With each drive, the headboard smacked the wall behind us. Pound, thump. Pound, thump. I found myself pressing my hand to the wood to quiet the noise so I could focus on him and only him. But it didn’t work. Pound, thunk. Pound, bang. But as he powered into me with another thrust, this one so intense that I really did feel my eyes roll back into my head, the thump changed to more of a…crumbling noise. And it was then that I felt something…powdery, almost. And it was coming down on top of us.
I looked up, and I realized he was taking me so hard that he was cracking the plaster. He was breaking the house. That was how passionate he was. It came down on us like fine sand, and a bigger crumble landed on the edge of the headboard.
“Wall…cracking,” I gasped, because it was all I could manage between the mind-blowing drives.
Max looked up, but he had no response. With one quick tug, he yanked me out of the line of the dust, into the middle of the mattress, so my head was off the pillows. He put his forearm in its place, a perfect fit under my neck. Deep inside me, he paused for a second. He moved my hair off my cheek, he sank down as if for a kiss, but didn’t kiss me. Lips touching, no kissing. “Fuck this house. Fuck everything. Fuck the world. Fuck everything but you.”
I squeezed down on him hard. “Or maybe fuck me, especially.”
He groaned and put the Y of his thumb and forefinger under my jaw. “Dirty talk. But you look so sweet.”
I rolled my belly to make him shift inside me. “Not sweet.”
“Not fucking sweet at all.”
He planted his knees and drew me up to sitting in his lap, my legs hooked around him, my ass to his massive thighs. He plunged into me so deeply that all I could do was roar.
He licked along the line of my throat, and his scruff scratched the cool line he’d left with his tongue. When he got to my ear, he turned my face to the side. He tugged at my earring with his teeth until the back slid off, and he let both parts fall to the mattress. “I don’t want to lose that,” I told him. His grip on my jaw was so tight, I could feel my own heartbeat against his fingers.
“I’ll buy you new ones. Hundreds of them. Spoil you fucking rotten until you’re insufferable.”
This man. How had I not seen this underside of him? This filthy gorgeous talk that made me so crazy? “I love you like this.”
“I love you like this,” he answered with a thrust. “I don’t want anything between us,” he growled and then tugged at my earlobe with his teeth. “Not an earring.” He moved his thumbs to my lips. “Not a secret.” His other hand gripped my hip. “Not a strip of lace. Nothing.”
The words, the feeling, the overwhelming, intoxicating high that was Max sent me spiraling. The position was absolutely perfect, absolutely what I needed, and I started to feel the flicker of my orgasm take over, the first rumble deep inside my body. Max is doing that to you. Max’s cock. Max’s body. Him. It’s him.
“Oh Jesus,” I whispered.
“Yeah?”
Max. Your Max. He’s got you. He does. And he’s going to make you come so hard. I couldn’t even speak because I was heading so fast toward the rapids. “You’re going to make me come.”
“Again and again. Count on it.” He situated me a little higher so my clit was pressing against his pelvis with every drive from below. The hand that had been to my jaw moved down between us, the front of his forearm to my stomach. And then his fingertips met my clit.
Class V rapids. Oncoming. No life vest. No turning back. My walls started to flutter, and my legs started to shake even harder. “Can I come?”
“Do it,” he said, putting a long kiss to my chest and then moving down to my nipples. I watched him in the moonlight, and as soon as he put his lips to the left one—oh sweet baby Jesus—his eyes closed, and that aggression washed away. Total peace, total calm. Total happiness because of me.
The flicker shifted to a tremor in my clit, and I felt myself heading into the falls.
“I’m going to let go for you, okay?” I knew it was my voice, but it didn’t feel like me at all. I felt him smile into my breast, and he nodded into me but didn’t stop sucking, not even for a second.
His touch was perfect, like mine but better, and he made steady circles around my clit. Didn’t experiment, didn’t screw around with fancy stuff; he just gave me dependable, confident, continuous spirals that made my whole reality spin like a top.
