Page 155 of The Lies We Play

I suck her clit harder.

She breaks.

The cry that comes out of her is ragged and intimate and too honest for this room. Her body clamps down around my fingers. Her back bows off the bed. Her hands hold my hair so tight it should hurt, and maybe it does, but pain has no place in me right now. There is only her. The heat of her. The taste of her. The stunning fact that Livia Crane is coming apart under my mouth because she trusts me enough not to stop it.

I keep going.

I can’t help it.

I want every second.

Every tremor. Every sound she tries to swallow and fails. Every place where Livia stops being the woman who can dismantle a man with one eyebrow and a binder tab, and becomes this woman beneath my hands—open, furious with herself for needing, still trying to manage the collapse like it’s a meeting that ran over time.

I want to know what she looks like past competence.

Past control.

Past the bright, brutal ways she survives the day.

So I don’t stop.

I keep my mouth on her, my fingers buried inside her, and I listen to the changes in her breath. That’s all I have now. Breath. Skin. Heat. The quick, helpless sounds she hates herself for making. The room is too warm, the sheets twisted under her hips, the air so thin it feels manufactured. The city keeps shining beyond the glass, indifferent and expensive, while she breaks apart in front of me like she has finally run out of places to hide.

Her thighs clamp around my head.

“Creed,” she gasps, and it isn’t a warning anymore.

It is fear.

Not of me. Of this. Of how much she wants. Of what her body is saying before her pride can intercept it.

I know because I feel the same terror, only mine comes quieter. Mine moves under my skin with a suit on and a clean legal argument. Mine tells me to pull back, give her a second, let this stay containable.

I ignore it.

I curl my fingers again, firmer this time, and suck her clit with the exact pressure that made her lose the thread of her own sentence a minute ago. Her back lifts off the bed. One hand flies to my hair, the other grips the sheet so hard her knuckles pale.

“Fuck,” she whispers, then louder, broken, “fuck, Creed⁠—”

The sound goes straight through me.

I look up because I need to see her when it happens.

Her face is flushed, eyes shut, mouth open as if she is caught between protest and prayer but too honest for either. Her body tightens around my fingers, then pulses. Once. Twice. Harder. Her hips jerk against my mouth, and then she comes with a force that takes the room with it.

She cries out.

Not pretty. Not controlled. Real.

Her pleasure spills over my hand, my mouth, the sheets beneath her, sudden and hot and so intimate that something in my chest goes very still. She tries to close her legs, tries to turn away from the force of it, but I hold her where she is—not trapping her, never that—just keeping her from vanishing inside the shame I can already see gathering at the edges of her face.

“No,” I murmur against her.

She shakes her head, breath snapping out of her in little broken pieces. “I can’t⁠—”

“Yes, you can.”

It is not an order.