Page 75 of Handful

“I am serious.” I kept her hand pressed over my heart so she could feel it hammering. “I never doubted for a second we’d get here. Not once. But I wasn’t just waiting you out, and I want that clear. After what you watched me do at that party, you had no reason to take my word for anything. So the space wasn’t only about you missing me. It was so you could see for yourself — every day, in that bar — that the man whose hands ended up on a stranger was gone. That I could stand next to you wanting you like hell and still keep my hands to myself. You had to watch me be that man long enough to believe he was real. That was the part I couldn’t rush.” I held her eyes. “Once you’d seen it, I knew you’d come back. Back in my arms. Back in my bed. Only this time for good.” I paused. “Although I’ll be honest — it was getting harder. Was giving Fewin’s plan some serious thought.”

“You absolute bastard,” she said, and pulled me back down to her.

I got her t-shirt over her head in the hallway and she was bare underneath, exactly as I’d suspected. I picked her up. She giggled as I carried her into the bedroom and laid her down on her bed where I just — stopped. Looked at her. All of her. It’d been weeks since I’d had her and I was going to take a goddamn second.

“You’re staring,” she said. Same as the first time.

“Yeah.” Same as the first time. “Worth staring at.” And this time she didn’t call it a line, because she knew.

I kissed my way down her. In no hurry at all, the way I’d told her I dreamed about taking my time, no clock, nowhere to be. I dragged my mouth down her throat and across her chest and over her stomach and felt her start to come up off the bed before I’d even gotten where I was going. When I finally settled between her thighs and put my mouth on her she said my name — Tyler.

Not Handful. Tyler. I’d felt the lack of it every day for weeks. Hearing it now, soft and wrecked, with my mouth on her, it damn near took me apart. I had to stop and breathe against her thigh.

Then I got my mouth back on her, and everything else went quiet — the heat of her against my face, the smell of her skin, the taste I’d missed worse than I’d admitted even at the bar. I’d told her the truth that day. I took my time proving it.

I worked her slow, the way she likes, reading every sound, every shift of her hips, paying attention. Flattened my tongue and dragged it up the length of her and then circled her clit, slow, then fast, then slow again, two fingers sliding inside her while my mouth kept its rhythm. After a while she let go of the sheets and put both hands in my hair and held on. I felt her go tight and trembling around my fingers.

“Not yet.” I said it against her, didn’t lift my head. “You summoned me. You don’t get to run the whole thing.” I slowed right down. “You come when I say.” Playing her own word back at her — the COME she’d sent me.

“Tyler—”

“Not yet.”

“Bastard.”

I grinned against her and gave her what she needed and took it away again, twice, until she was shaking and her thighs were locked around my head. Then I lifted my head just long enough to say the one word she’d sent me.

“Come.”

And sealed my mouth back over her. She broke, her whole body shaking, thighs still clamped around my head, fingers pulling my hair. I worked her through every second of it until she shoved me away, gasping, half-laughing, swearing at the ceiling.

“I hate you.”

“No you don’t.” I kissed the inside of her thigh, the soft curve of her stomach, came up her body. “You summoned me here for exactly this. You don’t get to hate me now I’ve delivered.”

She got her breath back faster than I expected and then she got her hands on me and flipped us. She pushed me flat on my back and looked down at me, hair wrecked, hands spread flat on my chest. I looked up at her and went for a nipple — I knew exactly what sounds she’d make if I got my mouth on it — but she shoved me back down with a smirk.

“My turn,” she said. “And you don’t get to tell me when.”

She took her time. Started with her mouth on the heart tattoo — just held it there a second, which nearly did me in before she’d even gotten going — then worked her way down, slow, until she had her mouth on my cock. One long, lazy lick, like she was testing how much I had left. Not much, was the answer. She knew it too.

She reached for the drawer by the bed, then stopped with her hand on the handle and looked back at me. “I’m on the pill,” she said. Simple. Certain. “And you’re mine now. I don’t want anything between us tonight.”

“Nothing between us,” I confirmed. It came out rough.

She sat up, climbed over me, and took me inside her slow — inch by inch, watching my face.

“There he is,” she said, when she had all of me. “My Tyler.”

Then she moved, and I let her have it. All of it — the pace, the angle, how deep, how slow. My hands were on her hips, not steering, just there. She knew what she wanted and she knew how to get there. She wound us both up slow, grinding down when she felt like it, holding the edge until I was past asking nicely, and then she let go. I felt her go tight around me, watched her head drop back and her mouth fall open, and that was what took me over with her, both of us at once.

She collapsed onto my chest, onto her own name, and I wrapped both arms around her and held on, our hearts knocking against each other.

After — a long time after, the second time done and a third one threatening — she was tucked under my arm, sheets wrecked, her hand flat over the tattoo like she was holding her own name in place. She traced it with one finger and said, quietly, “You should stay.”

I’d said those words to her once, in my room at the clubhouse. She was saying them back now, in her bed, her terms. Different room. Same answer.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere. Told you that.”