“Come on my cock, Rosie. Do it. Now.”
With that, left became right. Here became there. The ocean became the forest. The leaves turned into the waves. I was diving. I was falling. Crashing through the rapids into him.
9
Max
Rosie came like a woman who wore naughty lace even when nobody was looking. She came hard, and she came loud. She came like a fucking queen. She didn’t whimper—she fucking roared. She gritted her teeth and dug in her nails, and all I could think was, Naked was nothing. This was what I’d always needed to see. It was tough as hell to stop myself coming as she did, but I needed to see how she finished before I pumped myself into her. I needed to see her all the way through it—until that happened, I didn’t give a fuck about myself.
The muscles of her neck tensed, and she held her breath between moans. Her pussy gripped my cock tight. I’d planned to get another one out of her, or maybe three. Except just that first one went on and on and on, like waves in high tide. From the way she writhed, from the way she stayed gone, I knew they weren’t coming at her back to back; it was one long, perfect orgasm, the most beautiful goddamned thing I’d ever fucking seen.
As soon as her wetness thickened, as soon as it slipped out of her and onto my balls, I knew I didn’t stand a chance of holding out. The full-body writhes lessened, and she started to come down off of it. She gripped her inner thighs with her hands and dug her fingers into her own flesh. “Fuck. Fuck,” she growled. As her pussy unlocked from my cock, enough for me to think in actual sentences again, her legs fell open for me. I gripped her inner thighs hard, fingers on the wetness that had spilled from her pussy, and my precum, too. I gripped her hard enough to see the depressions where my hands had been, outlined in shadow. I stayed inside her as she panted. I stayed inside her as she whimpered. I stayed inside her as she said, “Thank you, Max, thank you.” Only when she opened her eyes did I let myself start driving into her again—slowly at first, because I knew she’d be sensitive.
She blinked hard. “How can anything feel so good? How can anybody be so amazing to me?”
“You’re the amazing one, Rosie. I’m just here worshiping at the altar.”
“God.”
She was in old-school missionary, but it was like I couldn’t get deep enough. I thought about putting her on her knees, but this time—this first time—I knew I had to look into her eyes as I came. It had to be that way, no fucking doubt. So to get deeper, to get every inch of my cock into her that her body would allow, I put her right leg between my thighs and pinned it down with my weight. Her left leg, I raised up so that her heel was past my shoulder. When I drove into her like that, she whined, this fucking desperate noise of pleasure that made my cock pulse in response. She turned her head back and forth, and I watched her goddamned toes curl again. “You coming again?”
She smiled, eyes still closed. “Still coming off the last one.”
Fucking yes. She was confident, sexy, feminine in her movements in a way I’d never seen her be out in the world. Her gaze met mine, and she raised her arms above her head. Then she brought her mouth to the skin of her inner arm and lightly nipped her own flesh, drawing that perfect silk back slightly between her teeth before letting it go.
“Fuuuuuck, Rosie.” I’d never seen anything so hot in my whole fucking life.
Hotter than her actual body was the way she acted about it. Like she knew she was a bombshell, knew she was right off the charts. I loved it, and I wanted to punish her, not because she was so beautiful, but because she’d never let me see this beauty before.
I drove into her
hard again so that the bed whacked the wall. The head of my cock, engorged from edging back and forth through her orgasm, made the tip even more sensitive than usual. She squeezed, and I pounded her with everything I had. The fucking plaster sprinkled down, but the house could’ve come down around us, and it wouldn’t have made shit for difference to me.
“I’m gonna come inside you unless you stop me,” I told her.
Her hand gripped my knee, and she nodded.
“You better be sure,” I told her as I felt my balls tighten up, slapping against her ass, almost painful with every drive. The good kind of pain, though. The pain that gets you where you need to go.
“I’m sure.”
“You want my cum inside you?”
“Inside me first and always.”
