Page 98 of Maid For Each Other

“Is this okay?” I asked, lifting my mouth just enough to lower it to her neck. I was oddly into the smooth column of her throat, that graceful strip of skin that smelled like sweets and tasted like promise. I’d decorated it with chocolate diamonds at the jewelry event, and I was no less entranced than I’d been that night. My tongue was everywhere and I was a mess, an unhinged man whose only focus was the soft skin laid out in front of him.

I wanted to pen poetry about the slide of my tongue against the slip of her skin.

“Yes,” she said on a hot breath, driving her hands into my hair and holding my head in place as I dragged my teeth over her. There was a shake to my fingers as I inhaled the scent of her cleanskin, and a shiver rocked down my spine as she slid her feet up the mattress and arched her back.

“Kill me, Mariano,” I said, raising my head to look into her eyes. “You fuckingkillme, honey.”

She looked up at me through heavy-lidded eyes that humbled me, because I didn’t deserve a look like that, and I was no longer capable of going slow. I grasped her towel and pulled it loose from her body.

My hands trailed all over her skin, dipping and sliding, tracing and teasing, and my mouth followed, doing everything possible to make her writhe and arch. I was sick with the need to draw out every moan, distracted by the trembling in her legs,obsessedwith the way she whispered my name over and over as she got close.

And the way she cursed when she was there?

It was intoxicating, a high like I’d never experienced.

I was blackout drunk on her body and had no plans to sober up anytime soon.

I kissed my way back to her mouth, capturing sighs on the way, but the breath in my lungs got a little stuck when I returned to kiss her slightly swollen lips.

Because the sight of her face made it hard to breathe.

Her eyes were closed, her hair a damp curtain on the pillow, and it pinched my heart, how beautiful she was. The sight of her soft face stung my eyes and my throat, and I might’ve broken down and started speaking in poetic tongues if she hadn’t chosen that very moment to reach for the button of my jeans with her very capable hands.

I sucked in a breath and froze, every muscle in my body becoming stone as those very capable hands touched me.

It was the sweetest torture, holyshit.

She opened her eyes, blinding me with hot amber orbs, and it was over.

We exploded into action, moving fast, a mad rush of hands and limbs and wrappers and frenzied kisses until I was over her, panting, swallowing down emotions I couldn’t express as I met her eyes.

Do you feel this, too?

Are you as terrified as I am?

Can you kiss me for the rest of your life?

I swallowed again and managed, “Are we good here, Mariano?”

35

We’re Good

Abi

“Are we good here, Mariano?”

I looked up at Dex, his face a tight mask that I would’ve described as a glower if he hadn’t just chanted cursing praises of me the entire time he’d worshipped every inch of my body.

No, he didn’t look mad, he looked intentional.

Intense.

I watched his strong neck as he swallowed and I could feel the tremble in his arms as he held himself above me. He was poised and ready, a hunter about to go in for the kill, and I’d never wanted anything more than I wanted him at that moment.

His green eyes looked dark as he waited for me to say yes, and nothing could’ve stopped me from trailing my nails down his long, muscular back and saying, “So good, Powell.”

Then he was there, we were there, and everything else in the world—the room, the lights, the air—disappeared from our universe. It was only Dex and me as he held my hips and went deep,only us as he licked my skin and made me whisper his name on repeat, only Powell and Mariano as he flipped me around on the huge mattress, biting down on the back of my neck while I screamed into the pillow and he groaned my name on a string of profanities.

---