Page 35 of Knottingley Ever After
“If I start this,” he says, “I have no intention of stopping. So you had best be a very good girl for me, and stay quiet enough that the entire team doesn’t learn precisely what you sound like.”
The good girl should make me bristle.
By every rule I have ever lived by, it should.
Instead it lands somewhere low and molten and turns over, slow, and the part of me that surfaces to meet it is not the wall and not the prickly one with both gloves up.
It is the other one.
The one who only ever gets out when my guard is on the floor.
The one who does not wait to be given things, who sets the terms, who takes a dare and lifts it clean off the table.
“So what I’m hearing,” I murmur, deliberately tipping my face deeper into his hand instead of away from it, watching his pupils blow wide at the surrender that is not a surrender at all, “is that I’m permitted to be just a little bit loud.”
He groans, low, the sound dragged up out of somewhere deep in his chest, and his fingers tighten a fraction against my jaw.
“If a little bit loud is the toll for getting my mouth on those perky little piercings and feeling you gasp for more,” he breathes, “then yes. Fuck. Be as loud as you dare, Pinky.”
A laugh slips out of me, bright and wicked and wholly unrepentant.
“Challenge accept?—”
He seals his mouth over mine before I can land the word.
And the kiss takes the rest of the sentence.
A heartbeat after that it takes the rest of my sense, and as it does, one last coherent thought drifts loose through the wreckage of my better judgment, almost fond, almost amused at myself.
And yet here I stand.
Soaking wet, walls down, every bolt of my guard sprung loose on the tile, in a locker room built for women who do not exist, about to fuck Matteo Santori.
This is, without contest, the most reckless thing I have ever done.
CHAPTER 6
Steam And Surrender
~IRIS~
Never in my twenty-four years had I scaled a drenched Alpha built like Matteo Santori.
His shoulders alone could block out arena lights, slick with water that carved glistening trails over ridges of muscle earned from years of carving ice and throwing checks.
The man was a goddamn monument, and right now, he was mine to climb—legs locked tight around his waist, arms slung around his neck like I had any intention of letting go.
The shower’s icy cascade hammered his back instead of mine, but he didn’t flinch.
Water sluiced over the dark ink curling along his ribs, over the sharp cut of his hips, turning the already sinful landscape into something obscene. His mouth claimed mine with the kind of hunger that suggested he’d been starving for this since the moment I’d scowled at him in that mop closet.
Lips firm, demanding, tasting faintly of the peppermint gum he must have chewed between drills and the lingering edge of that blood-orange brightness now tempered by raw need.
I moaned into the kiss, the sound vibrating between us as my back met the cool tiles. The contrast—chill stone at my spine,furnace heat of him pressing forward—sent sparks racing down every nerve.
His hands gripped my thighs, holding me steady as if I weighed nothing, thumbs digging in just enough to promise bruises I’d wear like badges under my gear tomorrow.
He kissed like he played: relentless, creative, always one step ahead.
