Page 72 of Praised
“Just twenty?”
I huffed a laugh. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.
“It looks like you meeting my friends.”
“I already have.” He ground against me, looking more like a devil than an angel.
I grabbed his waist, dragging him to a stop because I had no interest in coming in my pajamas when his perfectly tight and hot body was right in front of me.
“Officially.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know beyond that,” I admitted. “I’ve never done this before.”
Rose jerked his body to the side, the momentum pushing me down at an angle so my head landed against the arm of the couch and my back flat against the cushions. With one of my legs on the couch and the other braced on the floor, Rose adjusted himself over top of me, giving me another grind of his hips for good measure.
“More of the praise part, I hope.”
I closed my eyes and nodded, tongue darting out to wet my lips. I had a hundred words of praise and promise on the tip of my tongue, but spilling them all over him after being prompted to do so felt far too contrived.
“Plenty more,” I assured him. “You’ll be begging me to shut up before the week is through.”
“I doubt that.”
I blinked him back into focus, tugging his arms so he fell against my chest. He pressed his forehead against mine and I opened my eyes, taking in the parts of his face I could see with the narrow field of vision.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” I asked.
In response, he rubbed his erection against me.
I bit back a groan, giving a small shake of my head. “I know you want that. I want that too, but I mean…the rest of it.”
“Flynn.” He pushed himself up a little, giving me space to see the earnest sincerity in his eyes. “I’ve never met someone like you and I don’t think I ever will again.”
“Not sure that’s a compliment,” I murmured.
He smacked my chest, which broke some of the tension for a second, only for things to turn somber and serious within the next breath. Rose was terrified. I could see it in the finest wrinkles around the corner of his mouth when he tried not to frown, the tightness in his shoulders when he tried to keep himself composed above me.
“I know that if I want to be with you, I need to give up some of my control,” he said.
I wanted to argue the point, but he wasn’t wrong. There were ways I liked things, especially in the bedroom, and while I could have great sex without those rules…it was infinitely better with them. I wanted that for me, for him…for us.
“It’s not a bad thing,” I told him. “It’s…it’s trust. It’s responsibility.”
“It’s terrifying,” he said.
“I don’t ever want you to be scared of me.”
“Not of you.” He shook his head, quick to correct me, which did something to the knot that had begun to form in my stomach. I couldn’t bear for another good conversation with Rose to go bad. Not when I was so close to truly getting a chance to be with him in all of the ways I wanted. “It’s just me. My life. The way I’ve had to be up until now. I can’t just turn it off.”
“Not a switch.”
“Barely a dimmer.”
I chuckled and pulled him back down, silencing his worries with the softest kiss I’d ever given another person in my life. Above me, Rose went soft and pliant, melting against my chest and making way for my tongue to dip past his lips. I kissed Rose until I was ready to take his clothes off, forcing myself to pull away long enough to remind him, “You’ve given me a chance before. Give me another one and I’ll show you how freeing giving up control to someone can truly be.”
CHAPTER24
