Page 56 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Chapter sixteen

One Time

NELLIE

Eleven minutes from the town green to my front porch, and Owen Peterson spends every one of them taking me apart with his thumb.

That's all it is. His hand on my thigh where my dress rode up, his thumb drawing slow circles on bare skin. He's not even looking at me. He's got his elbow propped on the door, watching the fence posts go by, breathing slow and easy while I strangle the steering wheel. I'm still humming from the bandstand and he knows it.

I run the stop sign at Cedar.

"Nobody at Cedar," I say before he can.

"Didn't say a word." The circles widen. Slower. "Drive faster."

The porch light at 1287 burns yellow in the dark. I kill the engine and the quiet rushes in, crickets and my own pulse, and for one second neither of us moves.

Then I'm out of the car. Around the hood. He meets me at the fender and I don't know which of us reaches first.

His mouth is nothing like the kiss on the green. That one was for the town. This one is for me, deep and starved, his hand fisting in my hair, walking me backward up my own porch steps like he's memorized them.

I fumble the keys. His body cages me against the door from behind, his mouth at my neck, and I feel exactly what this night has done to him pressed against me.

"Four weeks," he says against my ear, low and rough. "That sponge bath. The supply closet. Tonight you stood on my boot in this dress and put your arms around my neck in front of God and everybody." His teeth graze my earlobe. "Open the door, Nellie."

The key finds the lock. We fall through.

His boot catches the doorframe with a bang and I start to laugh and he swallows it, turns me, presses me into the hallway wall with his good leg between mine.

Then he goes still. Pulls back far enough to see my face in the dark.

"Tell me to stop and I stop. Now, later, middle of it. One word."

"If you stop," I say, "I will end you."

"Thank God."

The zipper of my dress gives under his fingers. He drags it off my shoulders slow, watching it fall, and then he reaches past me and turns on the hall lamp.

"Owen—"

"No." His eyes come back to me and the look in them dries my mouth. "I've pictured this in the dark for a month. I'm not doing it in the dark."

He looks. Takes his time about it, both hands settling at my waist, sliding up over every curve like he's claiming ground. I have never once in my life stood still for this. I stand still for it.

"Look at you." Barely a whisper. His thumb traces the lace at my hip. "I stitched my own arm shut once in a firehouse kitchen and it took less out of me than keeping my hands off you has."

His shirt comes off under my hands. The chain glints against his chest and I don't let myself look at it. Not tonight.

I go for his belt and he catches my wrists.

"Bed," he says. "I fall over in this hallway, you'll never let me live it out."

We make the bedroom shedding everything but the boot. He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls me down over him and neither of us can wait.

He drags the head of his cock through the slick heat of me, once, twice, teeth gritted like it costs him, and then I sink down and take him and the stretch of it whites out my vision. He's big. I knew he'd be big, I bathed the man, but knowing it and taking him are two different educations, and a sound tears out of my throat I've never made in my life. Thick and deep and pulsing, and my body grips him like it's been keeping this space open for weeks.

"There." His voice breaks in half. Head back, throat working, every muscle in his chest standing out under my palms. "God. You're so tight. So— don't move. Give me a second or this ends embarrassing."