“Definitely a tidier kitchen,” he agreed.
There was a breeze coming in off the ocean. Gia had put on a sundress before they left for the restaurant, a cute little floral thing with a short, swingy skirt. A more powerful gust of wind caught it and nudged it up into her lap. He reflexively moved to push it back down, but then he paused halfway with a handful of the fabric. Rethought things. Reversed himself and brought the skirt back up to where it had been when the wind had taken over.
He felt her intake of breath before he even touched her skin. She stiffened a little in his arms, full of anticipation.
He had just been thinking about how much he loved it when he could make her relax.
But he loved this, too—making her come to attention.
He let his hand settle on her thigh, heavy and possessive. Willed it to say what he wasn’t allowed to with his mouth.
Her next intake of breath was a little sharper. Her back arched a little, like she’d been trying to prevent herself from leaning into his touch with her lower body but had forgotten to anchor her upper body.
He let the hand slide upward, let his calloused middle finger, made rough by a lot of knife work, drag across her smooth skin. Goose bumps rose, and not just there, but on her arm, too. On the side of her throat.
With his other hand, he brushed her hair aside so he could lean down and put his mouth on the back of her neck.
Her head fell back, and her hair swung over and covered the side of his face as he continued to kiss the back of her neck. He let himself get lost in the blue, better than any ocean vista. Her skin tasted salty, like seawater. His dick, which had been stirring since her first little gasp, hardened.
“We should go inside,” she whispered.
He made a wordless murmur of disagreement. He wanted, suddenly, to torture her. To show her.
His hand, inching ever upward, encountered the fabric of her panties. He could tell they were cotton from the feel—like the jersey kitchen towels he favored. Last time he’d been in this position, he’d wished for light to see what color her panties were.
Well, now he had light. The bright, unrelenting afternoon sun.
So he flipped her dress up.
Her panties were black. Plain black cotton.
That should not have been so sexy.
After taking in the sight of her for a moment, the dark, damp black cotton against her creamy skin, he moved her underwear aside, slowly, enjoying the juxtaposition, savoring the drag of the fabric across her skin. From there, he let lazy fingers drift over her, barely touching the heated flesh they encountered.
“Bennett,” she said, his name a warning on her lips.
“Shh.” He’d meant to soothe, but it came out harsher than he intended, more like a command, but hey, that worked, too. She was into dirty talk, he’d learned. That was his Gia—she didn’t want you to hold her hand, but saying something like “I’m going to make you come right here, and you’re going to have to be quiet about it,” usually worked like a charm.
The balcony was small and flanked by neighboring ones. He followed Gia’s gaze as she assessed them. They were empty, but the sliding glass door on the room to their right was open.
He chuckled.
Then he watched her assess the scene below them, the pool full of vacationers.
He chuckled again.
“You’re evil,” she whispered.
“Maybe,” he agreed cheerfully. “Should I stop?” Even as he asked the question, he swirled his fingers over her with a little more—but not too much—pressure, just the way he’d learned she liked.
She shook her head, a wordless but vehement no.
So he shifted her a little, moving her off him enough that he could get all of her skirt out from between them. Then he shamelessly unzipped his jeans, took out his dick, and settled her back against him, snuggling his dick into the crack of her ass. Satisfied with this arrangement, he then settled her skirt back over them. You would have had to look closely to see his one hand snaking under her skirt, and as far as he was concerned, anyone looking that closely was welcome to the show.
She squirmed, whether to make herself more comfortable or to make him more uncomfortable, he couldn’t say. He let his hips rock a little, even as he repositioned his hand over her mound to tease her before he got down to business.
He floated his other hand up to her chest. Not her breasts, but the flat expanse of skin that covered her collarbones and shaded into her throat. Splayed his hand wide and let it rest there, pleased with the rapid firing of her pulse he discovered.
And fuck, this was the life. One hand resting on Gia’s throat, feeling the pulsing there, and the other on her pussy.
Time to see if he could make her pulse there, too. He set up a rhythm that involved the dose of pressure she liked and the occasional skim over her clit directly. It didn’t take long for her to get really riled up.
“Oh my God!” she whispered. His favorite phrase in the world. A moan escaped then, a loud one. It must have shocked her with its volume, because she grabbed his hand, the one that had been resting at her throat, and pasted it over her mouth. Then pressed both her own hands over it, like she was trying to make sure she obeyed his directive to be silent but didn’t trust herself to do it on her own.
Fuck. His hips, which he’d been allowing to rock gently, surged forward. She made an inarticulate noise and scraped her teeth against his palm, like she was trying to bite him but couldn’t get a hold on him.
Her hands left his then and came down and clamped on to the arms of the chair. She pressed against it, using it as leverage to lift her hips more firmly toward the hand that was working her.
He toyed with the idea of backing off, of bringing her back from the edge and making her wait, but honestly, he didn’t want to. He wanted her to come, then he wanted to go inside and make her come again. Let himself come with her.
