Page 91 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"You're staring," I whisper.

"Yes, ma'am." His eyes come up to mine, dark and sure. "Get used to it."

When I reach for his belt he catches my wrists, kisses each palm, and presses me back into that ugly motel quilt like it's silk.

"Owen—"

"No." He hooks his fingers in the last of my clothes and draws them down my legs slow, kissing the inside of my knee, the soft of my thigh, higher. "I ran two counties for this. I'm not rushing it."

Then his mouth is on me and I stop having opinions.

Soft. So soft I could cry from it. The warmth of his breath first, then the barest touch of his tongue, and every nerve I own gathers to that one inch of my body like it's the only place I've ever lived.

My hips lift on their own. Chasing.

His forearm settles across me, heavy and warm, pinning me easy to the mattress. Not stopping me. Keeping me. There's a difference, and my body knows it before my brain does, and it melts something low in my spine.

He takes his time like time belongs to him.

Slow. Slower. Each pass of his tongue draws the tension up my thighs, coils it tight behind my hip bones. I hear myself whimper. He answers it. I feel his mouth curve against me when I say his name, feel the low rumble of his laugh travel straight through me, and I have to grab the sheets because that alone nearly ends me.

"Owen. Please."

"I know, baby." Spoken right against me, his voice a vibration I feel in my teeth. "I've got you."

He does.

His fingers slide into me, slow, curling, and the world narrows to that pressure, that impossible sweet ache, the wet heat of his mouth working me in a rhythm my hips learn without asking. Everything in me pulls tight. Tighter. He holds me there, right on the edge, until I'm fisting his hair and saying his name like a threat and a prayer in the same breath.

Then his lips close around me and he hums.

I break.

It rolls through me in waves, my back bowing off the bed, my thighs shaking around his ears, his name splitting in half somewhere in my throat. The ice machine outside can gossip all it wants. I am past caring. I am past everything except his hands and his mouth and the way he groans against me like my falling apart is doing something to him too.

He doesn't stop.

He gentles. Long, soothing strokes that catch every aftershock and hold it, carry me down soft as a landing. My whole body is loose and ringing. I'm still trying to find my breath when I feel it start again. That slow build. His patience like a promise.

"Owen, I can't."

"You can." A kiss to the inside of my thigh. "Let me love you, Nellie."

So I do. I let him.

The second time is slower. Deeper. Less like breaking and more like dissolving, and when I come apart there are tears sliding into my hair and I couldn't tell you where the pleasure ends and the crying starts. I don't want to know. He stays with me through all of it, murmuring things into my skin, my name, that he's here, that he's got me, until the shaking stops.

Then he starts up my body. Unhurried. A man with nowhere else on earth to be.

His lips at my hipbone. The flat of my stomach, soft as a prayer, and he lingers there, and neither of us says why. Between my breasts. Over my heart, which is hammering loud enough to give me away.

He looks up at me then, chin resting on my sternum, eyes dark and wrecked and certain.

"Hi," he says.

I laugh. Wet, shaky, ruined. "Hi yourself."

"Hi yourself."