“If you weren’t going to listen to me,” he murmurs, his voice muffled by my apron, “why ask me?”
“I like knowing your opinion.”
“Show me you like it by proving you’re listening to me, Melanie.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, rumpling his head playfully as I try to make him be happy again. The pleaser in me just can’t take his displeasure. Not his. “I’ll make it up to you.”
“Hmm.” His eyes glow like torches all of a sudden. “Make it up to me by telling me how you’d like to spend your twenty-fifth birthday,” he proposes.
A moment’s hesitation settles between us. What would he say if I told him I wanted to spend the day with him? Doing nothing but him all day? That I want him to tell me about his life, his family, that I just want to be with him because, lately, that’s when I’m happiest?
Prying free of his hold and forcing him to settle down on his seat, I bring over the cinnamon apple tart on a plate, then I boost myself up to sit on the island counter right in front of his seat. Using my lap as a table, I set my bare feet on his thighs and lift a spoon to feed him dessert.
“Where did you spend your twenty-fifth birthday?” I ask, spooning a little of the tart into his mouth.
He eats every spoonful I feed him, and the act is not as hot and sexy as I’d imagined it to be; it’s ten times more so. Because of those eyes. The way they watch me feed him like some predator biding his time for the real meal. “Probably drunk. Nowhere memorable. You braid your hair when you cook too?” he asks gruffly, tugging at my knot as I feed him another spoonful.
Something intensely intimate flares between us. Every second, he’s unlocking both my heart and my soul, and there’s no stopping the barrage of emotions overtaking me. Longing, tenderness, want, hunger, need, fear, happiness.
“It’s to keep my hair on my head and off my plates,” I tell him.
“Ahh,” he says, eyes twinkling as I bring up another spoonful of tart to his mouth. Watching as his tongue takes the spoon and runs around it teases all my senses. A buttery sensation flows across my thighs as I watch how his lips close over the spoon, how he savors it, how he watches me as he eats his tart, his eyes bright and hungry and brilliant like a bastard who knows I’m wet and ready for him. I feel like he’s baking me on the inside just like the oven baked my pie. As he takes the last bite, he tugs the tip of my braid and runs it under my chin, caressing me down my throat, and then . . . into my cleavage.
An instant flood of heat pools between my legs, pussy gripping greedily to feel him inside me again. Why is everything he does so fucking hot? My heart is racing and my brain is screaming—touch him! Kiss him! Straddle him and feel him, show him you want him! Make him want you back, just like this! Make him want to STAY!
But I don’t move because I also really crave, I really need, for him to make the first move. So I boost myself down and whisper, “I should clean up.”
With a low, unexpected groan, he clamps his hand over mine and forces my hand down against his erection—pulsing between his legs and as hard as I’ve ever felt it—then he turns his head and takes my mouth in a quick, heady kiss that tastes of cinnamon and apples and him. “Princess, I’ve been like that for hours. Hours. Since I boarded the damn flight on my way here . . .”
“If you’ve been like this for so long, then you can give me ten minutes to clear this up so I will have nothing else to do the rest of the night but you,” I seductively whisper, then I giggle happily when he warns, a thick, raw lust roiling in his eyes, “Five minutes.”
“It’s not a race,” I counter, and then, purposely, secretly, I start moving more slowly to entice him. He watches my every move, making love to me with his eyes as I start cleaning up the rest of the table. Playfully, I slap his hand away when he tries cupping my butt. He chuckles as I carry the plates to the sink, and I’m so affected by the rumbling sound, I can’t quell the pulsing throb in my body, begging me for his fingers, his lips, his teeth, his tongue. He’s been hard for hours but he doesn’t know I’ve been wet and achy for just as long.
He helps me take the rest of the plates to the sink, and the gesture, along with his overpowering nearness, keeps me on edge. As he finishes clearing the table, I start to wash, our fingers brushing, our bodies connecting in so many points, every one of them sizzles across my nerve endings.
