Page 125 of Bonetide

“How would you know?”

“I know.”

“Don’t be smug.”

“Aye, lass.”

His mouth has done the corner thing again. The book’s still open on his knee, and he isn’t going to lift his eyes from the page until I make him.

I’m going to have to make him.

I cross the room and stop in front of his knees, and he finishes the line at his own pace before he raises his face to mine. His eyes are the pale blue they’re supposed to be, and the look in them is the one I’ve learned over these weeks, the one he gives me when I’ve done a thing he was secretly hoping I’d do.

“Put the book down.”

“What for, foxglove?” he asks, eyes gleaming.

“You know what for.”

Chapter

Twenty-Four

Alasdair sets the book down on the arm of the chair without looking and sits back, folding his hands in his lap, large and pale against his dark trousers. He looks up at me with a careful expression on his face, though I can see the dark hints of desire in the depths of his blue eyes.

“Tell me,” he begs, his voice rougher, raspier.

“I want you to be the thing you are when you’re not being careful with me,” I tell him, and, for a moment, I have to marvel at how confident and brazen I’m being, sexually, anyway. He’s truly unlocked some hidden part of myself that had been dormant for way too long, a side of me I never even knew existed. I suppose it’s hard to know exactly what you want when you spent most of your sexual life being married to a man who didn’t care about your wants in the slightest.

“Aye. Could you be more specific?” he asks, nostrils flaring slightly.

“I want you to take what you want,” I tell him, feeling coy. “I don’t want to be asked. I want you to use me however you want and not check on me. I want it to be the way it was the night you came through the window, but in daylight, and I want you to make me ask for it.” I pause. “And I want you to make it filthy.”

He looks at me a long beat, his lips parting. As always, he’s gone still, nearly frozen, the appearance of a predator about to pounce.

“On your knees, foxglove,” he demands, his voice thick.

I obey before my brain has finished processing the instruction. The hooked rug is hard on my knees. His hands move to his fly, slow and deliberate, the careful, old-fashioned competence he does everything with, and I watch his fingers deftly pull down the zipper, the sound filling the room.

He unbuttons the trousers and pulls himself out. His cock is thick and hard—but seriously, when isn’t it?—and he wraps his hand around the base of himself as he looks down at me on the rug.

“Open your mouth,” he commands quietly.

I open it.

“Wider, lass.”

I do as I’m told.

He slides the head of his cock between my lips and he doesn’t go slow. He pushes in past my teeth, over my tongue, to the back of my throat, and stops there; the size of him fills my mouth until he’s jammed in.

His other hand has come to the back of my head, his fingers splayed wide in my hair, his thumb at the side of my jaw, holding me.

“Christ, look at you, love. On your knees on your great-aunt’s rug with my cock in your throat.”

I make a choking sound around him.

“You like that, aye? I can feel you liking that.”