Page 42 of Trust my Heart

“I know.” I held there, seated deep, and got a hand into his hair. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I started to move. Long, slow strokes, nearly all the way out of him and all the way back in, and every one of them dragged another sound up out of his chest. I held the pace slow even though every muscle I had wanted to drive into him and not stop, because slow was mine to give tonight and he was going to feel every inch of it, was going to know I had all night and nothing left to hide behind and nowhere on this earth I would rather be. Both his knees hooked over my arms, and I folded him open under me, and the new angle punched a raw sound out of him that I felt in my own spine.

His cock dragged hard and wet between our stomachs on every stroke, and his hand came off the headboard and went for it, and I caught his wrist and put it back.

“No,” I said. “Not yet. You don’t get to touch. You come on my cock or you don’t come, and you don’t come until I say.”

“Luke, I can’t, I can’t, please, it’s too much, I need…”

“You can.” I kept the pace steady and deep, dragging it out, watching the sweat run down the side of his face and his mouth fall open on nothing. “You made a whole building believe a lie for a month. You can wait for me another minute. Look at me while you do it.”

He looked at me. It cost him. He was strung out and trembling from a whole night of me taking him to the line and pulling him back, and he held my eyes and took what I gave him and begged with them when his voice gave out. He was past pretty words, past dark humor, past everything but the two of us and the drag of my cock into him and the hold I had on the both of us. I had never wanted anything the way I wanted him right then, wrecked and open and mine and still, even now, reaching one hand up to press flat over my heart like he had to give me something, anything, even if it was only that.

I put my hand over his and held it there against my chest.

For a while I kept us both there on the line, my cock buried deep and dragging out slow and pushing back in, his heart going wild under my palm and his body wound tight enough to snap. Sweat ran off the both of us. The headboard knocked the wall and neither of us gave a damn. My own edge was climbing fast now, a low hard pull at the base of my spine on every stroke into him, the heat of him around me nearly more than I could take slow, and I knew I couldn’t keep the two of us hanging much longer, and I was done wanting to. I’d wanted him wrecked and I had him. I’d wanted him to hand it all over, and he was one word away from it.

“Now,” I said, and I picked up the pace and finally got my hand around his cock, slick and hot and leaking between us. “Now. Let go. I’ve got you. Come for me.”

He went over a stroke later. His whole body drew up hard and his back came off the bed and he came in hot pulses over my knuckles and up his own stomach, my name breaking in two in his mouth, and the clench of him around me hauled me right up to the brink in his wake.

I watched him come apart, felt every shudder of it work through him, and that was the thing that took me over. I drove in deep, once and then again, and went over behind him, buried all the way inside him with his name locked in my teeth, and for a long few seconds the whole month, the fear, all of it, went dead quiet, and there was nothing left in the world but him and me and this.

I came down slow with my face in his shoulder, both of us spent and dragging in air. His arms had come up around my back somewhere in it, and he was holding me down against him and not letting me move, and I didn’t want to move. His heart pounded against mine and slowed by degrees, and I felt mine follow it down.

After a while I made myself ease out of him, careful with it, and tied off the condom and dropped it in the bin, and brought a warm cloth back from the bathroom and cleaned him up while he lay there loose-limbed and stunned and watched me do it with something soft in his face I didn’t have a good word for.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.

“I know.” I threw the cloth at the hamper and missed and left it there. “Let me anyway.”

He caught my wrist when I lay back down. He turned my hand over and pressed his mouth to the center of my palm, slow, the way I’d kissed his knuckles at the start of it, giving me back the one small thing he had left to give. Then he pulled me in against his side and got an arm over me, heavy and sure, and held on.

“I wanted to make it good for you,” he said into my hair. “You wouldn’t let me do a damn thing.”

“You made it good for me by letting go.” I settled into him. “That’s the whole thing I wanted. You. Not running the show for one night in your life.”

He huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh, and I felt it move through his chest under my ear. He hadn’t laughed easy in a long time, not since before Adam walked back onto our floor and started taking pieces off the both of us without either of us seeing it happen. I lay there in the quiet and felt his breathing even out under my ear, and I let myself believe, finally, that this was ours now, and nothing was going to take it.

He went quiet a while. Out on the street a car went past and dragged its lights across the ceiling and was gone. Somewhere across the city Adam thought he’d won, and had no idea at all what was coming for him. Tomorrow that would matter. Tomorrow we’d get up and start taking him apart, the two of us, together this time, no more secrets and no more either of us hauling it alone. But that was tomorrow.

“We’ve got a hell of a day coming,” he said, like he’d heard me thinking.

“Tomorrow.” I shut my eyes. “Tonight you’re mine, and nobody in this world gets a piece of you but me.”

Chapter 15: And Now We Wait

Ryan

The date went on the canvass sheet wrong, off by a day, in my own handwriting, and my hand didn’t hesitate over it. Good. It had taken three tries at the kitchen table last night before it stopped hesitating.

I clipped the sheet into the Okafor file and sent the file across the gap between our desks. Luke took it without looking at me. His thumb ran the pages, stopped on the canvass, stayed there. He set the file down in the middle of the gap, open to the page, and squared it so the wrong date faced me.

“Check your dates,” he said. Loud enough for the row.

“The dates are fine.”

“The warrant says otherwise.”