Problematic Summer Romance (Not in Love, #2)(104)

“Maya,” he warns.

I hum around his cock. Feel him shiver.

“I’m really trying to be a gentleman here.”

A lurid pop. “Are you?” I ask, delighted by the roll of his eyes as I lick the underside of the head.

“Yeah. But—” I twist my hand at the base of his cock, and his words catch. “But I’m starting to think that you’d let me do anything to you, Maya. Anything at all.”

“I’m not sure how—oh—how you had missed it before—what are you—?”

He has my back pressed against the mattress, and is inside me, just like that. A little too hard, too fast, the burn of the stretch otherworldly, the multiple thrusts until he really is all the way in, ruthless, perfect—

“Yeah,” I say.

“Jesus, Maya.” His hands close around my wrists. Trap them above my head. “You have no damn patience.”

Not when it comes to you, I want to say, but my mouth is too full of his kiss.

“I haven’t taken a single breath since Sicily,” he says against my ear, inhaling me, rolling his hips into mine. “I can’t stop thinking about you. It’s fucking distracting. You are disruptive. Of my work. Of my sleep. Of my ability to think.” I thought he was all in, but no. Another push, and he bottoms out. “Fuck. Fuck. You feel better than anything I could make up with my mind.”

I smile against his jaw. Try to free my arms. Realize that I can’t. So I say, “Conor?”

“Yeah.”

“I want you to fuck me a thousand times. Everywhere you humanly can.”

He very nearly comes. His breath is loud, a rough exhale against my shoulder, then a deep grunt as his hands rip the sheets off the mattress as his cock jerks inside me. “You are so fucking dangerous.”

I grin, and he splays me open like I’m a doll, unmoving under him, and kisses and kisses and kisses me, the shallow, lingering slide of his mouth against mine, his hand coming up to the stem of my neck to angle me to him, and I try to move my hips so that we can finally—

He pulls out. Flips me on my belly. Slams back in, fucking his way into me, and it’s so agonizingly good, I see stars.

“Menace,” he growls in my ear, and when he starts moving, the rest of the world recedes, his thrusts so hard that I’m sure he’ll finish before me, but his hand reaches around, his fingers find my clit, and this is so beyond the realm of good, I’m not sure what to do with my own body. I claw at the pillow, say nonsensical things that only amount to please, don’t stop, if you stop—please don’t stop. The pleasure blasts through me with the force of an earthquake. I press my palm against my mouth to muffle my scream.

“No.” Conor yanks my hand away, laces his fingers with mine, pins it to the mattress. “No. You’re going to fucking scream it. I want to hear it. I want to hear you and you’re going to let me.”

I do. And I dissolve.

It’s not until much later, his arms wrapped around me like safety ropes, that it occurs to me to say, “Conor?”

“Yeah?”

I squeeze my eyes shut. Smile into the pillow. “Welcome home.”





Chapter 43




It’s early days.

Between the two of us, there’s a lot of love that had nowhere to go for a long while.

We’re making up for lost time.

That’s what I tell myself when we can’t seem to carve time or space for anything but each other.

“Let’s go somewhere,” he suggests a few days after coming back, running his fingers through my hair. “Just you and me.”

“Like, where?”

“Anywhere Seb can’t find me.”

I laugh. “To go somewhere, we would have to leave the house. Are you willing to do that?”

No. He isn’t. He acknowledges it later that night. Slow rhythm. Steady breeze blowing the curtains apart through the open balcony door. I’m too boneless to do anything but lie there, feeling that warm pressure building inside me, so happy, I can see the shape of it on the ceiling.

I love you, I think, closing my arms around his neck. I don’t say it, but he hears it anyway, and smiles against my neck.



* * *





The dinner happens about two weeks after Conor gets back.

He’s not nervous about it. “It won’t change anything,” he reassures me, and I believe it. I’m not worried, either, but I have little tolerance for awkward moments, and I’m grateful when Minami asks, “Should we just…acknowledge it?”

I’m still chewing the first bite of Eli’s risotto. It’s my favorite of his dishes, and he knows it. “Coaxed you here like an ant into a sugar trap,” he whispered at me when I let myself in. “Don’t worry, the Trivial Pursuit is locked away.”

“What is it that we should acknowledge?” Rue asks, looking up from her food, and god bless her for being who she is.

“You know,” Minami says. “The fact that Hark and Maya are currently—”

“There is no need to talk about what they are doing in detail,” Eli points out. “Dating. They are dating.”

“As the older brother, did you give your approval?” Minami asks, which has Eli taking a sip of his red wine.