Page 114 of Worth the Fall

I tug her panties aside with one finger and lick the length of her pussy, circling my tongue on her clit and sliding it back all the way down until I dart into her. She gasps, and her hands move from gripping the sheets to sinking into my hair.

My god. She tastes like heaven, like everything I want and need and desire. My lips are coated with her. My nose is buried in her slit as I lick and lap and pleasure and tease her nerves into a riot of sensations.

As I let her lose herself. As I make her feel. As I help her forget.

I kissed all of her pain away, now I want her to know I desire her, too. All of her. The scars. The beauty. The pain. The past. The future.

And goddamn, the mewl in her throat, the groan of my name, the desperate pleas for more as my tongue and fingers work her into a frenzy are an aural seduction all by themselves. When she gasps as I push her over that cusp where desire burns into bliss, I’m left reeling for her to come so I can push into her and join her.

“Grant.” She pants as her body jerks and writhes under the pressure of her orgasm slamming into her. Her pussy pulses around my fingers and against my tongue. I suck ever so gently on her clit, pulling every last ounce of pleasure out of her . . . and fuck me if I don’t want to get off the bed, yank her legs open, and fuck her into oblivion.

I just can’t.

Not knowing how she came to me.

Not knowing that I’m the one who messed her head up.

Not knowing that she trusts me when it seems as if trust is something she never allows herself to give.

So, as much as my dick is begging to slide into her pussy, I keep my pants on. Fuck yes, my dick aches with the need to take her, and my balls burn for release, but I know this isn’t about me. I’ll be cursing myself later when I grab the lube and take to my hand, but this is the right thing to do.

With her addictive taste still on my tongue, I press a kiss to each side of her inner thighs then move up to circle my tongue around the rim of her belly button. Inch by torturous inch, I work my way back up her body. Every time my dick even remotely rubs against the mattress or her leg, I want to come like a sixteen-year-old boy.

“So beautiful,” I murmur, raining praise between each kiss.

Up the side of her rib cage. Over the peaks of her nipples. Then I bring my lips back to the scars on her arms to let her know even those parts of her are beautiful.

I continue up to her shoulder and then follow the line to the underside of her jaw. It’s her sighs that fuel me. Her sudden tensing as she guesses where my lips will land next followed by how she sinks into the mattress when she remembers that she trusts me.

It’s when I find her lips again that I know she’s calmed some. Her kisses, which were tentative before, are now laced with tenderness and satisfaction. They’re still not one hundred percent the Emerson I’ve come to know, but they’re enough for now—they’re progress.

“Grant.” She murmurs my name against my lips, and when I lean back and look down at her, a tear has slipped out of the corner of her eye and is making its way down to her ear and the pillow beneath.

“Sh,” I say as I rest my forehead against hers.

“No one has ever treated me that way,” she finally murmurs as she lifts a hand to rest against my heart.

It’s only much later when she falls asleep in my arms that I really hear her words. I take pride in knowing I gave her that feeling.

Because while she’s never been treated this way, I don’t think I’ve ever paid that kind of attention to a woman before.

But then again, none of them have been Emerson.