Page 8 of Velvet Betrayal
He kissed me again, and for a minute I let myself believe him. I let him tip me back onto the counter, my hands on his belt, dragging him closer like I couldn’t stand one more second without him. His zipper scraped my thigh, jeans shoved the rest of the way down, his mouth everywhere, hands everywhere, like he meant to burn this moment into both of us.
And then he was there—inside, hot, thick, all that panic and hunger crashing into one deep, shuddering thrust. My whole body clenched around him, the world narrowing to this. To him. To now.
He stilled for a moment and that was when it almost broke me—the care in it. The insistence on checking my face, my readiness, even now, even with the past years between us like so many bombed bridges.
I wanted to laugh, or scream, or touch his face just to make sure it was real, but all I could do was fit my arms around his shoulders, lock my ankles and close my eyes. The kitchenhummed a low, hard bass beneath us: fridge, furnace, the white-noise of snow attacking the glass.
He pressed in, slow, grinding, deep enough to steal my breath. The counter edge felt like the edge of the world, and I was already falling.
“Fuck,” he groaned, his head tipping back, eyes dark and wrecked. “You feel so good. So fucking good. I could stay inside you forever.”
He braced, both hands flat on the counter, as if he might need the extra leverage to keep himself from coming before he'd really started. I ran my nails up his shoulder blades, arched harder, and tried to breathe. If there was a world beyond that moment—the threat, our daughter’s dreams roiling upstairs, the sum of all we were running from—it could go ahead and wait. For now, the world was hips and breath, a friction so thunderous it drowned out every danger but this, the danger of wanting him again, of ever having let him go.
He started to move—slow, deep, filling me until I clenched around him, until the ache turned to need. Each thrust pinned me to the counter, hard and sure. I spread my knees wider, greedy for all of him.
His hands gripped my ass, dragging me closer, his hips driving into mine, fast and unyielding. Sweat slid down his temple. His breath shook against my skin.
“Fuck yes. Stay with me, Ruby. Stay here—” It sounded like begging, and maybe it was, but it also sounded like a man who’d spent too long in the habit of not asking for anything, taking what he wanted. Right now…right now, I was that thing. “Come on, Ruby, come for me. Come on my cock, sweetheart. Show me you’re mine, show me, fuck…”
And I gave it to him. I let him have it, let him take all of me, let myself fall, greedy for it, hungry for him.
For two, three, five minutes, I was nobody’s hostage.
I was a body, I was wet heat, I was just a woman hungry for her own survival.
The orgasm found me so abruptly that I nearly drew blood biting down on Kieran’s shoulder. Kieran buried his face in my neck as I spasmed around him, grinding even deeper into my body. “Fuck, Ruby—so tight, so perfect—God, I’m gonna come—take it, sweetheart, take all of it. That’s it. All mine. All…fucking…mine.”
He pulsed hard inside me, shuddering, and for a second we hung there, glued together by heat and chaos, by want and ruin. Just two people, nothing left but each other, nothing left but this.
After, we stayed braced, tangled, until I let out a little whine of protest against the counter getting cold. He lifted me up, held me for a moment, and set me gently onto two feet. “You’re so beautiful,” he said. “Let’s go take a shower.”
I wanted to protest. To tell him that this was insane, that this wasn’t a getaway, that he had kidnapped me and my daughter and he had take us back to Boston right fucking now.
But I did no such thing.
When he held out his hand, I took it. We climbed the stairs together.
And the whole way up, all I could think about was the next time he’d be inside me.
Kieran
Irealized I should have probably discussed the trip before I took her and her daughter to a little cabin that was so remote most people missed the turn off.
But this was about survival, not comfort, and every fiber of me remembered why the second I caught the sound of her breathing in the next room. The salt of her skin, the heat radiating off her body—Christ, if it was just up to me, I’d have bent her over the kitchen sink and fucked her again until she forgot her own name.
But I knew better. I knew to stretch it out longer, to wait until she was asking, no, begging for me.
That was the Callahan way, if not by genetics then by practice—play the long game, don’t tip your hand. It was how my brother found his way into nearly every strategic position in the city and how I’d managed to survive this long without choosing a side. I’d once told Ruby that I could be patient longer than anybody she’d ever met, and she’d believed me even as she wanted to prove me wrong. Now I wondered if she might actually try.
And it was also what had made me very, very good in bed. I waited. I listened. And all I wanted to hear was the sound ofRuby Marquez coming for me over, and over, and over again, until she forgot every reason she was supposed to hate me.
She was standing in the shower alcove now, barefoot, blouse hanging open, hair a riot from my hands. I memorized her like a map, in case she folded in on herself when reality came tumbling back. “You couldn’t have picked a hideout with, I don’t know, better amenities?” she called, but she was already grinning around the edges.
“The amenities here are good. The electricity used to just flicker in and out a decade ago. It was a whole thing.”
I leaned in the doorway, watching her do a little inventory—bath gels, off-brand shampoo, four scratchy towels stacked like a dare. She wouldn’t say it, but I could tell she liked the redundancy.
“Let me guess, no hot water?” she said.
