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I stared at the ceiling, chest heaving. “I will actually kill you.”

He smiled, slow and warm, and kissed the curve of my hip. “No, you won’t.”

He pressed his lips to my belly, then to my thighs, before returning to where I needed him the most. His breath fanned out hot against my wet core. His tongue, flat and firm, dragged slowly upwards along my entire slit, from my opening to my clit, coating itself in my slickness. He repeated this long, deliberate stroke several times, the pressure building, before his tongue tip suddenly focused, circling my swollen clit with tight, rapid flicks. The sharp sensation made me gasp and arch off the bed.

His left hand slid down, fingers pressing firmly against my outer lips, spreading me wide open for his mouth. I felt the cool air briefly, then the wet heat of his tongue delving deeper, probing my entrance before returning to torture my clit.

Simultaneously, his right hand found my breast, fingers kneading the firm flesh roughly. His thumb rasped over my nipple, pinching and rolling the hardened peak, sending jolts down to where his mouth worked.

The dual assault was relentless. The pressure of his tongue circling my clit intensified, the flicking motion becoming impossibly fast and precise. He dipped his fingers inside me and curled them upwards, finding that spot deep inside and rubbing firmly in time with his tongue. My hips bucked uncontrollably against his face. A deep, shuddering tension coiled low in my belly, tightening unbearably until it suddenly snapped.

My orgasm ripped through me, sharp, electric convulsions pulsed from deep inside my center radiating outwards. My back arched violently off the mattress as a raw cry tore from my throat. Every muscle clenched and released in rapid, uncontrollable waves, my vision whiting out as pure sensation obliterated all thought.

I collapsed back, a puppet with severed strings, twitching in the aftershocks, reduced to a shuddering puddle of nerve endings. Feeling the last echoes of pleasure fading away, my breathing began to slow, ragged gasps turning into steadier inhales and exhales. I lay there for a long moment, floating in a warm, honey-drenched haze, the kind that made the contours of my body feel stretched and boneless.

The world beyond the mattress seemed to have dissolved, the only things that existed were the soft sheets tangled beneath my back, the faint hum of the air conditioner cycling, and the heavy, sated thrum of my own pulse beating gently in my ears.

Every cell in me was alive and shimmering, but also oddly at rest, like I’d run a marathon and then landed in a featherbed.

I realized distantly that my mouth was hanging slightly open, and that I was probably making some silly, postcoital face, but I couldn’t summon the will or muscle control to do anything about it. I wanted to say something clever, to regain some sort of my power back, but apparently my brain had entered the witness protection program. My mind had been rinsed clean, wiped free of coherent thought, and the only thing that passed through it was a steady, deep sense of satisfaction and the vague awe that comes from being not just taken apart, but reassembled in a way that left you stronger and softer all at once.

My hand flopped to my stomach, fingers splayed as if I needed to confirm that my body was still real, still mine. I could feel the aftershocks jittering through my legs, the little involuntary trembles that would have been embarrassing if I’d had any sense of shame left in me.

The ceiling fan overhead whirled lazy circles, and the light filtering through the curtains painted stripes over Damon’s back as he hovered over me, face split in a slow, crooked grin.

He looked so self-assured, so devastatingly proud of himself, that at the very least I wanted to hit him with a snarky one-liner that would put a dent in his unflappable confidence. Instead, all I managed was a halfhearted, “You’re such a showoff,” which lacked bite, coming out more like a kitten’s mewl than a threat.

Damon just chuckled, his breath warming the hollow of my hip before he kissed it, slow and proprietary.

It occurred to me that everything leading up to this moment—every smartass comment, every deliberate brush of his hand, every time he’d looked at me with those inscrutable eyes—had been winding us tighter and tighter, until this was the only possible outcome. There was a fatalistic logic to it, like gravity or physics.

I’d never really believed in inevitability until now, but as I watched him press his lips to my flesh, I understood. This was always going to happen. We were a pair of magnets on a collision course, and it was just a matter of time. And from the look in his eye, this was just the beginning.

16

NAKED NEGOTIATIONS

Damon

She’d been the one to set the rules. No sex. Her words, her boundaries, her perfectly reasonable, completely infuriating terms—and now here she was, fingers knotted in my hair, thighs trembling against my shoulders, silently begging me to break every single one of them.

I grinned against the warm, salt-sweet skin of her inner thigh and took my time about it. I left a trail of slow, open-mouthed kisses, tasting the shiver that rippled through her body with each graze of my lips. When I reached the hollow where the muscle met her hip, I paused to breathe her in, to feel her heat and scent flood my senses, then shifted my attention to the taut, trembling plane of her belly.

Her hands clamped onto my arms, her nails biting crescents into my biceps. I groaned against her skin, heat flooding my chest at how desperately she sat up and hooked her fingers into the waistband of my sweats and yanked downward. I chuckled against her throat. “Impatient?”

“Yes,” she breathed.

I moved off the bed and stood at the edge, shoving the sweats down my legs and stepping out of them. Her gaze dragged down my chest, over the ridges of my abs, and when her eyes landed on my cock, hard and curving up toward my stomach, she bit her lip, breath shuddering, and her tongue flicked out to chase the moisture left behind. My shaft jerked at the sight.

I couldn’t move for a second. I wanted to burn the image of her—hair fanned across the pillow, eyes hungry, thighs parted—into the back of my skull, to recall it anytime I closed my eyes. This was happening. I was here, with her, finally collapsing the space between what I’d wanted and what was real.

I reached into the nightstand drawer and fished out a condom, tearing the foil with my teeth. Mikayla plucked the packet from my fingers and, without breaking eye contact, opened it the rest of the way. “Let me.”

She drew the latex out and circled her fingers around my girth, stroking root to tip in two long, twisting pulls. I thickened in her grip, a bead of pre-cum welling at the head and sliding down. My jaw clenched.

I caught her wrist. “Keep doing that, and this is going to be over before it starts,” I managed, but the warning was hollow. I didn’t care if I came right now, all over her hand, and then again in five minutes. I’d never wanted anyone like this.

She grinned—slow, wicked—and rolled the condom down my length with both hands, smoothing it inch by inch until it reached the base. Then she fell back against the pillows, her thighs parting, the slick pink folds of her sex glistening in the low light. I swelled in anticipation, harder, thicker, and I knew there was a good possibility I could come just from looking at her like this, from knowing she wanted me as badly as I wanted her.