Page 52 of 13 Nights

He can feel what he's doing to me now, every clench, every shudder, every desperate attempt to hold back. The knowledge makes the act more intimate and more obscene than anything we've done in this kitchen.

His heartbeat is racing. I can see it in the pulse hammering at his throat, and the knowledge that his body accelerates when he touches me undoes something fundamental in my composure.

"Now," he says.

The orgasm hits with a force that bows my spine off the counter. His free hand catches the back of my neck, iron and certain, holding me through it while my body locks and releases around his fingers. He doesn't stop. He works me through every contraction with the same measured authority, watching my face with an intensity that would be detached if his own breathing weren't wrecked.

He frees his cock from his trousers without stepping away from me. He's thick and hard, the heat of him against my thigh fully alive in a way it hasn't been before.

When he surges inside me, the sound that leaves him is torn and raw, a man who has been partially deaf to his own body hearing the full register for the first time.

He stops with his full length buried in me, both hands locked on the counter, his forehead against mine, his heartbeat slamming so hard I can feel it in my own ribcage. His breathing is ragged. His entire body is rigid with the effort of not moving.

"If I move before I'm ready," he says, barely audible, "this is over in seconds. And I’ve waited a very long time to feel this properly."

I hold still because he told me to hold still, and the discipline of obeying while he's buried inside me and every nerve in my body is screaming for friction is its own exquisite torture. His breath comes in measured intervals. The counter creaks beneath the weight.

When he moves, the first stroke is slow and deliberate and pulls a groan from his chest that vibrates through my entire body. The second is harder. By the third he's found the angle that drives the head of his cock against the spot that turns my vision white, and his hips settle into a rhythm that is pure authority, each thrust precise and devastating and designed to pull me apart at the speed he's chosen.

"Until tonight," he says, his voice stripped to gravel, "I was fucking you from behind a wall. I could feel enough to direct. Enough to command." He drives deeper, adjusting his grip on my hips to tilt my pelvis up, and the new angle makes me cry out. "Tonight there is no wall. I feel what your body does when I'm inside you. Every clench. Every pulse. The exact moment you stop being able to think."

"I can still think."

"Then I'm not finished."

His pace builds. Each thrust hits the angle he's chosen, and the friction of it builds in layers until I can't separate pleasure from pressure from the overwhelming fact of him alive inside me.

The control is in his hips, in the deliberate force of each stroke, in his hand on my hip holding me exactly where he wants me. The vulnerability is in his face, which has lost every mask he's worn since I met him.

"Your control is slipping," I tell him.

His grip tightens on my hips. "No. My restraint is."

"Convenient distinction."

"You'll understand it before I'm finished."

I tighten around him deliberately, and the sound it rips from him is worth every ounce of discipline the action costs me. His rhythm falters for one stroke before he corrects it, and the look he gives me is murderous and adoring in equal measure.

"Don't close your eyes," he says. "You chose this. Watch what it does to me."

I watch. His jaw is tight, his teeth bared, his composure cracking with each stroke. His heartbeat hammers against my breasts. When the second orgasm tears through me, my body clamps down around his cock so hard that his rhythm shatters. He buries himself to the hilt with a sound that is neither controlled nor quiet. His hips grind against mine. His cock pulses inside me, and his heart pounds against my sternum through every place our bodies meet.

He doesn't pull away. He stays inside me, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other braced against the cabinet. His breathing settles by degrees. His heart rate slows against my chest, and I count the beats without a stopwatch for the first time since I started measuring him.

"That was not what I planned," he says.

"What did you plan?"

"Considerably more restraint."

"Restraint is overrated."

"You are a deeply objectionable woman."

"I know."

He lifts me off him and sets me on my feet in the same motion. His arms are steady. His heartbeat has slowed to something almost normal, and the warmth of his chest where he holds me against it is the warmth of a living man.