Page 184 of Safe Word

The silence wasn’t empty – it pulsed with everything we hadn’t said, everything we couldn’t take back.

There was no returning from this.

Not to masks. Not to fantasy.

Not to before.

THIRTY-THREE

I couldn’t separate from her.

My body refused to obey as I pushed deeper into her pussy, coaxing another moan down that vicious tongue.

‘You’re learning,’ I murmured. She blinked, her lips parting against mine. ‘To submit…’

‘Oh, baby…’ Her voice had my dick hardening inside her all over again.

I moved slightly away, peering down into the ocean of her eyes, lust-drunk, wide with the aftertaste of surrender.

‘I thought I wasn’t going to see you again…’ she whispered.

‘Me? Or Ghost?’

Her hands abandoned my shirt, climbing up my neck to my jaw where her gaze scorched a mark of its own. Her heart beat under her skin like an invitation.

As her head fell back against the tiles, I moved, but her body coiled at the sensation of me slipping out of her, and her legs slammed me right back inside.

With my dick half-lax between her tight walls, I could feel every single drop of us leaking from her, running down our thighs.

Heat. Salt. Breath. The echo of what we’d just done vibrated between us.

Christ, I couldn’t breathe…

‘I’m a greedy woman,’ she murmured, but it came out as a growl. ‘I need you both.’ The rasp in her voice, the shine in her eyes, the smirk on her face made me see that lioness she rarely let out.

This was Scarlett. This was Paula.

‘It really is you.’ The words left me on a breath.

She hooked her fingers behind my neck and drew my face closer.

I never felt comfortable kissing a woman, maybe because such an intimate, personal act didn’t have a place with the ones that had come before her. They all served a purpose.

But Paula’s mouth on mine felt like a punch to the soul, cold and clean, then hot enough to burn it to ash.

Like death. Like birth.

Like a reason worth dying for.

I was… lost.

I kissed her back like a man starving, like the sinner she saved with every touch.

She made space for the devil and the man, and kissed them both like they were one and the same.

The taste of her forgiveness and punishment tangled into one.

No wonder I couldn’t stop.