Page 22 of Protected By the BRATVA Grump
"I brought bread." He sets a paper sack on the counter and opens the window over the sink. He lifts me down off the chair by the waist with an ease that I refuse to find as attractive as I do. His hands stay where they are for a second after my feet touch the floor. "Sit down."
"It's my kitchen."
"It was your kitchen. Now it’s a crime scene."
He runs the tap over the tray until it stops smoking. Then he pulls out the drawer where I keep the good knife, which he bought me, and goes through my fridge like a man taking inventory. Within twenty minutes there's garlic in a pan and something happening with cream and the whole apartment smells like a place where people live. I sit on the counter with my heels knocking the cupboard door.
He hands me a fork to test the sauce. Watches me put it in my mouth. Doesn't look away.
"More salt," I say.
"More salt," he agrees, and doesn't move to get it.
The air changes.
He steps in between my knees, and I put the fork down somewhere behind me without checking where. His hands come to my thighs, and slide, stopping at my hips. His thumbs move once over the bone there, and neither of us says anything at all for a long moment.
"I saw your face this morning," he says quietly. "When Bill had the paper out."
"I know."
"You didn't ask me anything," he says, taking a tendril of my hair and tucking it behind my ear.
"No."
He waits. Whatever he's braced for, I'm not going to give it to him.
I take his face in both hands, and this time he comes down to meet me before I've even started to pull.
"Thank you," I whisper against his mouth.
Something in him breaks its own leash. He kisses me, one hand flat between my shoulder blades and the other already dragging up under my sweatshirt, and I hear the burner click off behind him.
Then he lifts me off the counter and carries me three steps into the wall.
My legs lock around his waist. The framed print by the door goes crooked and neither of us reaches for it. He gets the sweatshirt over my head and his mouth is on my throat, my collarbone, the top of my breast. My hands are in his hair, and the sound I make when he bites down gently at the curve of my shoulder is not a sound I have ever made in front of another human being.
"Bedroom," I manage.
"No."
He carries me to the sofa instead and puts me down on my back. I get exactly long enough to appreciate the view of him pulling his shirt off over one shoulder before he's kneeling on the floor and hooking his fingers into my leggings and taking them and my underwear off in one long pull.
"Jasper."
"Let me." He spreads my knees with his forearms and looks at me for a moment that goes on far too long, and I feel it everywhere. "Every day this week I've stood in that café with people talking to me and thought about this. Bill telling me about pastry. Your hands covered in flour." His breath is warm against the inside of my thigh. "You have no idea what you do to me."
His mouth closes over me and my back comes off the cushions.
He's not in any kind of hurry. He never is. He works me with the flat of his tongue in long, slow strokes that build a fire from nothing. When I start pushing up against him he presses one forearm across my hips and holds me down, which somehow makes everything worse and better at once. Two fingers slide into me and curl, and he groans against my clit like he's the one being taken apart, the vibration of it makes me cry out and grab a handful of his hair.
"That's it," he murmurs. "Let me hear you."
The wave builds low and heavy, and he knows the second it turns because his fingers speed up and his mouth gets firmer. He takes me straight over the edge with my thighs shaking around his ears and his name coming out of me in pieces.
He's still there while I come down, gentling me through it, kissing the inside of my knee.
Then he stands and gets his belt open. The sight of him like that, chest heaving, eyes black, the tattoos moving over his shoulders as he shoves the denim down, has me reaching for him before I'm even breathing properly again.
