Page 49 of Puck to the Heart
“Take what you need, Olivia. I’ve got you.”
My hips tipped up, taking him deeper. I groaned as he stroked the spot I could never quite reach on my own.
“So good, Barnes. Are you gonna come for me?”
Every cell in my body lit up from the inside at the praise, and Iwantedto come for him, I did, but the harder I tried, the further it slipped away until I was a sobbing, gasping mess.
Humor laced his words when he said, “You’re doing so well. I’m right here; just let go.”
“What?” The word came out almost as a shriek, it was so loud in the near silence.
“You must be so close. Let go and come for me.” The hand not between my legs found a nipple again, rolling and playing with the taut bud until my breaths grew uneven again. When his thumb found my clit, and his fingers curled inside me, my body nearly arched off the bed, held steady by the confines of his arms. White light engulfed my vision, and my inner walls clenched around his fingers, wringing a strangled cry out of me.
“Fuck, Ash, don’t stop. Rightthere.” The new, higher angle of my hips and all the places he touched me sent me over the edge.
Building bliss grew so slowly, creeping along my body so lightly at first that I barely noticed it until I was caught in the syrupy feeling trapping my limbs as the sensation grew. Pleasure spread in perfect, incandescent waves from my core, spread further by Ash murmuring in my ear, keeping me present in a way I usually couldn’t maintain. Ash’s steady, solid presence at my back grounded me, keeping me from spiraling out. And when the peak finally came, I barreled over it, falling over the edge in a cascade of sparkling sensation.
When the paralysis of pleasure released me, awareness slowly filtered back. Heat scorched my back, and it took a moment to realize the pounding rhythm against my shoulder blade was his heartbeat. It took another moment to realize he still traced lazy circles over my clit, turning the hypersensitive flesh nearly ticklish. With a flinch, I put a hand on his arm and turned to face him as best I could in this position, with my back pressed against his front. “Fuuuuuck.” The word stretched out, everything still on a lag from the bone melting orgasm.
I was a puddle, spilling off his body, only upright because Ash was.
My entire body tingled and tensed, electricity arcing down every nerve like a weird Tesla coil. Finally, when I stopped shaking and could breathe again, I drank down air like I was drowning, realizing I was a mess. Sated, but a bedraggled and damp mess all the same. “Holy shit. That was…” I rolled over onto my stomach, looking up at Ash. His smugness was all I needed to see.
Still, tenderness laced the smugness, and I watched his black eyes take in the length of my body sprawled on his bed. “Good, huh? I told you could do it.”
The limpness in my body disappeared, replaced by a ravenous desire for him, and I rose up on my arms to meet his eyes, prepared to slide over to straddle him. A jaw-cracking yawn interrupted my plans. Ash leaned over, kissing my forehead.
“I bet the food’s been delivered. We can eat and go to sleep.”
Hmm. I liked the sound of that, but still, wanting him remained like embers of a slow-burning fire. A new tenderness for this previously unknown aspect of Ash put me into a dreamy contemplative state. I went into this not knowing what to expect from either of us, and came out the other side feeling closer to him than before. He saw me, talked me out of my own head again, and gave me what might have been the most intense orgasm of my life. The first given by another person, certainly.
If I wasn’t careful, I’d fall so much harder for this man.
I woketo Ash Wilder’s stupidly perfect face within kissing distance.
Low light spilled into the bedroom through a window, enough to see Ash’s features but still dark enough to soften all his sharp edges. Up close, the dark lines of his tattoos smudged together where his arm reached behind his head to rest on the pillow. The plushness of his lips, which I now knew weresosoft when they pressed against my skin, the stubble on his jaw as it scraped my neck. It all added up to one of the most beautiful people I’d ever encountered. His legs tangled with mine beneath sheets with a much higher thread count than any I’d ever purchased.
Sharing space with another person had always been difficult for me. Sharing a bed was nearly out of the question. The only other person I ever slept beside shattered me, not just my heart, but myself. I entrenched every part of myself in my relationship with Alex, losing my grip on what made meme. And it, apparently, was too much.
Ever since, I shuttered myself. Turned to hard, crackling ice or stone, anything to keep from sharing the depth of anything real. Nothing someone might take away, or?—
“Why are you staring?” Ash’s voice startled me out of my reverie.
“I wasn’t.”
“Darlin’,” his voice was rough with sleep, and one of those ice shards inside me shattered at the endearment. “I am routinely on display in front of thousands of people. I know what it feels like.”
“If you’re going to call me ‘darlin’, maybe you should get a cowboy hat, John Wayne.” Yes, I ignored his question, but this sudden accent was too fun to pass up, and I turned up my own accent into an exaggerated drawl.
“That can be arranged.” His sexy, evil fucking eyebrow arched at me. “Would you like that,darlin’?You could live out all your cowboy fantasies.”Those onyx eyes flashed as he rested on one elbow, smiling sleepily as he drawled the word in an exaggerated accent.
But I looked away, unwilling to meet his gaze with the flush creeping over my face and chest, because yes, yes, I would like that. Very much. Before I let myself fall too far into that particular daydream, I asked, “What doyoulike?”
“You.”
The flush of heat spread lower. “No, what do you, you know,like?” The weight pulled the word down in my mouth, and I hoped the implications were enough. In the thin light filtering through the curtains, everything between us grew too real again. Too… much. “Last night was …” I flopped my hand between us, “all about me. And,” my voice cracked. “I don’t want to be selfish.” The word echoed in my mind, a dirge in a never-ending funeral where I was the object, not an attendee.
Being too much work would send him running.