So he whispered in her ear, low and dirty. “Yeah, Gia. Fuck yourself on my hand.” She liked that directive, judging by how furiously her hips bucked, so he kept it up, keeping his voice so quiet he could barely hear himself over the rush of the ocean and the din from the pool below them. “That’s right. Take what you need, Gia.”
He kept his hand over her mouth, because she seemed to want it there, but only lightly, so she could easily push it away or turn her head.
“Make yourself come. Use my hand to make yourself come.”
And she did, biting back a scream he would have given anything to hear. He let his hand fall from her mouth back to her throat and rest there lightly so he could feel the thundering of her pulse in concert with the shuddering of her pussy.
He held her for a long time, eventually removing both hands and just hugging her while her breathing returned to normal.
She’d gone limp in his arms. He’d felt her relax before, but this was beyond that. She was heavy and vulnerable, and, he flattered himself, sated.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, her tone tinged this time with equal parts amusement and awe.
He smiled and kissed her cheek.
* * *
Bennett was always doing that—kissing her after sex. Dropping these affectionate, seemingly innocuous little kisses on totally innocent body parts.
It wasn’t called for.
It didn’t freak her out like it had last time, though. She wasn’t holding back panic, which was…interesting. It was more a minor annoyance, like a bug she hadn’t managed to swat away before it bit her.
She would have objected—purely on principle—except for the fact that after that kiss, he swatted her thigh and said, “Let’s go inside and do that again, and this time, you can make as much noise as you like.”
And dammit if she didn’t want that more than she wanted to object to that kiss. A lot more.
Still, she wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to tease him, so she stretched, making sure to writhe strategically as she did so, huffed a satisfied, purring sigh, and said, “I don’t
know. I think I’m good. I should probably go find the girls now.”
He responded by picking her up, like he had earlier in the water, taking her back inside, and dropping her on the bed.
She tried not to laugh, but once it became clear she was going to lose that battle, she surrendered and cracked up.
He rolled his eyes, but he was holding back laughter. He stared at her for a moment before reaching back and pulling off his T-shirt. Then he shoved his still-unbuttoned jeans down, grabbing his underwear on the way, and stepped out of them.
The sight of him like that, naked and hard, sobered her up pretty quick.
“Still want to leave?”
She shook her head no.
He climbed onto the bed and crawled over her, resting one knee and one hand on each side of her, caging her in against the bed. “What about now?”
“What if I did?” she teased. “This”—she gestured at him as well as she could, given how hemmed in she was—“isn’t very conducive to me leaving.”
Without a word he pushed himself up and rolled over, landing on his back next to her, no part of him touching her. She felt the loss of his body heat.
She’d been teasing, but of course he had taken her seriously. He would never want her to feel pressured. It was interesting. In the short time she’d known him, she’d come to understand him as a person who exerted control over every situation he encountered. It was how he’d gotten sober. How he’d built his restaurant from nothing. How he’d gotten them to Florida when she was freaking out at airline employees.
So to see him so easily ceding control to her was…puzzling.
But also not worth thinking about right now—she had more important items on her agenda. So she did her own roll, aiming for the reverse of their previous positions as she planted one knee on either side of him. Kneeling up, she mimicked him from earlier, kicking out of her panties and grabbing her dress and working it up over her head. Then, completing the mirror-image maneuver, she placed a hand on each side of the bed and lowered herself so she was hovering over but not touching him.
“You weren’t wearing a bra today,” he remarked. On the surface of things, he spoke mildly, like he was making an idle observation about the weather. But when you looked close—and she was looking close—his nostrils were doing a flaring thing.
“I don’t really need to.” There had been a period when she was younger when she’d lamented her small breasts, but now they just seemed like the kind of breasts she was supposed to have. And they were good for modeling. “In a sundress, I’ll usually just forget it. No need to worry about bra straps showing.”
He nodded like that made sense, but once again, careful observation suggested that he was not as placid as he seemed. He had to visibly unclench his jaw to get his next sentence out. “So you weren’t wearing a bra earlier, at the restaurant.”
She grinned. He liked the idea of her braless. “That is correct.”
He nodded.
She decided to keep fanning the flame. “I also wasn’t wearing a bra the day we met. I’d been preparing for plane travel. You know, going for maximum comfort. But then with that storm, there were a few times when I was so cold, my nipples got all puckered up, and I thought maybe I should have gone with a bra. I wondered if you noticed.”
He gave up the façade then, groaned and closed his eyes as if he was imagining it. “I noticed.” He sounded almost comically displeased at the memory.
She giggled. The weird thing about sex with Bennett was that it was sometimes funny. She wouldn’t have thought it possible to mix such bone-shattering pleasure with joking around, but it came so easily with him. So she kept laying it on. “Yeah, too bad you brushed off my slutty advances that night, or you could have seen for yourself.”
His eyes flew open. “I was a fucking idiot, Gia. An idiot.”
Then his arms banded around her, and he pulled her down on top of him.
