Page 58 of Her Rival

"Ooooooh," I groaned, my walls clenching down on nothing, the empty ache of it almost worse than the want.

"Aww," he murmured against the inside of my thigh, and I felt him smile against my skin. "Does the woman want to be filled."

"So empty," I whimpered, squeezing my thighs together to chase any friction at all.

His hands forced them back open, slow, easy, like I weighed nothing, like my resistance was a thing he found genuinely funny. "Did I say you could close those legs, Hartley."

The command landed somewhere low and made me shake before he dove back in, sliding one finger inside me, slow, an intrusion my body had to give way to inch by inch. Like he was forcing himself past every wall and blockade I'd ever built, one at a time, unhurried, because he had all night. Forget picking the locks. He blew them off with a rocket launcher. He pressed his tongue flat to my clit and held it there, no movement, just heat and pressure, while that one finger curled deep and found the place that made my heels dig into the mattress, and pressed, and didn't let up.

My head fell back to the sheets. I lost myself in the slow drag of his mouth and the cruel patience of his hand, and somewhere underneath the pleasure was the dim astonished thought that I had walked into this man's life to ruin him a second time and he had laid me out on his bed instead and was taking me apart with a tenderness that had teeth in it.

His finger crooked, curling and pumping, and the kind of wet noises came out of me that you only make with another person's hand inside you, and I heard him swallow, heard the low growl roll through his chest like he was the one being fed. He wrapped his lips around my clit and sucked, slow and then furious, and added a second finger, the stretch of it making me gasp, and I cried out loud enough that my own voice came back to me off his bedroom walls. I lost every ounce of control over my own movements. I jolted. His free forearm came down across my hips and pinned me flat to the bed, and he held me there and ruined me with his mouth and soaked his whole face doing it, and rode me right up to the line again, that bright unbearable edge…

"Oh shit. It's coming. It's coming. Jett. Yes. Thank you. Oh, fu. Nooo."

He stopped again.

"No, no, no, no, no," I whispered, reaching down, fingers scrabbling for his hair, his shoulders, anything to drag him back where I needed him.

Before I could even pry my heavy eyes open to figure out where the hell he'd gone, the bed dipped beside me, a warmth at my side I couldn't place through the fog. Then his hand cupped my breast, full and possessive, and rolled my nipple between two callused fingers, and tugged, until my back arched clean off the mattress and a sound I didn't recognize came out of me. His palm slid down my stomach, slow, and my muscles jumped and quivered under it like the skin couldn't decide whether to flinch or beg.

"You think you deserve the pleasure I give you?" he said, hot and low against the shell of my ear.

His fingers parted me again, just resting there, and I bucked up into the empty air to chase them. "Jett. Please."

He chuckled against my ear, dark, delighted, a man who had waited nine years for a thing he hadn't even known he was owed. "Who would've thought. The girl who used to stand across that gym laughing at me. Begging me like this."

Tears crested my eyes. The good kind, the kind that come when your whole body's strung so tight it has nowhere left to go. "Jett, it hurts so good. Please. Just one. I won't ask for any more."

"Hmm." He pressed a kiss just below my ear, unbearably gentle, given everything else. "I don't believe you."

"Jett, please," I whimpered.

"Goddamn it. Hearing you beg like that." His fingers found my clit and traced it, faster, tight slick circles right at the edge of too much, while his mouth dragged down the side of my throat. "You want to know how many times I begged you to look away from me at that dance."

"Jett," I breathed.

"How many nights I lay in that town with your face in my head, begging you, in my own head, not to hold my eyes the way you held them. You held them on purpose. You wanted me to understand. I understood." His voice had gone rough and low and was somehow the hottest thing he'd done yet. "Took me nine years to get you on a bed instead. Took me nine years to learn what your voice sounds like when you want something more than you're scared of it. Say it again."

"I'm so sorry," I choked out, because it was the truest thing in me and it came out before anything else could.

"Don't be sorry." Two fingers slid back inside me and pumped, deep, relentless, until the room went white at the edges and the stars came down behind my eyes. "Be better."

"Oh my god. I'm gonna come."

And just as my spine bowed up off the bed, he ripped his hand away.

I wanted to roll over and sob. This was how I was going to die. Strung out on the edge over and over and absolutely nothing to show for it, ruined by a man who'd turned my own body into a thing he got to grant or deny. Everything moved in a blur as a hand closed warm around my ankle.

"Wait, Jett," I said.

"You'll have your pleasure in time," he said, low, and flipped me over onto my stomach like I weighed nothing.

"Jett, hold on a⁠—"

"But not until I take mine," he said, scrambling up behind me, his hands moving to my hips.

Too late. The instant his palms found me, I knew he saw them.