Back in a Spell (The Witches of Thistle Grove, #3)(61)
“I wasn’t planning on fucking you last time, was I?” I said, eyes still closed, feeling the silken course of my own long hair down my back, sensing the way he felt it, too—a sensation completely unfamiliar to him. I’d also deliberately used the word I knew would provoke the strongest reaction from him, turn him on even more.
Among many other things, Morty Gutierrez really liked it when I swore.
“And this time, you were?” he asked, hoarse and low, a smile in his voice.
I lifted my head, met his eyes, a slow smile spreading over my lips. “I absolutely was, yes,” I confirmed. “Unless you object?”
“I do not,” he said, so fervently it startled a bright little bubble of a laugh out of me. In one deft instant, he reached behind me and unhooked my bra with one hand, faster than I could normally even do it for myself.
“Ooh, skills,” I murmured, goose bumps prickling my bare skin as he slipped it off me entirely and set it on the couch beside us, with that same care he showed all of my belongings, that sweet semireverence. Like anything that touched my skin must be precious by association. Then he looped an arm around my waist and tugged me closer, his other hand winding in my hair and tugging, just enough to arch my back a little.
“And a wealth of natural talent,” he informed me, flicking a devilish blue glance up at me as his mouth hovered right over my sternum, lips so close I could feel the heat of his breath. “Pretty sure magic isn’t my only forte.”
Then his mouth settled on me, and anything I’d been about to say wisped out of my head like dispersing fog burned off by the sun.
I clung on to his neck like I needed it for support, stroking the soft close-shorn hair at his nape, twining my fingers through the longer fall of it above. He lingered over my breasts with agonizing slowness, pressing a slow stream of grazing kisses around each nipple until my whole chest felt engulfed with heat, a slow simmer like hot springs bubbling under my skin, his fingertips feathering over my upper arms.
When he finally closed his mouth over a nipple, I let out a needy little high-pitched sound, between a moan and a sigh. The tug and heat of his mouth, the silken lap of his tongue, the way I twitched when he nipped me hard, just a little more painful than was comfortable—like he’d remembered that I liked, from last time—all melded together into a single sensation of utter overwhelm.
And the fact that I could feel every moment of how much he liked it, too, the taste of my skin and the soft feel of me, the sway of my hips as I ground against him on his lap . . . It made me feel like I was going to explode, spontaneously combust, burst into an actual phoenix right on top of him.
“You, too,” I said, fumbling with his own shirt—one of his blousy Byronic affairs that somehow still had too many finicky damn buttons—my fingers trembling and clumsy with need. “Now.”
“I love that, you know,” he whispered, helping me along, shrugging out of the shirt in one sleek movement that bared that finely lean, muscle-carved torso, his gleaming inked shoulders, those watercolor tattoos flickering in the candlelight. “That you don’t say ‘please’ to me when you want something in bed.”
“I don’t know why I don’t,” I admitted, taking a beat to just look at him. The impossible, almost feline beauty of that lithe and gorgeous body; the dazzling, dark-smudged eyes; the hair I’d disheveled myself. His face paint was hopelessly smeared in purple and silver, a mess from rubbing against mine, the way my own no doubt was, too. Somehow, this only felt sexier. “I always used to, before. Does it bother you?”
“Not at all. It suits you like this,” he said, running his hands up and down my sides, sinking his fingertips hard into my flanks. “Being in charge.”
“We can both be in charge,” I whispered, leaning down for a long, clinging kiss that left us both out of breath, gasping against each other’s lips. “If you want.”
“I want what you want, Nina,” he said, eyes heavy-lidded, hands still grasping tight to my hips. “If you want to be the boss, then here, with me, you are. And that’s the way I like it, too.”
“Then this is what I want,” I said, shimmying off his lap until I knelt between his legs, wriggling out of my vintage jeans leg by leg and tossing them somewhere behind me, the marble tiles a sudden and shocking cold under my knees after all that heat.
Leaning forward, I trailed a line of slow, hot kisses of my own down the hard planes of his belly; he was tattooed there, too, a gorgeously geometric rendering of a black-and-white beehive and a bee below his left rib cage, an ouroboros circling his right hip bone. I alternated the kisses with little nibbles that made him hiss, curl a hand around the back of my neck to keep me in place. I ran my lips over the outer edges of his torso, where I knew—and felt—that his skin would be even more sensitive. Nuzzling my cheek against him, letting my hair trail after in a caressing stroke.
“Ah, Nina,” he groaned, head falling back against the couch. “You’re going to—fuck, you’re going to make me lose my mind with this.”
“Fine by me,” I purred against his skin. “But I think you can take it.”
Every hitching breath spurred me on further as I dipped lower, then unbuttoned his jeans—thank the goddess he wasn’t wearing a belt, because I was so giddy with want that I’d have been woefully inadequate to deal with it. He lifted his hips to let me tug them off him, boxers coming with. I slid my hands up his thighs, stroking the smooth muscle of them, reaching between to cup him. Then I dipped my head and took as much of him as I could manage in my mouth, in a long, languid slide that drew an unsteady moan from deep in his throat.