His eyes burned. The joking was done. He was dead serious. “An idiot,” he said once more, before kissing her. He slid his tongue inside her mouth, and her bones liquefied. She was already lying on top of him, but she gave up any pretense of holding herself up and melted into him, into his relentless kisses.
His hands came to her cheeks and he repositioned her head, deepening the angle of their kiss before letting his hands slide up to tangle in her hair. She moaned and ground herself on him. It had taken no time at all for moisture to gather again between her legs, for the breasts that were so small to take on an out-of-proportion role in her consciousness, as pressure and pleasure both gathered in them. She rubbed them shamelessly against his chest. He grunted, and his hands left her hair and came down with a satisfying slap on her ass.
“Stop moving or this is going to be over before it starts,” he ordered, which, of course, only made her speed up.
Another grunt, a distinctly unsatisfied one this time, and he sat up, taking her with him, and physically set her aside. She landed on her back on the bed—the bed he heaved himself out of.
“Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer, just went over to the desk and started rummaging around in a plastic bag. When he turned, he had already ripped open a condom package.
“Oh!” she said, belatedly approving of this interruption, and then again—“Oh!”—as he sheathed himself while walking toward her.
“This still cool?”
Though in theory she appreciated that he was asking, she couldn’t help rolling her eyes. “What part of anything I’ve said or done is telegraphing to you that this is not cool?”
He shrugged, the casual gesture at odds with the glittering fire of his eyes. “Just checking.”
Her eyeballs were no longer under her conscious control, apparently, because they rolled again without her even trying.
Also not under her control? Her thighs. Because her second response to his question—her nonverbal, involuntary response—was to spread them. To let them fall open so she could display herself to him—all of herself.
Not that she objected to this response—her thighs were smart. Go, thighs!
That bold little move achieved her desired aim. It shouldn’t have been possible, but his eyes burned even brighter. “Fuck, Gia,” he muttered as he arrived at the edge of the bed. “You’re killing me.”
Instead of climbing onto the bed and coming toward her, he reached for her, wrapping his arms under and around her thighs, and pulled her toward him—right to the edge of the mattress. Then, the whole maneuver one smooth motion, he slid right in.
“Oh!” she said again. Maybe that was the only word she knew. It sure seemed like it, because once he was fully seated, buried in her to the hilt, his feet planted on the floor and a sheen of sweat rising on his brow, she said it again, but this time it wasn’t a surprised, “Oh!” It was a satisfied, dirty exhortation.
“This,” he said, his voice sounding so pained she would have been concerned in any other context.
She waited for more, but that was all he said. Then he said it again. “This.”
Maybe that was the only word he knew.
Whatever, she loved hearing it. Loved that he was losing himself so much in the sensations they were creating, in her, that he’d lost his ability to form complete sentences. So, wanting more, both because her own need was rising again and also because she was getting off on the power she had over him, she lifted her knees to her chest and wrapped her forearms around her shins, opening herself to him as much as possible. It was obscene, and she loved it.
He did, too, judging by the inhuman sound that ripped from his throat in the second before he lost it, jerking his hips back violently and then pounding into her. Then he did it again and again and again.
“Oh my God, Bennett!” She’d thought a moment ago that she was approaching another orgasm. It was on the horizon. Her body was responding to him in the usual way—heat gathering between her legs, at her breasts. Her body was straining toward his.
But the thing
about Bennett was that the normal road map didn’t apply—to anything. Not to revealing big secret truths, and not to orgasms, either.
In the case of the latter, it was like he’d ripped it out of her. Just reached in and taken it before she’d expected its arrival. One second it was on the horizon, the next it was there.
“Yes,” he said, in that way he had. He liked to narrate her orgasms, she’d noticed, and she wasn’t complaining. The way he exhorted her, how invested he was, made everything hotter. “Come for me, Gia. Come for me.”
She did, laughing because he’d said it like she had a damn choice in the matter.
She went limp, a noodle on the bed, and he hopped off and started rummaging around out of her sight. Was he going for another condom?
She couldn’t believe she was going to say this, but, “I don’t think I’m up for—”
He reappeared with her camera. “Have you taken a picture today yet?”
“Yep, of Wendy trying on her dress.”
“Let’s take another one.” He was advancing toward her, his eyes dancing.
She tried to be annoyed but failed as he hopped onto the bed next to her and started tickling her. “I just told you,” she said through her giggles. “I already took my picture for today!”
“Well, maybe I want to remember this. Maybe this is my picture for today.”
He was still teasing, but he was also…arranging her. Pulling the sheet up so her breasts were covered.
“Bennett!” she laughingly protested when he stepped back and lifted the viewfinder to his eye.
She tried to put her hands up to shield her face, but he was fast—and she was still laughing.
Dammit.
Chapter Sixteen
Getting herself out of Bennett’s room was hard. Out of his room, out of his bed, out of his arms. Not hard like he was objecting, or trying to detain her. No, he just lay there on the bed all sprawled out like the king of the castle and watched her silently as she got dressed and attempted to fix her makeup.
It was more like…she really, really didn’t want to leave.
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