Page 21 of Working For Her Second Chance

My back arches. His mouth is warm and wet and relentless, sucking gently, then harder when I gasp, reading my reactions with the same precision he brings to everything.

His mouth moves lower. Ribs. The soft plane of my stomach. The freckles below my navel that he traces with his tongue like he's reconnecting dots on a map he memorized that first night. My hips shift. My body knows where this is going and is already there, already aching, already saying yes before he asks.

He hooks his fingers in my underwear and pulls them down. Slowly. Watching me. His eyes are dark and intent and focused with a concentration I've seen him bring to live wires and delicate connections, and being on the receiving end of that focus while mostly naked is an experience no spreadsheet will ever contain.

His mouth finds the inside of my thigh. A kiss. Warm breath against sensitive skin. Then the other thigh. Taking his time. The particular, methodical patience of a man who works with precision for a living, now applied to me.

"River." My voice is wrecked. "Please."

His hands grip my thighs, thumbs pressing into the soft skin where my legs meet my hips, and when his mouth finally reaches the center of me, the sound I make isn't voluntary. It comes from somewhere below thought—raw, shocked, as if my body forgot this was possible and is furious about the lost time.

His tongue moves in long, slow strokes. Flat, then pointed, learning what makes me gasp versus what makes me grip the sheets. He finds the rhythm that takes me apart—a specific pressure, a precise spot—and stays with it, steady and relentless. My analytical brain tries to hold a thought and can't. Sentences start and don't finish. I am aware of his hands on my hips and his hair between my fingers and the wet heat of his mouth and the sound of my own breathing, ragged and climbing.

The orgasm builds from the base of my spine. A tightening. A coiling. His tongue doesn't falter, doesn't change, just holds that maddening rhythm while the pressure mounts and my thighs shake and my hand fists in his hair and I stop thinking entirely.

...and the room narrows to nothing but the heat of his mouth and the sound of my own breathing.

He stays with me until I push his head away, oversensitive, breathless. He presses a kiss to the inside of my thigh. Looks up at me. His mouth is wet and his eyes are dark and the expression on his face is one of quiet, undone satisfaction.

He rises and reaches for the nightstand. His hands are shaking.

I see it. The tremor in fingers that handle twelve thousand volts without flinching, that climb poles in thunderstorms, that splice live wire steady as a surgeon. Those hands are shaking because of me.

Something in my chest cracks open that's bigger than desire.

I sit up. Take the condom from him. "Let me."

A small act. Practical and intimate. My hands on him—he's hot and hard and the sound he makes when I roll it on is a bitten-off groan that makes the heat spike between my legs all over again.

"Macy." My name. Not a question. An anchor. Like he needs to say it to remind himself this is real.

"I'm here," I say. "I'm right here."

He lowers me back. Settles between my thighs. The first press of him is slow—achingly, deliberately slow—and the sound that comes from both of us as he fills me is something between a gasp and a confession.

Forehead to forehead. Eyes open. The moonlight on his face. The vulnerability of watching each other this close while our bodies find a rhythm that feels like memory—the specific way we fit, the angle of his hips against mine, a connection so familiar it makes something in my chest go raw and aching, like finding a thing you stopped looking for.

He moves with the same steady control he brings to everything. Deep, measured strokes that push the breath frommy lungs. His arms are braced on either side of my head, the muscles in his shoulders taut, his jaw tight. The control is beautiful. The control is almost unbearable. I want it to break.

I wrap my legs around his hips. Change the angle. Roll my hips up to meet him, and the new friction pulls a sound from his chest that's raw and startled and completely without composure.

"Macy—" His rhythm stutters. His arms shake.

I do it again. And again. Matching him thrust for thrust, refusing to let him set the pace, because this isn't something he's giving me. This is something we're building together, and I am not a surface being explored—I am a woman who has spent twelve years making decisions and I am making this one with my whole body.

The steady, measured man loses his rhythm. The control breaks. His thrusts go harder, faster, and the raw, uncontrolled need underneath the precision—the sound of his breathing, the grip of his hands, the way he says my name like it's the only word left in his vocabulary—is what sends me climbing again.

His hand slides between us. Finds the right place. Presses.

The second orgasm builds fast—friction and pressure and his body moving against mine and the sound of his voice in my ear, my name, just my name, like a prayer or a curse or both—and it crests and breaks and I'm gone, muscles clenching around him, nails digging into his back, the sound I make muffled against his shoulder.

He follows. Two more thrusts and his whole body tenses—a held breath, a stopped clock—and then he shudders, and his face drops to my neck, and the sound he makes against my skin is quiet and broken and reverent.

Stillness. Weight. Breathing.

His face in my neck. The specific smell of his skin—copper, sweat, something warm underneath that I'd forgotten I remembered. The low hum outside the window. The same soundfrom that first night, when we lay in this bed the first time and I traced his scar and he stared at the ceiling and neither of us knew that "this" was something you could lose.

For one breath I'm eighteen and thirty at the same time. Both versions of me in this bed. Both terrified. Both home.