Page 54 of Dominion's Guard
"Tell me your safeword."
"Red."
"Good girl." The words leave my mouth with a warmth that I feel behind my ribs, and her reaction is immediate: a visible softening through her shoulders, a catch in her breathing, an involuntary lean toward me that she doesn't try to correct. Those two words settled somewhere deep, somewhere past the bravado, and the response she couldn't fake is the one I've been waiting for.
I pull the shirt over her head. She's bare underneath, and the sight of her stops my hands mid-motion, the shirt still caught around one wrist. The lean muscle I've been cataloging through cotton for weeks, the slope of her waist into the flare of her hips, the small firm breasts that rise and fall with breathing she's trying to control, the flat plane of her stomach that tightens under my gaze the way it would under my hand. She is standing in my bedroom wearing nothing but panties and the amber streetlight coming through the blinds, and I am harder than I have been in years and she hasn't touched me yet.
She reaches for my shirt. Her hands are steady but her fingers aren't, and the contradiction tells me everything. The brat would be fast, efficient, stripping me with the same speed she strips away deflections. The woman underneath is slow, tentative, pulling the fabric up and over my head with the care of someone unwrapping something she's afraid to break. Her palms flatten against my chest when the shirt clears, and the contact of her hands on my bare skin sends heat straight down through my stomach and into the ache that's been building since she kissed me in the kitchen.
"You're staring again, Broussard," she whispers, but her voice lacks its usual edge.
"I'm going to be staring for a while. Get used to it."
I hook my fingers into the waistband of her panties and pull them down slow and intentional, following the fabric with my knuckles down the outside of her thighs. She steps out of them, and the rest of her is bare, standing in the stripe of light from the window with nothing between her skin and my hands.
"Lie down."
She backs onto the bed and lies against the pillows, and the sight of her there, in my bed, looking up at me with eyes that are equal parts defiance and want, sinks into me with a weight I'll carry for the rest of my life.
I strip off my pants and follow her down, and when the full length of my body presses against hers, skin to skin from chest to thigh, the sound she makes is low and honest and the sound I make against her throat is its equal.
She's warm everywhere. The heat of her skin soaks into mine at every point of contact, and when she shifts her hips against me the friction of her body against my cock drags a groan out of me that I don't bother suppressing. She's wet. I can feel it against my thigh where her legs part around mine, and the knowledge of how ready she is settles in my bloodstream like a drug.
The kiss is different from the one in the kitchen. That kiss was discovery. This one is intent. Her mouth opens under mine and I take what she offers and demand more, my hand sliding into her hair and gripping at the base of her skull, tilting her head back until her throat is exposed and the sound she makes is involuntary and close to desperate.
"Andy." My name in her mouth is half command and half plea. "Stop being patient."
"You don't give the orders tonight."
"Watch me." She rolls her hips up against mine, a deliberate grind that presses her heat against the length of me, and the grin that follows is pure Renata, defiant and wanting and daring me to do something about both.
I press her wrists into the mattress above her head and hold them there with one hand, and her eyes widen and her hips stutter against mine and the sound that escapes her is the sound I caught during the scene with Arnold, the bitten-off exhale she buried before it could breathe.
I don't let her bury this one. My grip on her wrists tightens by a fraction, holding her in the exposure, and my free hand traces down the center of her body, between her breasts, over her ribs, across her stomach. She arches into the touch, chasing it, and when my fingers reach the crease of her thigh and stop just short of where she wants them, the sound she makes is frustrated enough to qualify as profanity.
"Tell me what you want," I say against her ear.
"Touch me."
"Where?"
"You know where."
"I want to hear you say it."
The silence is loaded. Her jaw works. The brat is fighting the honesty, the deflection warring with the want, and I wait with my fingers resting against the inside of her thigh, close enough that she can feel the heat of my hand without the contact.
"I want your fingers inside me," she says, and the words come out rough and defiant and cost her more than any confession she's given me across the kitchen table. "I want your mouth. I want to stop talking about it and I want you to make me feel something I can't fake."
"That's my girl."
My hand slides between her thighs and finds her slick and swollen and so sensitive that the first stroke of my fingers draws her spine off the mattress. She's wet enough that my fingers move through her easily, finding the rhythm that makes her breathing fracture, and when I press two fingers inside her the sound she makes is guttural and honest and the inner musclesthat grip me are tight enough to make my cock throb in sympathy.
I work her with my hand while my mouth moves down her body. I take my time because the patience is the point, because every second I spend learning the topography of her skin is a second she can't hide behind the performance. My tongue traces the underside of her breast, finds the peak of her nipple, and the sound that pulls from her chest vibrates through her ribs into my mouth. She tastes like salt and clean skin and wanting that has been building longer than she'll admit.
My mouth moves lower, tracing across her ribs where I can feel each breath she takes expanding against my lips, then down the taut plane of her stomach where the muscles contract under my tongue. She knows where I'm going, and when I settle between her thighs and replace my fingers with my mouth, the sound she makes is sharp enough to cut glass.
Her hands come down from the pillow and find my hair, and her fingers curl tight and pull, and the sting of it shoots straight down my spine and makes me groan against her. The vibration of the sound against her clit makes her thighs clamp around my ears, and the taste of her, salt and musk and arousal, floods my mouth and I could stay here for the rest of the night and not come up for air.