When I’m washing the last plate, he stands behind me, his body a wall of brick, his palm rubbing my butt as he starts kissing the back of my neck in the most breathtaking way. “It felt like coming home for the first time in a long time tonight, Melanie,” he says, and I can detect the rasp of gratitude in his voice.
“No girl cooked for you before?”
I’m amused and laughingly turn, but when I look into his eyes, my amusement vanishes.
There’s something very serious in his eyes, and very, very tender.
His jaw looks squarer from the force of his hunger as he reaches out to unhook the apron from my nape, letting it fall to my waist as he undoes the knot at the small of my back.
“Nobody has cooked for me for thirteen years,” he says, knocking the wind out of me with what I see roiling in his gaze. Hunger, but not only of the physical kind. Hunger to be nurtured, taken, accepted.
I know this hunger. I hunger for the same.
Watching me like I’m all the acceptance he’s ever wanted, he laces both his hands through mine and backs me toward my bedroom.
My pulse thunders as he backs me inside, letting his thumbs trail along my face. When he kisses me, his kiss is such velvet, I feel like I could fly. His body presses close to mine, filling me with yearning. I close my eyes when he dips his fingers into my braid and slowly unwinds it. I shake my hair out and run my fingers over it, and he sinks his fingers in with mine as though curious as to how I do it. I close my eyes and feel him awkwardly but very tenderly use his hands to unravel all of my hair.
Do you ever want someone to look at you, but see only the good? This is me with him. I don’t want him to see that I’m a mess inside sometimes. I’m trying to be the perfect girlfriend. And I know that he’s trying to be the perfect boyfriend too. I guess it’s not fair. I want him to see only the good, but I want to see all of him. Even the bad. As we kiss for a while, we talk about memories from his childhood, his uncle named Eric, how they went hunting all the time at a Texas ranch. We talk about my ballet lessons growing up, my embarrassment when I fell at my first recital. We talk tonight. But I want to know more, every piece of the puzzle that is him.
He doesn’t mince words and he tells me what he likes about me and how much he wants me. And I still want more, but our kisses are getting heavy, so heavy I can’t breathe right anymore. He’s taken off his shirt and is now in only his slacks, while he’s pried off my apron and left me in my skimpy little dress.
I suck on his nipple ring. God, how I love this ringed nipple. The groan that follows my sucks. I love how the other nipple puckers in response as I stroke it with my fingertips.
“You wear a scar and yet I can’t ever imagine you being broken,” I whisper as I rub my hands up the muscled grooves of his chest, paying extra attention to the long, textured slash of his scar. I really value scars. The story they tell. The meaning they wear.
“My scar,” I say, then I hesitate before murmuring, “Do you know what it’s for? It’s because I needed a kidney when I was young.”
Shocked at my own revelation, I ease back, protectively curling my arms around myself. “Melanie, come here,” he commands, a spark of some indefinable emotion in his eyes. I take one step to him, and he slides my dress off my shoulders, down my waist, and to the floor.
I’m so exposed . . .
I stare at my feet, feeling myself go red unexpectedly. I’m not wearing panties and I didn’t cover my scar.
Greyson exhales, a long and slow sound as he takes in my nakedness, then he clenches my waist in one hand and tugs me closer, his voice low and breaking with huskiness. “You, princess, are no
thing but perfect.”
“Do you realize I haven’t ever talked to anyone about it?” I whisper.
He fingers the scar on my hip bone, tracing it with one blunt fingertip. “I see the pills you take for this every morning.”
“They’re so my body doesn’t reject it. But since she was my identical twin, my dose is minor. My body . . . accepted it almost as if it were mine.”
Impulsively, I lean over and set my lips on the deeper, more jagged cut near the bottom of his rib cage. “Now you tell me how you got this?”
“Long time ago,” he touches my hair with one hand, “my brother . . . my stepbrother got into a fight. Had to pull him out of there and got a souvenir. It’s nothing.”
Dragging my lips up his scar and toward his neck and those thick tendons I really like and the Adam’s apple that makes his voice rumble the way it does, he tilts my head up by the chin and looks at me, smoldering eyes trailing down to my tits, my abdomen, my perfectly waxed pussy, and the way he looks at me as if he’s photographing me in his mind sends a dizzying current racing through me.
