Page 95 of Her Rival

When my thumb finally pressed against her clit, her tune changed.

"Oh fuck. I can. I can. I can. Jett. I'm so close. Don't stop. Don't stop. Don't. stop."

Her body locked. Had I not wrapped my free arm beneath her stomach to hold her hips upright, she'd have collapsed flat to the rug. My thumb flicked her clit at speed, shaking her body through another orgasm that rocked her to her core. She was done. Completely spent.

When she collapsed, I was there to catch her.

"Come on," I said with a grunt. "Let's get you in bed."

She tried to ask something. I think she wanted to ask about me. I think she'd figured out somewhere in the last twenty minutes that I hadn't finished, and she wanted to know if I needed her to. I picked her up off the rug before she could get the question out and set her down on the bed and pulled the duvet half over her and stretched out behind her on the cool sheets.

She made a small sound when the cool of the sheets hit her bath-warm, bath-flushed skin.

I slid one arm under her head.

I slipped my other hand between her legs.

"Give me that leg."

She gave me the leg.

I slid back into her.

I let her body swallow me down slow this time, the way a body swallows something it already knows the pattern of, and the languid push of me into her pulled small low whimpers from her throat. I kissed along her pulse point. I took a slow breath at the back of her hair. The movements were slow. Lazy. Reverent in a way I didn't have a word for and wasn't going to look for in that moment.

"Oh, Jett," she whispered. Her tears came back.

"I've got you."

I fucked her slow from behind. My hands soft. My lips on the curve of her neck. My teeth on the muscle where her shoulder met her neck. I left a mark there I hoped she'd see in the morning. I didn't have a reason for hoping that. I just hoped it. I wanted her to wear the mark of me the way men of my generation hadn't been taught to want women to wear marks of them, and which I wanted anyway.

"I know you've got one more for me, sweet girl," I muttered against her ear as my arm wrapped around her and my fingers found her clit again. "So why don't we go slow this time. Really savor it."

"Oh yes."

The soft pace was relentless. I timed my circling fingers to my slow thrusts and she fell into another universe. She gave herself up to me. She didn't fight. She didn't try to hold herself up. She lay against me and let me move her body with mine, and the growl that came out of me at the gift of that surrender was a sound I had not made in my life.

"That's it. Give yourself to me." My voice broke on it. I did not care that it broke. "Let me have all of you. Let me show you how you should feel. How a woman like you should feel every single night for the rest of your life."

Our bodies collided. We fell over the edge together. I shivered into her. My teeth sank into the muscle of her shoulder and I let myself bite, hard enough that she'd feel it, light enough that I wouldn't break skin, the way her body had taught me to bite over two encounters of trial and error, and I spilled into her as her body milked the rest of me out.

She bucked back through my orgasm. She fucked me through it the way I'd fucked her through hers earlier. She gave me the same gift I'd given her.

When she'd milked me dry, our bodies stilled.

"Such a good girl for me, Hartley," I muttered, smoothing her sweaty hair off her face.

Her lower lip quivered.

"That's all I ever wanted to be, you know," she whispered.

I went very still inside her.

"I know," I said.

"You know."

"Hartley. I've known since that first afternoon three weeks ago. Possibly since the gym nine years ago. The thing you wanted to be at seventeen was the thing somebody never told you already were. I have spent every minute I've been in this house with you trying to figure out how to tell you. I don't yet know how. But I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out by morning if I have to."