Page 51 of 13 Nights

"I have spent every October since White Plains making certain this couldn't happen," he says.

"How's that going?"

The sound he makes is close enough to laughter that the vibration of it travels through his chest and into my fingers.

His free hand slides to the back of my neck. The grip is firm, possessive, and carries the same authority his commands do, but his thumb traces a line along the tendon beneath my ear that belongs to a different register entirely.

"I should tell you to leave," he says.

"You've tried that. It didn't take."

"No." His mouth is close enough that I can feel the word against my lips. "It didn't."

He kisses me. His lips are warm, and his heartbeat kicks up a notch under my palm. Feeling his pulse accelerate while his mouth opens mine is the most intimate thing I've experienced with my clothes still on.

He pulls back long enough to strip his coat. The linen shirt beneath it is thin enough that when I press both palms flat against his chest, I can feel the heartbeat through the fabric without searching.

He watches me with an expression I haven't seen before, something rawer than desire and more exposed than anything he's permitted me to witness.

"You can feel this," I say. "All of it."

"Every nerve." His jaw tightens. "It's considerably more than I anticipated."

"Is that a complaint?"

"It's a warning."

He lifts me onto the kitchen counter in one smooth motion. His hips settle between my knees, his mouth finds my throat, and his chest presses into mine.

"Don't move," he says against my skin. "Not until I tell you."

He strips my shirt over my head. The bra follows. He doesn't fumble, but the economy of his movements has an edge tonight, a tautness that suggests the act of undressing me is costing him in ways it hasn't before.

When his mouth closes over my nipple, the groan that escapes him is louder than my own response.

He pulls back, startled by the sound, and the look on his face is furious and bewildered and entirely unguarded.

"That's new," I say.

"Be quiet."

"You can feel what your mouth is doing."

"I said be quiet." His teeth graze the peak, and this time he absorbs the sensation with his eyes closed, his breath held, his hand tightening on my hip hard enough to bruise. He moves to the other breast, his tongue circling while his thumb rolls the nipple he abandoned. The dual sensation sends heat straight down through my center until I'm aching and wet, gripping the counter's edge because he told me not to move and my body is at war with the instruction.

He strips my shoes and jeans off and pulls me to the edge of the counter. When his fingers slide between my legs, he makes a sound I've never heard from him, guttural and raw and torn from somewhere beneath every defense he carries.

He's done this before, learning every response with thorough, unhurried attention. But until tonight, sensation reached him through a layer of distance. Now every touch registers directly in his own body, and I can see the cost in the set of his jaw, the strain across his shoulders, the white-knuckled tension in the arm braced against the counter.

"You're soaked." His voice comes out rough. "I can feel how wet you are, and every time my fingers move, the muscles inside you tighten and your breathing changes and the heat of you—" He curls his fingers and my hips buck before I can stop them. He pins my thigh to the counter. "What did I say?"

"Don't move."

"Then don't." He works me with slow, relentless focus, his thumb finding my clit and pressing with steady, merciless accuracy while two fingers curl inside me. The wall he's described is gone. Every stroke registers in his own body now, and the effort of maintaining control while the full weight of sensation floods through him draws his forearm taut.

"You're going to come when I decide," he says. "Not before."

The orgasm builds against that command with an urgency that borders on agony. His fingers are unforgiving, his thumb circling my clit with the patience of centuries.