Page 108 of Her Rival

"I understand."

I let go of his wrists.

He kissed me again. This kiss was different. This was the kiss of a man who'd been given the permission he'd been asking for, and the permission unlocked something in him I hadn't yet been in a room with. The version of him that had been waiting under all the other versions. The version that had been waiting for me to give him the word.

He picked me up. I wrapped my legs around his waist. My jeans against his sweatpants. My hands in his hair.

He carried me from the door into the living room. He set me down on the back of the long low couch that faced the wall of glass and the deck and the valley beyond.

He stepped back to look at me, and his eyes went down my body, where they'd gone in the entryway with the towel two nights ago, and I watched them do it.

"Take off your sweater," he said.

I took off my sweater.

"Take off your shirt."

I took off my shirt.

He stepped forward. His hands came around behind me. The bra came undone in one smooth motion that I had not, before this exact moment, fully appreciated was a thing a man could do with the kind of competence he was doing it with. The straps slid down my shoulders. He drew the bra off and tossed it onto the cushion of the couch.

He put his thumb in my mouth. He put his thumb in my mouth and pressed it against the inside of my cheek, and his eyes were on mine, and he said, very quietly:

"You're mine tonight."

"Yes."

"Mine to have. Mine to hold. Mine to fuck."

"Yes."

"This is your last chance to say no, Hartley."

I closed my lips around his thumb. I sucked.

He almost broke right there. I watched it happen. The control he'd been holding all night cracked along a hairline and I saw it happen and he saw me see it, and the small registering on his face was the first time I'd been able to crack him with my body alone.

"All right," he said. "If that's what you want."

He pulled his thumb out of my mouth. He pulled me off the back of the couch and down onto my knees on the plush rug that ran the length of the living room floor, the rug I'd walked across barefoot on Sunday morning without paying any attention to.

I went down soft. I looked up at him. He looked down at me. His face had on it the look it had had at the table in the conference room that first afternoon, except inside out, except now I was the one who knew what I was for, and the knowing was the gift, and I was giving it.

He pulled the waistband of his sweats down.

I took him in my mouth.

He gripped my hair. Both hands. He let me set the pace for the first thirty seconds and then he took over, his hands twisting in my hair the way they had on Saturday night, the way they had on Tuesday on the rug at the foot of his bed, the way they were now in a different room with the same intent but a different charge underneath.

The charge was different because the room was different. The charge was different because the I love you had been said. The charge was different because the man whose hands were in my hair had spent twenty hours not knowing whether he'd get to put his hands in my hair again, and the not-knowing had concentrated the wanting into something fiercer than anything I'd felt from him before.

I felt him in the back of my throat. I gagged. My spittle ran down. I wrapped my arms around his hips and pulled him closer and he made a small noise in the back of his throat I hadn't heard him make before and his leg shook against my shoulder for half a second and stopped.

"That's it," he muttered. "Swallow me down. Hartley, fucking hell. You do this so well. Holy fuck."

He kept moving. My head bobbed against him. I hummed around him because I knew what the humming did, and he cursed under his breath and his hand tightened in my hair and his other hand braced against the back of the couch and his head fell back.

He pulled me off him before he came. He pulled me off him before he came because he wasn't going to finish in my mouth tonight. The finishing-in-her-mouth version of the night was a version he'd given me on Saturday and wasn't going to give me again twenty hours after I'd told him I loved him. The version he was going to give me tonight required him inside me, where he could see my face.