But as he licked along my seam, as he dipped his tongue into my entrance, as he went lower and circled the rim of my asshole, I understood why he hadn’t done it until now. Because before, he hadn’t meant it. The way he washed me with his mouth, lavishing me, adoring me, taking his time, this kind of attention sent a message. You’re important to me, it said. I want to give you what I can, starting with this.
I knew it was also a stall tactic. I knew that giving in would mean I accepted his lack of answer. I knew that Mike or Donny was watching this private, intimate act in the surveillance room.
And I didn’t care. This moment was organic and needed and beautiful because of what it was, despite what it lacked.
I knew that I could still let this be our goodbye.
His tongue swept over me and inside me, his fingers stroked all my most sensitive spots, his lips sucked and nibbled. He was dominating me but in the subtlest way he ever had. There was nothing demeaning about what he was doing. Nothing to be embarrassed about submitting to. It was selfish because it was for him but it was selfless as well. It was sincere and affectionate and progress and I thought, vanilla is good, too.
He brought me to climax three times, each one taking me higher than the one before. And each time, he stole my breath and my balance and I’d think, I can’t anymore, but he’d show me I was wrong and send me there again.
After the last, when I was torn apart and boneless, too spent to fight anymore for what I needed from him, he lowered my leg off his shoulder and reached up to brush the hair out of my face and said, “Stay, Emily.”
A tear leaked down my cheek that might have been left over from the final time he’d made me come. He wiped it away. “I want you to stay,” he said again. “We can figure out what this is together. Say yes.”
The place those words sent me was more gratifying, more pleasurable than any of the orgasms he’d given me. “Yes,” I said, with as much emotion as if I were accepting a proposal. “Yes.”
He pulled me down to my knees in front of him and he kissed me. His tongue was gentle against mine. His lips were firm but yielding. He tasted like me, like my desire and my submission. Tasted the way that pleading must taste, soft and imploring, vulnerable and exposed. It wasn’t a kiss that took; it was a kiss that asked. For the first time, he didn’t demand from me.
So what I gave back was honest and unforced and open. When before he’d been a blustering wind that I’d chased and sometimes was lucky enough to catch – or be caught up in – now we were both still, coming together on our own accord. We originated in this. Everything now was new. A start. A beginning. The brush of his hand across my cheek, though he’d done it many times before, it was as if this time was the first. His whispers were unheard whispers. The gasps at the back of my throat were sounds I’d never made. The way my knees buckled, how he pulled me tighter against him, the sighs between us – all new.
This was our first surrender.
First embrace.
First kiss.
First touch.
CHAPTER 25
A sudden change in room temperature woke me the next morning. I came to enough to realize I was missing my covers, and, with my eyes still shut, I searched blindly for the blankets.
“I pulled them off of you,” Reeve said.
I squinted up toward his voice and found him standing above me. “Why would you do that?”
“Because it’s time to get up.”
This wasn’t the wakeup from Reeve I was used to. Usually he used his cock to rouse me. This time he was fully dressed, wearing what I called the ranch uniform – jeans and a long-sleeve flannel button-down shirt.
I hoped his attire meant he wasn’t leaving again already. It had already been late when he’d come home the night before and we’d stayed up much later, moving from my room to his where we’d moved together under the sheets for long hours.
It had been wonderful and magical and all the adjectives that people use to describe “making love.” We hadn’t done any talking after he’d knelt before me, however, and there was still so much to be said. Hopefully today we’d have time to remedy that – if his business didn’t pull him away.
Even if it did, I had his attention now.
I rubbed at my eyes with my fist. “I prefer your usual wakeup method.”
He laughed. “I do too, Blue Eyes. But we don’t have time for that. We have plans.”
I stifled a yawn as I sat up against the headboard. “What are we doing?” Swear to God, if he’d forced me up just so I could make the six a.m. breakfast, I was going to be very unhappy about it.
“We’re spending time together in a location that isn’t a bed.” He sat on the bench against the wall and pulled on a boot.
I curled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them for warmth. “A bed has never been required for your dick to find its way inside me.”
“No, it hasn’t,” he said, grinning and pulling on his other boot. “But today I’m putting something else between your legs. Get up.”
“Fine, fine.” More than fine, actually. He was spending the day with me. Or, at least part of it. Like I’d said the night before, I’d take whatever he gave.
I pushed myself out of the bed and padded into his bathroom for a much needed shower.
After, I dried off and put on my robe, planning to head to my bedroom to get dressed. But when I opened the door, Reeve was waiting with a tray of eggs, toast, and fruit.
“You know breakfast in bed works best when I’m still in bed,” I teased.