Page 114 of None Of Your Business

He settles between my knees, guiding the tip of his cock against me, but he doesn’t push in right away.

“Eyes on me,” he whispers.

Nodding, I open my eyes.

Then he slowly pushes inside, giving my body time to stretch and open around him. He’s thick, filling me so completely that a long, low sigh escapes my lips. The pillow beneath my hips takes every bit of pressure off my lower back and joints, letting me sink into the mattress without a single flare of pain.

He pauses when he’s fully buried, his forehead coming down to rest against mine.

“You okay?”

“Don’t stop,” I moan, wrapping my arms around his neck, pulling him closer. “Hudson, please.”

A low groan rumbles deep in his chest, and then he sets the pace.

He drives all the way in, then pulls back out, lifting my hips to meet his thrusts.

“Fuck. So tight for me,” he rasps, his chest heaving as he drives into me again and again.

He shifts his angle, pressing deeper, while his thumb finds my clit.

“Hudson—” I gasp, my nails digging into his shoulders as my head rolls back against the pillow.

“Let go.”

I fracture completely. Another orgasm rips through me, my walls clenching around his cock in waves.

Hearing me break shatters whatever restraint he had left.

He drives into me three, four more times before he lets out a low, guttural roar. He buries his face into the side of my neck as he comes, his entire body trembling.

He stays there, his heart hammering against my ribs.

And because I can never sit in silence for too long, I press my lips to his ear and whisper, “What the hell did you put in those pancakes?”

He lifts his head to look at me before we both burst out laughing.

Thirty-Three

I’ve been sitting on the floor of Hudson’s living room for ten minutes, staring at what I’m almost certain is my centerpiece.

It’s encased in an enormous wooden transport crate that two very serious men carried through Hudson’s front door ten minutes ago.

A tear slips down my cheek. I wipe it away, but another takes its place. Apparently, sleeping with Hudson has completely dismantled my emotional regulation.

I woke this morning tangled in his limbs, my face mashed into his chest, his heavy arm pinned around my waist. When every moment from last night came flooding back, I’d buried my head in his shoulder and informed him I was going back to sleep until adulthood felt less humiliating. He laughed, kissed the top of my head, and said he needed a shower.

I assumed that would be the most destabilizing part of my morning.

I was wrong.

My eyes track the stenciled gallery logo on the pine slats.

It was him. Hudson was the anonymous online buyer who snapped up the canvas an hour before the gallery doors even opened. The stranger I’d privately resented all night.

I’ve sold work before. Commissions, smaller gallery pieces, things that leave the studio to become background scenery in someone else’s life. You wrap them, hand them over, and move on. That’s the job.

This one was different.