Page 18 of Viper's Desire
He moves. Careful at first, his eyes on my face for every flinch that doesn’t come anymore.
The stretch gives over to a slick, deep pull that builds with every stroke, and I rise to meet him without being shown how, my body learning him the same as it learned his mouth.
Every thrust drags over a place inside me I didn’t know was there.
“That’s it,” he says, rough against my jaw as he pumps in and out of me.
The pressure gathers again, deeper and fuller than before, wound around my center.
He drops a hand between us and finds my clit, and that’s all it takes—his fingers and the deep push of him at once, dragging me past where I can hold it.
“Tanner, it’s happening again.”
“Let go.”
I break around him. It rolls up from where we’re joined, and my thighs clamp around his hips. My body clenches tight around the thick length of him, a long pull of pleasure that pulses through me.
He follows me over with a groan torn from somewhere deep, his arms caging me, his hips stuttering and then stopping, and we come down together into a shaking heap.
His breathing slows. My hand moves up and down his spine in long passes.
Soreness settles between my legs, a tender ache. It’s a good kind of proof that I gave my virginity to him, and it can’t be undone.
He moves off me and steps away for a moment, taking care of the condom, then pulls me into his side as he settles back down, tucking me under his arm. My ear rests over his heart.
His skin is damp under my cheek, and I press closer into the heat coming off him.
“You’re mine now,” he says into the dark. “You walked in that door. Around here, claiming isn’t something a man says and then takes back. It’s done.”
I lift my head to look at him. “I want to be yours,” I say. “But that goes both ways. I don’t share, either.”
The corner of his mouth goes up.
“Mine,” he says again, making it permanent.
I settle down again with my ear over his heart and his arm anchoring me.
I’m exactly where I chose to be. Nobody put me here. Nobody talked me into it or out of it. I chose, and the choice was only ever mine.
His breathing evens out under my ear, and I let mine match it, and I stay.
CHAPTER 7
VIPER
Eden is asleep against me,one knee hooked across my thigh. My arm has gone dead under her. I leave it. I’d let the whole thing rot before I’d move her off me.
I’ve slept next to women before. Never through the night. Never sober, never twice, and never once woke up before them and stayed.
I’m staying.
Her hair is spread across my arm. She runs warm—warmer than me, and I run hot. Her breath comes slow against my chest, and my own keeps trying to slow down and match it, like my body already decided we do that now.
She sleeps like nothing in the world is coming for her. Lips parted. One hand curled loose against my ribs, right over the wound she helped heal.
Weeks ago, she saved my life. Now she’s drooling on my shoulder, and I don’t want her anywhere else.
There’s a knock at the door, hard enough to shake the door in its frame.
