Sweet Filthy Boy (Wild Seasons, #1)(37)
Oh shit.
His suit jacket is folded over his other forearm, laptop bag still slung over his shoulder. He was rushing out the door.
“Oh.” The flush of embarrassment creeps up my neck. Pushing his hand away from my body, I begin, “I didn’t—”
“Don’t stop,” he says, jaw clenching.
“But you’re leavi—”
“Mia, please,” he says, his voice so low and soft it drips over me like warm honey. “I want this.”
His arm shakes, eyes roll closed, and I let mine do the same before I fully wake up, before I lose my nerve. What had I thought in Vegas? That I wanted a different life. That I wanted to be brave. I wasn’t brave then, but I pretended to be.
With my eyes closed, I can pretend again. I’m the sexbomb who doesn’t care about his job. I’m the insatiable wife. I’m the only thing he wants.
I’m drenched and swollen and the noise he makes when he slides his fingers over me is unreal: a deep, rumbling groan. I could come with barely an exhale across my skin I’m so keyed up, and when he seems to want to explore me, to tease, I rise into his fingers, seeking. He gives me two, pushed straight into me, and I grip his forearm, rocking up, f*cking his hand. I can’t stop long enough to care how desperate I seem.
Heat crawls up my skin and I pretend it’s the heat of the spotlight.
“Oh, let me see,” he whispers. “Let go.”
“Aah,” I gasp. My orgasm takes shape around the edges, the sensation crystallizes and then builds, crawling up from where his thumb now circles frantically against my skin until my orgasm is hammering through me. Clutching his arm in both hands, I cry out, rippling around his fingers. My legs and arms and spine feel fluid, filled with liquid heat, molten as relief floods my bloodstream.
I open my eyes. Ansel holds still, and then slowly pulls his fingers from me, slipping his hand back out from under the covers. He watches me as consciousness eventually pushes sleep completely aside. With his other hand, he hitches his bag higher on his shoulder. The room seems to tick in the quiet, and even though I try to grasp on to my feigned confidence, I can feel my chest, my neck, my face grow warm with heat.
“Sorry, I—”
He silences me with his wet fingers pressed to my mouth. “Don’t,” he growls. “Don’t take it back.”
He traps his fingers with his lips pressed to mine, and then slips his tongue across his fingers, across my mouth, tasting me and releasing a sweet, relieved exhale. When he pulls back enough for me to focus on his eyes, they’re full of determination. “I’m coming home early tonight.”
Chapter NINE
IT SEEMS HARDER to keep track of what I’m spending when euros still feel like play money. Given how different things feel with Ansel from how they did in the States—and even though I’m in love with this place—part of me thinks I should stay for two weeks, see everything I possibly can in that time, and then fly home to make amends with my father so I don’t have to resort to prostitution or stripping when I move to Boston and begin apartment hunting.
But the idea of facing my father now makes my skin go cold. I know what I’ve done was impulsive and maybe even dangerous. I know any loving father in this situation would have a right to be angry. It’s just that everything makes my father angry; we’ve all grown desensitized over time. I’ve been sorry enough times when I didn’t need to be; I can’t find it in me to be sorry this time. I may be scared and lonely, not knowing whether Ansel’s schedule will let up, what will happen with us tonight, tomorrow, next week, or what will happen when I find myself in a situation where I can’t communicate with someone, but this was the first decision in my life that feels like it’s only mine.
I’m still completely lost in my head, overthinking my wake-up call with Ansel, when I step out of the shower. In front of me, the bathroom mirror dries perfectly, clear of any stray water droplets, any streaks, as if it’s been treated with something. I’d offer to clean to pull some of my weight but there’s absolutely nothing that needs to be done. The bathroom window gleams, too, sun shining directly inside. Curiosity prickles at the edges of my thoughts, and I walk around, inspecting everything. The apartment is spotless, and—in my experience—for a man, strangely so. Before I get to the living room windows, I know what I’ll find.
Or, rather, what I won’t find. I know I pressed my hand to the glass my first real day here, watching him climb onto his motorcycle. I know I did it more than once. But there’s no handprint there, only more unblemished, crystal-clear glass. No one has been here but us. At some point, in his sliver of time at home, he took a minute to wipe the windows and mirrors clean.
THE OLD WOMAN who lives on the bottom floor is sweeping the doorstep when I walk out of the elevator and I spend at least an hour with her on my way out. Her English comes in fragments, mixed with French words I can’t translate, but somehow we make what could be an awkward conversation into something surprisingly easy. She tells me the elevator was added in the seventies, after she and her husband moved in here. She tells me the vegetables are much better down Rue de Rome than in the market on the corner. She offers me tiny green grapes with bitter seeds that give me goose bumps but I can’t seem to stop eating them. And then she tells me she’s happy to see Ansel smiling so much now, and that she never really liked the other one.