“I want to be in you, to lose myself in you.”
His energy feels as hot and erratic as a summer storm as he lifts me up and carries me up to my bed. He starts kissing me in the darkness, cupping my head and feeding only my mouth for long, heady minutes.
Then he’s touching. My breathing goes with every pull on my nipples. The cup of his palm on my sex. I moan at the press and roll of his mouth over mine, and the addition of his thumb sliding behind me, slowly killing me as he caresses my little ass. “Oh god, Grey,” I gasp when his free hand slips down my abdomen, lower, and lower, while his tongue takes mine. I part my thighs with a sigh, and he strokes me open, my folds slick under his fingers, and suddenly everything is gone. My debt. My dreams. My work. My to-do list. It’s all gone except for Greyson’s mouth and hands in me, the gentle abrasion of his stubble against my jaw. His breath going as fast as mine.
“You smell as good as you feel.” His gruff whisper is hot against my mouth. His body trembles with unleashed power. I can see, even in the dark, the sheer, raw, aggressive beauty under the polish. I love the way the walls drop when he fucks me. How he peels layers of me away until I’m vulnerable and shaking. How he’s as lost in what he does as I am.
“Say something wrong to prove this isn’t happening,” I whisper.
“I don’t think so, I don’t feel like ruining tonight just yet.” His gruff voice resonates with lust as he looks at me, his eyes glittering, fierce. Engulfing.
“Fuck me hard.” I gasp for breath as his tongue swirls wetly over my skin and he dips his middle finger into my folds, stoking, gathering my juices.
“Wet, tight, and ready,” he rasps in undisguised pleasure, his chuckle dark and throaty as he presses two fingers in me.
The need for him builds and twists along my nerves, tangles in my every muscle. My heart beats furiously in my chest as he suckles one of my nipples, and when he fingers both my pussy and my back at the same time, I scream.
Hot sucking motions rock through me as I jerk my hips to his hands, my fingers burying in his hair as my body grips his plunging fingers, terrified of losing them.
“Say you want me to fuck you, long and hard and everywhere,” he says, his face twisted into a mask of pleasure as he watches me.
“I want you to, I need you to fuck me everywhere,” I plead. “Only you. Please.”
“Here?” Face raw with desire, he caresses the outer rim of my ass with his thumb again and teases the tip back inside.
I bite back another scream of pleasure. “Greyson, I want this with you.” I lick my lips as my body tightens involuntarily, a sheen of perspiration already coating our bodies, we’re so hot. “You know how much I want this with you.”
“It’ll take us over the edge, Melanie. Over the fucking edge, are you ready to go there with me?” he warns, his tongue rasping into my ear. My flesh melts as he starts dragging his mouth down, sucking my breasts until I arch and gasp, then lower, trailing a hot, swirling path down my belly button, to my bare sex. “First I want to taste you until you’re ready to convulse, princess.”
He sucks my clit into his mouth and I groan in delirium. “Oh god.”
“God can’t help you, baby, but I can.” He blows air over my clit in the most seductive way. “I want to kiss this sweet cunt, taste it, suck it.” He takes it lightly between his teeth, then gently sucks me. Fire courses through my veins as he spreads his hands open on my thighs and opens my pussy lips wider for his tongue.
“Greyson . . .” I cry as pleasure bursts through my veins, my body spread open for his kiss, my hands fisting on the sheets.
It feels somehow like he’s rewarding me because I cooked for him. But also like he’s claiming something from me. Like he’s claiming me. Every inch of me. When his thumb penetrates there again, I’m thoughtless, only groaning and mewing and whimpering and pleading, my hips jerking upward and backward.
“Are you ready for this, Melanie?” His eyes are dilated, but sharp and assessing as he studies me.
I squeeze my eyes shut and grind out, “Yes, please!”
He growls deep in his chest and bends over. His tongue flicks over my clit, then into my sex, probing and pushing into me. My senses open like floodgates. The tip of his thumb goes inside my backside, deeper, stimulating little nerves I never even knew I had.
