“I’ve got you,” he murmured against my skin. “Tell me what you need.”
Everything. Nothing. Him.
I couldn’t say it. Instead, I rocked into his hand, slow and shameless, chasing the release. His fingers flexed, rubbing me through the fabric in lazy circles that hitched my breath.
The boat swayed beneath us, gentle and relentless, matching the rhythm I set against his palm. My hands roamed—over his shoulders, down his chest, lower—until I palmed him through his shorts. Thick. Hot. Straining. When I squeezed, his hips bucked into my grip, and he cursed softly against my neck.
“Sloane…”
I kissed him again—deeper. I didn’t have a name for what this had become. Not simply lust, though God, there lived plenty of that between us. This ran deeper—the need to be near him, to touch him, to let him hold me until the world stopped threatening to swallow me again. His thumb found my clit through the damp cotton and pressed; I gasped into his mouth. My thighs trembled, and butterflies—actual, stupid, cheesy-novel butterflies—erupted in my stomach so violently I almost laughed.
Thirty years on this planet. Every relationshipaflatline.It took the literal end of the world, my grumpy, impossible boss, and the open ocean to give me this.
His mouth moved back to my ear, breath hot.
“You’re shaking,” he whispered. “Still sensitive?”
I nodded, bit my lip hard.
“Good.” His voice dropped lower, darker. “Because I’m not done with you yet.”
His fingers slipped under the waistband again. I cried out softly and muffled it against his shoulder.
It hit me that no one had ever touched me as if I mattered, as if my body held answers worth learning, as if the sounds I made meant something to him beyond his own satisfaction. Callan touched me as if I existed, as if every gasp and shudder and involuntary rock of my hips told him something he wanted to memorize.
He gave me everything I asked for without my having to say a word.
And somewhere in the middle of it all—his fingers inside me, his mouth on mine, the boat rocking us together in the pale morning sun—I realized the fear had gone quiet.
Not gone. Not yet.
But quiet.
Because this man had his hand between my legs and his eyes locked on mine, and he looked at me as if I’d hung every star in the sky. And I believed him, not because he said it, but because his hands said it, his mouth said it.
You’re not broken. You never were.
He let me come on his fingers—hard.
When the waves finally ebbed, he withdrew his hand slowly, deliberately, letting me register every inch of the drag.
My slickness glistened on his fingers in the bright morning light.
Without a word—without breaking my gaze—he brought them to his mouth.
His lips closed around them. He sucked, slow and thorough, tongue working over his own skin, tasting every trace of me as if I existed as something rare and necessary.
And something shifted in his eyes—a hunger far beyond the physical, beyond want—something that looked terrifyingly close to the same thing unraveling inside my own chest.
He knew.
He already knew what this meant; he’d known before I did. He leaned in and kissed me.
Deep. Open-mouthed.
He pulled back enough to speak, voice shaky, low against my swollen mouth.
“Baby… can you taste yourself?”