Page 124 of Ruthless Daddy
“Yours.”
He started on the dress. He did not rush this either. He had unzipped me a hundred times by now—in his bedroom, in the carriage house, in a hotel in Valletta on the way home—and theway he did it tonight was the way he had done it the very first time, the night I had finally said yes, slow enough that I could change my mind at every centimeter. The zipper went down. The dress went off my shoulders. He let it fall and pool around my feet and he did not look at the floor; he looked at me.
The collar stayed.
He drew his fingertips along it again, end to end, the way a man might check a wedding ring on a wife’s hand without thinking. Confirming the thing was there. Pleased it was there.
I had spent enough nights being only received. Tonight I was going to give. I lifted my hands to the buttons of his shirt.
He let me.
He stood very still while I undid them. One at a time, slow, the way he had unzipped me. The shirt came open. I pushed it off his shoulders.
The scars.
I had kissed them before. The first time we had been together, in his bed in the carriage house, in the dark, I had pressed my mouth to each of them in turn without saying anything, and he had held the back of my head and let me, and he had wept silently into my hair afterward and not explained, and I had not asked.
Tonight there was light. Tonight I wanted to see.
I went up on my toes first. The eyebrow scar—thin, through the left brow, the souvenir of Catania he would not name. I kissed it. The skin was warm. He closed his eyes.
I came back down. I put my hands flat on his chest and walked them down to his stomach, and I went to my knees in front of him on the wood floor, and I put my mouth on the scar low on his abdomen—the long one, the serious one, the one that ran from the bottom of his ribs to the curve of his hip and that had nearly killed him at twenty-four in a warehouse he would notenter again. I kissed the top of it. I kissed the middle. I kissed the bottom.
Above me, his hand came down to the crown of my head. Not gripping. Just resting. The same hand the man at the banquette in the lounge had laid on his partner’s head an hour ago, in exactly the same way. I felt it settle and stay.
“Baby.”
“Mm.”
“Get up here.”
I got up.
He walked me backward to the bed. The backs of my knees hit the edge and I sat. He went to his own knees on the floor in front of me. The reversal of position—me on the bed, him on the floor—was a thing he had done exactly twice in eight months, and both times I had cried, because the sight of him kneeling was a sight my whole nervous system did not know how to file.
He put his hands on my knees. He spread them, gently. He kissed the inside of one, then the inside of the other.
He worked his way up.
He was patient. He was unbelievably patient. He took his time the way he had taken his time on the zipper, the way he had taken his time on the buttons, the way he had taken his time, really, on the entire eight months of getting here. His mouth was warm and his hands were warmer and the collar at my throat was a small steady weight that anchored me to the room every time I felt myself about to leave it.
When his mouth finally arrived where I had been waiting for it to arrive, I made a sound I had not made in front of him before. He looked up. He held my eye.
“Ask,” he commanded, his voice a soft growl. The first invocation of the new rule, penned barely twenty minutes ago in his bold hand.
“Please.” My voice was already breathless.
“Please what, baby?” His words were a hot whisper against my inner thigh.
“Please, daddy,” I begged, my hips arching slightly off the bed.
He looked up at me then, a slow smile spreading across his face. He moved back to me, his broad shoulders pinning my thighs apart as his mouth found my center once more. He wasn’t just going through the motions; he was worshipping me, his tongue delving into my folds, tasting and teasing. He took his time, each lick and suck deliberate, building my arousal with a patience that was both exhilarating and torturous.
He brought me to the edge, his tongue circling my clit with a relentless precision that had my hands fisting in his hair, not to guide him but to hold him there, to keep his mouth on me just a moment longer. He held me on that precipice, my body taut and trembling, until I was gasping, begging for release.
Then, and only then, did he pull back slightly, his chin glistening with my arousal. He stood up, his eyes never leaving mine as he slowly began to undress.
He stripped off the rest of his clothes and got onto the bed and pulled me up the linen by the hips and laid himself down beside me and put his mouth back on mine, and his hand back at the collar, and the heat in the room was such that I could no longer find the edges of my own body and did not care to.
