Page 43 of Branded

It’s too much. It’s true. Her breath catches, and she puts both hands on my face and kisses me.

Nothing tentative. Her mouth opens against mine, and when I lift my good hand toward her waist, she catches my wrist.

“Flat on the bed.”

I put my palm on the mattress beside my thigh. She opens my belt and my jeans while she kisses the corner of my mouth.

“You follow directions well when somebody writes them plainly,” she murmurs.

“I have a demanding auditor.”

“You have an accurate one.”

She strips my jeans and underwear off, waits while I step out of them, then pushes me back with two fingers on my chest. Being handled by a woman half my weight should feel like losing. It doesn’t. The authority is real because I agreed to give it to her, and she trusts me to keep giving it.

Her hand closes around my cock. She strokes once, watching my face with the same concentration she gives a record that might change the whole file.

“Still,” she says.

Then she takes me in her mouth.

Every thought I own goes white. She takes me deep and draws back slow and uses her hand where her mouth leaves off. When my hips tense she braces her palm on my thigh and makes me hold still instead of thrusting, and I do, and it costs me.

My good hand is flat on the bed. Every instinct I have wants to be in her hair, to set the depth, to take. She’s claimed the pace. I let her have it and don’t turn it into a show she has to reward.

She circles her tongue under the head of my cock and looks up at me. The sight nearly ends me.

“Tessa.”

She pulls off long enough to say, “You can take it.”

She works me until my breath goes ragged and my hand fists the coverlet without leaving its place. Then she stops.

The loss is brutal. She rises and drags her thumb across her lower lip and looks at what she’s done to me.

“You enjoyed that,” she says.

“You have enough evidence to support the conclusion.”

Her laugh is quiet and real. I want to keep it in this room forever, with the keys on the desk and every exit still hers.

She takes off her clothes without hurrying and lets me watch. She takes a condom from her bag and checks the wrapper before tearing it and rolls it onto me herself. Then she climbs into my lap and sinks down on me slowly, by degrees, until I’m all the way inside her and she’s sitting on me with both hands on my shoulders and her eyes an inch from mine.

I could move her. We both know it. I stay still because she told me to, and because taking her choice from her hands would be easy, and receiving it takes everything I have.

She rises and sinks again. Slow, finding the angle. Then she rolls her hips and gasps.

“Tell me what you want,” I say.

“Your hand.” She takes my good hand and brings my thumb between us. “Here. Match me.”

I circle her while she rides me, and she starts to move harder, and the bed complains under us. I follow the rhythm of her hips with my thumb and keep the rest of me still even when the pressure gets close to unbearable.

“Garrett.”

My name breaks apart in her mouth. She comes with her forehead against mine and her nails in my shoulders, clenching around me so hard that holding still narrows down to one breath at a time.

I don’t take the control back because she’s undone. I wait. I wait until her grip loosens and she lifts her head and looks at me, flushed and certain.