over his head and the other resting heavily across my waist. Sleep had softened the fierce intensity from last night’s argument, but the shadows beneath his eyes remained as evidence of what honesty had cost both of us.

My body hummed with exhausted clarity. The fight had been brutal, and his words still echoed inside the bruised places they had found.

I’ve lost much worse.

The call to my mother had eased some of the fear, but it hadn’t erased it. It had created enough space for something else to exist beside it. Hope, maybe. The possibility that she meant what she said and that Thanksgiving didn’t have to become another place where I was forced to choose between the people I loved.

I shifted onto my side to face Ryan. The movement woke him immediately, his eyes opening with the alertness of someone who had spent too much of his life needing to know what was happening around him.

He found my face in the dim light. There was no smile, only a deep, searching look.

We had already made our apologies in the darkness before falling asleep. They had been ragged, imperfect, and real. The quiet left behind felt different from the silence that followed our fight.

Ryan’s hand slid from my waist along my side, his thumb stroking slowly over my ribs. His gaze dropped to my mouth before returning to my eyes, asking something he wasn’t ready to say aloud.

I answered by closing the final inch between us and kissing him.

The kiss was slow and deep, carrying all the tenderness that had survived our anger. Ryan kissed me back with the same deliberate pace, his hand rising to cradle my jaw. When he pulled away, his breath moved warmly across my lips.

“You okay?” he murmured, his voice rough with sleep.

I nodded. “Yeah. Are you?”

He gave a slow shake of his head. “Not yet.”

His fingers brushed a strand of hair away from my cheek before he said, “Show me.”

He didn’t want another explanation or promise. Ryan wanted to feel that I was still here and had heard every word he said.

I rolled onto my back and pulled him with me. He came willingly, settling over my body with a familiar, anchoring weight. Braced on his forearms, he stared down at me while dawn caught the edges of NAVARO across his stomach and the hockey scene inked over his chest.

I reached between us and hooked my fingers into the waistband of his boxers. Ryan lifted his hips enough to help me push them down before kicking them the rest of the way off. He was already hard, thick and heavy against my stomach, and my underwear disappeared into the gray morning a moment later.

Ryan settled between my thighs but didn’t enter me. The head of his cock rested against my entrance in a maddening promise while he lowered his mouth and traced a path from my jaw to my collarbone.

“You love this, don’t you?” he whispered against my skin. “You love this thick Chicano dick. You love when it’s all you can fucking think about.”

I arched beneath him, answering without words.

He pushed the first inch inside me slowly, stretching me until my breath caught.

“You love when I fuck you rough,” he continued, his voice dropping lower as his hips rolled forward another devastating inch. “When I fuck this tight little pussy raw until you forget your own name and all you know is me.”

He gave me another inch, filling me with an aching pressure that made my fingers tighten around his shoulders.

“You want my anger.” Ryan drove the rest of the way inside and held himself there, making me feel every hard inch of him. “You want my softness too. You want every part of me because I’m yours, and you’re fucking mine.”

He began moving with slow, deep rolls of his hips that stole the air from my lungs. Every withdrawal dragged against nerves that had barely recovered from last night, and each thrust drove him back inside until there was no space left between us.

Ryan kept the pace torturously slow while his mouth found my ear.

“Puta madre… me vuelves loco.”

Fuck, you make me crazy.