Under One Roof (The STEMinist Novellas, #1)(31)

The thing is, I don’t want to stop. I’ve come once, already, just from him sliding into me and stretching me too tight, from the feel of his hand clutching my hip bone—a small miracle in and of itself, because it usually takes me forever. But if I let him take me to bed, he’s going to wreck me. He is going to ruin me for anyone else. He is going to destroy me in each and every possible way.

“Please,” he murmurs.

I don’t really have a choice: I want to say yes, so I nod. Whatever you want, you can have, Liam.

It’s not pretty, when he pulls out. He gasps a breath of pure frustration and it’s clear that he hates it. I hate it, too, and I’m the one who just had a life-altering orgasm. Liam’s the one who gave it to me and took very little for himself—which doesn’t even come as a surprise.

I wouldn’t have fallen for an unkind man.

He takes my top and bra off, and I’m too stupid with aftershocks of pleasure to do anything but stand there and let him, watch him stare his fill with dark, unreadable eyes, even though I’m completely naked and my belly button is still an outie and the lacrosse scar is there, gleaming white in the dim lights of the room.

“Come here. Mara, you . . . Fuck. Come here.” His jaw is tense as he picks me up and carries me to his room. My first time here, but I know this place—because I know Liam. Dark colors. Framed pictures of semihostile nature from the trips he told me about. Sparse furniture. A stack of books on his bedside table. Reading glasses, the ones I tease him about, unfolded in the middle of his desk. I want to explore every corner, but there’s no time. The mattress bounces underneath my back, and then he’s taking up my entire field of view.

“Can I kiss you?” His mouth is hovering a few inches above mine, so I press my hands down his nape and arch into him, kissing him myself.

It’s slow, and warm, and achingly careful. He was fucking me less than a minute ago. He was so deep inside me that I felt deliciously split in two. But now there’s this gentle sliding of lips and tongues, Liam nibbling on me, holding first my chin, then the back of my head, and my heart sings for him.

I am catastrophically, ruinously in love with you.

“I love kissing you,” I sigh in his mouth.

“Mara.” His lips. His voice. “I want to kiss you everywhere.” He moves back, as if something occurs to him just then. “Can I go down on you?”

I feel my cheeks heat. Does he really want to?

“Just for a minute,” he adds, and then . . . Incredible, how he’s waiting for my answer. He just bent me over the kitchen sink and slid into me and made me come on his cock, but he’s asking for permission to eat me out like I’d be doing him a favor.

“Are you sure?”

“Thirty seconds. Please.”

“Yes. I mean, if . . . if you’re sure that you— Oh.”

He’s very good at it. Not . . . Maybe not deftly skilled, but he is completely lost to it, so thorough, so noisy in his utter, amazed enjoyment of the act, of me. My hips arch and he has to hold me down, carry me through the pleasure. It lasts more than thirty seconds. It lasts more than three minutes, maybe more than ten—but my thighs are trembling and my pussy spasms and I start to come like an ocean wave, and when I think the pleasure is finally subsiding he slides two fingers inside me and my hips buck up, because it’s not over. My entire world is spinning. I’ve officially had more orgasms in the past twenty minutes than in the last year.

Fingers still inside me, he looks up, eyes soft and earnest and swallowed by his pupils. “Thank you.”

Oh. “I think . . .” I clear my throat. My voice remains scratchy. “Maybe I should be the one thanking you.”

He shakes his head and lifts himself over me, balanced on one arm, and my eyes widen. He strokes himself with the other hand while staring down at my breasts with an awestruck expression. “This is so good, Mara. You are so good. Why do you want it to be fast?” He leans forward to kiss me again, licking the inside of my mouth, nibbling down my throat. “I just want to make it last,” he rasps against my skin.

I have no idea what he’s referring to. I don’t want this to be fast. I’ve never said I did, but he keeps telling me that . . .

Except that I did say it. Shit, I did say it. Just not to him. “You heard me.”

Liam is preoccupied. Licking one of my nipples. Biting gently. Licking again. Doing a fantastic job.

“You heard me,” I repeat. I twine my finger in his hair to slow him down. “On the phone.”

He stops, but doesn’t lift his head. His breath, warm against my breast, has me shivering. “Remember when I found you in my bathroom? I haven’t stopped thinking about your tits ever since—”

“Liam, you heard me tell my friends about . . .” He’s currently busy sucking on the underside of my breast, but for some reason I cannot bring myself to repeat the words. “About what I wanted you to do. You heard me.”

He looks up. He’s flushed, turned on, and more beautiful than ever. “I can do it, Mara. I can do it for you. What you want.”

“I don’t—” This is mortifying. I push him away, but he barely budges. “If this is some kind of charity, I don’t need a pity fuck. I am perfectly capable of—”

He takes my palm and drags it down his chest, past his abdomen, until his cock is hot in my hand. He is massive, and almost automatically my fingers close around him. Liam grimaces, biting his lower lip, and I have the sudden realization that he’s been touching me in all sorts of manners, but I haven’t touched him yet, not at all. It seems sad, and unfair, and unbearably stupid. Something to remedy.