I gave her everything I had, and she took it like a motherfucking goddess. She squeezed me, she held me, and when I’d fucked her so hard that my balls ached, she filled the darkness with a whispered, “Please, please, please, please.”
And I filled her pussy with every last drop I had.
10
Rosie
A throbbing hangover and fuzzy teeth were waiting for me when I woke up, and then it all came back to me in flashes, like a flipbook of Instax photos held together by an office clip. The pool table, the moonlight hand puzzle, the stairs, the striptease, the plaster, the begging. The growling. The banging. The coming.
Max.
Maxwell Benjamin Doyle. Born August 21. Favorite color: blue. Favorite food: nachos. Favorite beer: Double IPA. Least favorite food: grapefruit. Favorite movie, according to what he told the rest of the world: Blade Runner. Actual favorite movie: Legends of the Fall. Favorite song, when he talked to everybody else: Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Actual favorite song, as only I knew: U2, “With or Without You.” Total softie, 100%.
Also, the fifth man I’d ever slept with. The very best, hands down, no comparison, not even the same league. Unless I’d dreamed it.
I pried my eye open. There he was, the man about whom I thought I’d known everything, in bed with me. Naked. My thighs were still burning like I’d spent all night on the stair stepper.
Definitely not a dream.
Quick on the heels of my heart-melt at seeing him in my bed was the overpowering regret at having made a decision that remapped my entire reality. It wasn’t hangover regret either—I’d been tipsy, but not stupid drunk. Tipsy enough, though, to have no self-control at all. Normally, that manifested in eating a whole pint of Cherry Garcia in bed while I watched Felicity over and over again.
Not this time.
This time, it was Max. Over and over again, Max.
I’d thought that my dread at meeting Jed of the Loafers was like a bad clam? This felt like I’d helped myself to a second helping of a very haphazardly prepared paella. So I clapped my eye shut like a mosquito had just flown into it and tried to hit a mental reset button, like there used to be on the first Nintendo, the button that would fix everything. Reset. Reset! I could not have done this. I could not have slept with Max. There were three billion men on the planet, and I slept with the one who knew I still slept with a stuffed rabbit that I won at a fair when I was five. There were eligible men all over the Eastern Seaboard, and I managed to get entangled with the one who knew almonds gave me hives on my tush, the one who knew I shouldn’t eat sauerkraut unless I planned to be in solitary confinement for a day afterward. One of the very few people in my life that I knew I couldn’t live without.
I could not have done this. I could not.
Except I had.
The sun was rising, and a tiny sliver of light accentuated the ripples of his abs. He slept with his hand behind his head, and the sheets were draped over him like he’d been set up for a love scene in a soap opera. All the naughty bits were covered. Just barely.
Except, of course, for the morning wood. That was covered, sure, but very hard to ignore. It was huge. Absolutely huge. And perfect. And with the outline of his balls just visible. As if my fingers weren’t attached to me, they moved to the sheets, plucked at the fabric, and revealed the dark hair in a sexy patch. The pink, taut skin of the head peeked out. Then those veins, oh those…
I sort of hiccup-gasped, let go of the sheet, and tried as hard as I could to stop myself from moaning out loud. Again, though, bad paella! It all came flooding back to me. Every dirty word, every thrust.
An endless, amazing night of lovemaking. With my best friend.
I yanked my eyes away from the rumpled sheets and moved them to the window. The sunshine stung my retinas, and I watched a bumblebee hover outside, like a plump-winged grape. This wasn’t my first trip to the regret rodeo. I was thirty-four years old. I had about as much sense in choosing men as a roulette wheel. I had seen this movie before.
But one movie I hadn’t seen was… I let my eyes move over to his hard-on again, now actually getting bigger and actually shifting the sheets.
Lord.
Mercifully, Julia Caesar stumbled into the room with about as much grace as a man in a bear costume. I wasn’t usually glad to see her, not unless I was wearing long pants and had a sofa between us, but this was different. She was a living, scowling, hungry distraction. But she looked away when she saw me and stared at my bookshelf with one paw in mid-step. I made soft kissing noises, and she gave me a quick glance. Oh, please. Don’t be absurd.