Shock resounds on my body as he plays with my ass, thumbing me as he uses his other hand to hold my hips down and control the angle of us, how close we are, how his lips pleasure my wet, aching sex, every sinew in my body craving him like nothing . . .
Him.
Him.
Him.
He lifts his head, his lips wet with me, and he’s the most beautiful living thing I’ve ever seen.
“I want to fuck you bare,” he murmurs as he fiercely meets my gaze and slips two long fingers into my pussy, using them to part me. “No condom. Just you and me, Melanie.”
Feel him in me? Flesh to flesh? Nothing between us?
My throat hurts as waves of lava flow through me, and I nod hard. “I’ve always been safe . . .”
I see a flash of something dark and haunting in his eyes. “I’m not safe, princess, but I’m clean and I want you bare just as soon as I get a lab to prove it to you. Would any other form of birth control interfere with your antirejection medications?”
“I . . . no, Grey.”
“You sure?”
The genuine concern in his eyes only makes me need him all the more. “Yes! My doctor had once mentioned I could use a low-dose oral contraceptive if I needed to.”
His expression twists with some fierce determination, as if us doing this will mean some sort of commitment for us. I sense he needs to take me, to take me fiercely and in ways he’s never taken a girl before.
“Come here,” he says, grabbing me by the hair. “I want to kiss you hard, but fuck you harder.” He slams his mouth down, and adds, into my mouth, “But first things first.”
Whimpering as our bodies grind naturally as we kiss, I run my hand up his face and slip my fingers into his soft, thick hair, and I hear myself whisper his name against his jaw. His body trembles with unleashed power. “Say it again.”
“Greyson.”
“Now go up on your knees and elbows,” he says in a roughened whisper.
Oh, god . . . it’s really happening.
Tremors seize my entire body. There is no man I would trust more to do this with. No man I’d ever really wanted to do this with. And I want him to take every part of me, fuck every hole in me with his cock, his fingers, his tongue. He slips his fingers over my folds again, testing my pussy first, dragging the moisture up the crack of my buttocks.
“The wetter you are, the easier this is for me to thrust in.”
“I’m so hot. Grey, the way you looked at me when I was feeding you was foreplay enough.”
“Melanie, look at what you do to me.” He rubs the head of his
enormous erection between my ass cheeks and presses the mounds together so I feel the friction. I feel every pulse in his long cock, how hard and throbbing he is. He uses the swollen head to spread my pussy juices up to my ass and teases me with them. I’m quivering on my elbows and knees. Quivering.
“Greyson . . .” I moan. The anticipation is killing me, the feel of him so close, but so far. The scent of him dizzying me, while my eyes can’t see him and feel starved.
“Shh, baby I want this more than you do,” he croons behind me as he strokes a hand down my spine, caressing every dent of my backbone. “I fantasize about it. I fantasize about doing this with you. To you.”
I hear the ripping sound of a condom and lick my lips, staring at the wall in front of me with blurry eyes, my body throbbing for his, my pussy thrumming jealously.
“Will it hurt me?” I breathe fast and shallow as he presses the crown lightly into the rosette of my backside.
“Maybe . . .” he taunts as he trails his long, blunt fingers up my spine again before seizing a fistful of my hair and pulling my head back to whisper in my ear, “Or maybe not. With you and me, there are no givens. No rules. Just what we want. And I want every inch of you. I want what you’ve given no one. This fuck is mine.” He sweeps a hand to squeeze my breasts, pinching the sensitive tips of my nipples. Arrows of pleasure singe me, both my pussy and the place I want him to penetrate clenching tight in response.
“Just take it, Grey,” I gasp.
His thick answering murmur feels like a caress to me. “You bet your ass I will, princess. You don’t tease a man about wanting a thick, long dick up your lovely, tight little butt without getting what you’re asking for. Loosen up now, I’m lubing up.”
I mew as he presses his thumb into me, and then . . . something thicker, so much larger, so much harder. Deliciously creamed up and pushing into me.