Page 106 of Branded

I have never wanted to be looked at before. Not like this. Not by anyone.

He unclasps my bra and slides it off my shoulders, and he dips his head and takes my nipple into his mouth, and I arch off the bed, my fingers digging into his hair, holding him there. He groans against my skin—low and rough, like I’ve done something to him just by reacting—and the sound goes straight through me. His hand covers my other breast, thumb moving in slow circles. I am breathless, already gone, and he’s barely started.

He kisses down my stomach and his hands go to my jeans, and he looks up at me while he undoes them, a smirk playing on his lips. That eye contact. God, that eye contact—dark, steady and completely certain, like he already knows every sound I’m about to make and is looking forward to each one. I lift my hips, and he drags the jeans off and drops them, and then his mouth is on the inside of my thigh, and I stop being a person with a functional brain.

He takes his time. Of course he does. He works his way up slowly, mouth and hands, pausing in places that make my thighs shake, listening to my breathing change, cataloguing every reaction with the same focused attention he gives to everything he decides that matters.

I matter to him. That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about, even now, even with his mouth finally where I need it and my hand fisted in his hair and my hips rolling up against him. Somewhere between the contract and the cattle and the arguing and all those nights when I told myself this is just physical, just proximity, just the logical result of two people sharing a bed—somewhere in all of that, I started to matter to him.

“Sebastian—” His name breaks in my mouth.

He doesn’t stop. He reads me the way he reads everything—completely, efficiently, without mercy—and when I come it crashes through me hard enough that my back lifts entirely off the mattress and I have to bite down on my own fist to keep quiet, and he works me through every wave of it with his hands gripping my hips like he’s the only thing keeping me from flying apart.

Maybe he is.

I’m still shaking when he kisses back up my body. I reach for his belt and get my hands inside his jeans, and I wrap around him and feel him shudder and drop his forehead to my shoulder with a sharp exhale, and that—that undoing of him—hits me that this has nothing to do with want and everything to do with something I’m not ready to say out loud.

I stroke him slowly and he makes a sound that’s rough and low and real, and I want to pull that sound out of him for the rest of my life.

That thought lands and I don’t push it away. Not this time.

“Lennox.” My name in his mouth like that unravels the last of me.

“Hey.” I cup his face and make him look at me. “You’re mine.”

Something moves through his expression. Fast, almost hidden, but I’m close enough to see it—the flash of something unguarded, something that has no business being on Sebastian Drake’s face outside of this room in the middle of the sky where no one can see it except me.

He exhales slowly. Nods once.

Then he shifts and pushes inside me.

It’s slow. So slow. Every inch deliberate, his eyes on mine the entire time, refusing to let me look away, and my breath comes out ragged and my hands grip his shoulders, and my whole body adjusts around him.

He starts to move and it pulls a sound out of me that I feel in my bones.

This isn’t the frantic, half-dressed, can’t-wait version of us. This is something else entirely. His forehead drops to mine and his hand slides into my hair, and he moves deep, slow, purposeful, and I hold on to him and let myself feel all of it—every stroke, every exhale against my mouth, every moment his composure frays at the edges, and I see the real man underneath.

He is not controlled now. He is just mine. The thought breaks something open in my chest and my eyes sting, and I pull him closer and wrap my legs around him tighter, and his rhythm falters for just a second, his arms locking around me, crushing me to him in a way that feels less like frantic passion and more like love.

“Lennox,” he whispers against my throat. Wrecked. “Lennox.”

He reaches between us and touches me, and I stop being able to think at all—there’s only him, only the slow build that’s been gathering since the moment he looked at me across that plane cabin, only the heat and the closeness and the impossible tenderness of a man who doesn’t do tender doing it anyway, just for me.

I come with my face pressed to his neck and tears I didn’t plan on burning at the corners of my eyes and his name in my throat that I can’t make past a whisper.

He follows right after, my name on his lips, his whole body shuddering against mine, his arms so tight around me it almost hurts, and I don’t care. I want him closer, I want there to be no space left between us at all.

We lie tangled together in the wreckage of it. His hand moves up and down my side, slow and absent, like he needs to keep touching me as much as I need to keep being touched. Below us, the country rolls by and the plane hums and the world keeps existing, but I can’t feel any of it past the weight of him and the steadiness of his heartbeat under my palm.

I meet his eyes, and what I see there makes my breath catch. Mixed in with the lust and possession is something deeper. Something that looks dangerously like something I didn’t think he was capable of.

“Don’t,” I whisper. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you…” I can’t finish.

“Like I love you?” He holds me tighter, watching my face. “Why not? It might be true.”