Page 109 of Her Rival

He yanked me back to my feet. He kissed me again. Hard. The kiss buckled me at the knees.

"I need a surface," he muttered against my mouth. "Hartley. I need a surface."

I almost laughed.

"There's a whole couch right there," I said.

"Thank god."

He wrapped his arms around me and tossed us over the back of the couch. I squealed as he caught me. We rolled onto the cushions, and then off them, the way two adults will who are no longer young enough to do it with grace. We ended up on the plush rug of his living room floor, him on top of me, my jeans still on and his sweats half-down, the wall of glass above us showing the valley going amber.

"Jett."

"Yes."

"You're a mess."

"I know."

He kissed my face. He kissed my neck. He kissed the hollow at the base of my throat. He cupped my breasts in both hands. He slid his nose along my pulse point. Goosebumps rose. He latched his mouth around one of my nipples and I gasped, and his other hand snaked down between us and flicked open the button of my jeans without looking, the way a man flicks open the button of jeans he has now flicked open the button of three different times.

His hand slid down. Past my underwear. To the slick wet place he'd been finding by feel for a week.

He bit down softly on my nipple as his finger found my clit.

"Jett."

He growled against my breast as he slipped his finger inside me. He gathered the wetness. He drew it back up. He circled my clit slowly, deliberately, the way he had on Saturday but slower, more attentive, more like a man performing a careful act of devotion than a man performing dominance.

This was the version of the night he hadn't yet given me.

He'd given me Saturday. He'd given me Tuesday on the rug. He was giving me, on a Thursday afternoon at three thirty in the living room of his glass house with the valley burning low behind us, the version where he was slow.

The slow version was the version that wrecked me. The slow version was the version that told me, in language I hadn't been raised to recognize as love language but was beginning to learn, that he'd been waiting for the chance to do it slow.

He took me apart on the floor of his living room.

He took the jeans off me. He took the underwear off me. He took his time on each, the way you take your time on a thing when you don't want the doing of it to be over. By the time I was naked on the rug with the late afternoon sun coming through the glass and warming my skin, he hadn't yet finished taking off his own clothes. I hadn't yet come. I'd stopped caring whether I was going to.

The wanting was its own thing.

The wanting was a gift.

He came down over me. He kissed me again. He pressed himself slowly against me. I felt him slide between my legs without entering me yet, hot and slow and unhurried, dragging the length of himself through the slick of me, and he kissed me until I was the one begging him to move.

"Please."

"Please what."

"Please put yourself inside me."

"I love it when you ask for things, Hartley."

"Jett."

"Yes."

"Please."