Page 69 of Travis
“Yes.”
“Let me wash you first.”
I closed my eyes and let him. He reached for the soap and washed my shoulders, my arms, the small of my back, his hands careful and thorough. When his fingers glided through my folds, I almost came on the spot. I took the soap from him and did the same, working around his bruises, rinsing the last of the mission off his skin until the water ran clean. When I grazed his cock, a groan crawled up his throat and he smoothly took the bar from my hand. I watched with a laser-focused desire as he wrapped his soapy hand around himself, finished what I’d wanted to do with swift precision.
I wanted him. I wanted him inside me. Above me. Around me.
We dried off and walked into his bedroom, this place just as stark as everywhere else in the house. A bed with a dark comforter pulled military-tight. A nightstand with a lamp. No photographs. No books. Nothing that revealed who lived here except the faint indentation on one side of the mattress that said a person slept in this bed alone, every night, in a room he’d stripped of everything personal because personal was a luxury he’d stopped allowing himself.
I dropped the towel.
Travis crossed to me and took my face in his hands and kissed me, and this time it was slow. So slow that I felt every point of contact separately. His thumbs on my cheekbones. His mouth gentle on mine. The warmth of his body an inch from my skin but not touching, not yet, holding back on purposebecause the shower had been desperate, and this was going to be something else.
I could feel the difference, and it terrified me. Desperation I could handle. Desperation was simple. This wasdeliberate.
This was a man choosing, with his eyes open, to be tender with me, and tenderness from Travis Hale was something I had no defenses against.
“You’re shaking,” he said against my mouth.
“I know.”
“Are you cold?”
“No.” I pulled back enough to look at him. “I’m not cold.”
He searched my face. Whatever he found there made him kiss me again, slower, his hands sliding into my hair, and the care in it cracked something in my chest that I wasn’t going to be able to put back together.
He walked me backward until my legs hit the bed. I sat and he followed me down, settling over me, and the full length of his body against mine was warm and heavy and real. I pulled him closer with my arms around his neck, and he began kissing me the way he did everything that mattered to him: thoroughly.
My throat. My collarbone. The swell of my breast, where his mouth closed over my nipple and my back arched off the mattress. His hand cupped the other breast, his thumb moving in slow circles, and the dual sensation pulled a sound out of me that would have embarrassed me an hour ago but didn’t now.
I was past embarrassment. I was past everything except the feeling of his mouth on my body and the slow, relentless way he was learning every part of me.
“You’re beautiful.” He said it against my ribs, his mouth moving lower. Not performative. More like it was a fact he’d verified and was entering into record.
He moved down my stomach. Pressed his mouth to the soft skin below my navel, the part of my body I’d always beenself-conscious about, and kissed it like it was something worth lingering over. Then his shoulders were between my thighs, his breath was warm against me, and I twisted my hands in the sheets because I knew what was coming, and the anticipation alone was almost enough to undo me.
“Wait it’s your turn.”
He kissed up my thigh. “Not yet. I have to taste you. You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to.”
I had no idea what that meant but then his tongue found my clit, and it didn’t matter. My hips bucked and he pinned them down with one arm, firm, holding me in place, and settled into a steady, devastating rhythm. He flicked, he sucked, he swirled his tongue. Each movement driving me higher than the last.
I’d been touched before. By men who were fine, who were adequate, who treated sex like a checklist they were trying to complete before the credits rolled. This was nothing like that.
Travis’s focus on the most sensitive part of my body was almost unbearable. He didn’t change what was working. He didn’t try something new. He found the exact pressure and rhythm that made me fall apart and he stayed there with a patience that made me want to scream.
The pleasure built slowly. Not the sharp, compressed urgency of the shower but something deeper, waves that rolled through me and receded and came back stronger, and I could feel him reading every shift in my breathing, every involuntary movement of my hips, responding without ever breaking the rhythm.
I came with my hands fisted in the sheets and his name in my mouth and my body bowing off the mattress. He held me through it, his hands steady on my hips, and the orgasm rolled through me in long, shuddering waves that left me boneless and trembling and staring at the ceiling trying to remember how language worked.
He kissed the inside of my thigh. Then my hip. I felt the mattress slightly shift, a quick tug of a towel, then his skin sliding against mine. He moved up my body slowly, and when I could see his face the expression on it broke something open in my chest. He looked at me like I was the best thing he’d ever seen.
I pushed him onto his back and straddled his thighs. He reached for the nightstand drawer, found what he needed, and I watched him roll the condom on with hands that were still steady. Even now. Even after everything.
His hands gripped my hips as I settled over his cock, and I sank down onto him slowly, watching his face the entire time. His lips parted. His eyes went half-closed. His fingers dug into my skin, and I wanted that. I wanted his hands on me hard enough to leave marks, wanted evidence of this on my flesh, wanted proof in the morning that tonight had been real.
All I could feel was the stretch of him. The fullness. I moved slowly at first, my hands on his chest, feeling his heart slam against my palms. Then faster, because his hips were rising to meet mine and the angle was perfect and the sounds he was making were wrecking me.