She wore her signature grimace, the result of a pretty pronounced underbite, which pinned her top lip under her bottom incisors, making her very bulldog-like, and contributing to her general air of feline, apathetic invincibility. Another day with you staring at me and trying to force-feed me low-sodium luncheon meats. Happy Monday to me.
Julia gripped the carpet with her claws, making a snagging, ripping noise as the fibers succumbed to her talons. I made more kisses to try to stop her from waking Max with her claw sharpening. She swaggered over to the windowsill to take her morning sunning position. Outside, a row of unsuspecting sparrows danced around, happily fluttering eventual murder victims.
I turned my attention back to Max and took a deep breath, and it wasn’t particularly…pleasant. A whole night of nachos and onion rings was taking its revenge. Even my figurative bad paella would’ve been more palatable. The whole situation was bad enough, but to think of him waking up, pulling me into his arms, and finding the human equivalent of an onion blossom…
I couldn’t handle it. Too close to home, too embarrassing. I was nowhere near poised enough to handle a mistake like this head on, and certainly not without minty fresh breath. Carefully, and trying not to get too wrapped up in the girth of his forearm, my gosh, I moved Max’s arm off of me and slipped out of bed, tiptoeing into the bathroom. Julia trundled along after me, making the floorboards creak. I turned and stared at her, and she froze, snapping her face toward my dresser. I held my ground, though, and pointed at her slowly. As I did, her big, gold eyes glanced up at me, and I put my finger to my lips to tell her to shush it with the trundles. Like this was some sort of game of chess, she lifted one huge paw and dangled it tantalizingly over the floorboards. I pursed my lips and zeroed in on her weirdly human eyes. Don’t you dare, Caesar.
Her paw came down a millimeter. Or what, Brutus?
Once, I’d seen a nature show with mountain goats about to face off, so I summoned up my inner Rocky Mountain cloven-hoofed fury and I turned my head like that, like I was about to charge her. Much to my utter astonishment—Is this what a successful hostage negotiation feels like?—it worked. She placed her paw softly on the ground and twinkle-toed her way along. In the bathroom, she leapt up on the back of the toilet seat, pretending to hide behind my towels. I drew the door shut behind me, careful to make sure the click of the knob didn’t wake him. I stared at myself in the mirror. There was a very, very clear hickey on my throat, in the exact shape of Max’s mouth. There was even a hint of teeth marks. I planted my face in my hands.
After I’d taken a few breaths to steady myself, I turned on the
faucet to a bare trickle, and Julia leapt from the toilet to the countertop. She stared at the water and extended a furry gray paw into it and then snatched it back, offended by the shocking wetness of the water…or something.
As I wiped off the weird black glops of makeup that I always had in the inner corners of my eyes in the morning, I tried to come up with a strategy. What was I going to do to make this less awkward? I couldn’t blame the booze. I was now officially older than Jesus, which meant I was also definitely old enough to know better. I couldn’t blame the bad date, because that hadn’t been such a huge surprise—he’d listed hanging with my bros as one of his hobbies. All the fish in the barrel were most definitely dead. The chicken salad was spoiled.
All I could do was blame the obvious. The temptation of Max Doyle had been too much. And I hadn’t been able to resist. On the list of Huge Life Mistakes, this one was right up there at the top.
But I can’t pretend it didn’t happen, I thought to myself as I splashed my face with some water and put a dollop of toothpaste on my toothbrush, while Julia investigated the water with one paw and then the other, wax on, wax off. As I turned on my toothbrush and put it to my teeth, the bathroom door opened. Max stood there and leaned dreamily on the doorframe. Messy-haired. Buck naked. Hard. Perfect.
Slowly, I made circles around my top molars and blinked at him. He adjusted his balls and smiled at me.
I couldn’t fake business-as-usual. Could I?
So Good (An Alpha Dogs Novel) Page 7