Chapter Twenty-One
Okay. Change of plans.
Come clean. In real life. Face-to-face.
Hallie could not let him find that letter.
That approach was too impersonal after he’d eaten lunch with one arm around her waist, that thumb occasionally digging into her hip like a promise. Not after she’d caught him looking at her so often between appetizers and dessert, as if he were seeing her over and over again for the first time. Not when they were kissing against the front door of her cottage, her keys having clattered to the ground five minutes earlier, neither of them making a move to pick them up.
His knuckles had traced her cheekbones as if they were made of porcelain. When they broke for air and locked eyes, they were in their very own solar system, the real world light-years away. His hard frame pressed her against the door securely, his hands familiarizing themselves with her breasts and hips and even her knees—he seemed particularly interested in those. Squeezing and circling his thumb around the cap. Dragging one of them high around his hip and keeping it there while he worked her up and down against the wooden barrier, his lower body rolling, surging. Bringing her up onto her toes over and over again with hoarse gasps.
God, she had goose bumps everywhere.
An escalating warmth between her legs.
She was a body of sensations and nerve endings and needs. And the more Julian kissed her, feeding her his tongue with licks she felt down to her toes, the sexier she became in her own skin. How could she feel anything but incredibly desirable when every reverent scrape of his fingertips on her waist made her breasts feel fuller, more tempting. He was so aroused, he seemed to be in pain, and now his hands were climbing the backs of her thighs to palm her butt, his huge body crowding her into the doorway with a guttural sound. Oh Lord.
“D-do you want to come in for coffee?” she half laughed, half moaned.
“Hallie, I need to take you to bed,” he growled, momentarily breaking their frantic kiss. “This is not a joke.”
His teeth raked down her neck, his mouth racing back up into her hair, messing it up. Messing every part of her up, inside and out. But especially her conscience—how could she bring this man inside and make love to him knowing full well she had a secret that might make him second-guess the decision to be with her in the first place?
Tell him. Tell him now. “Julian—”
“The problem is, I can’t stop thinking about you having an orgasm.” That confession was spoken directly on top of her mouth, her lips moving with his, as if they were forming the words together. “It was a problem before last night. But now . . . Hallie. Now?” His fingers moved between her thighs, massaging her through the thin material of her panties. Pulling the undergarment down hastily to the tops of her thighs and rubbing slowly, slowly—right there—with the heel of his hand. “Now I can’t go a full minute without feeling the way this thing fucking gripped me at the end.” His middle finger pressed deep, her mouth falling open on a silent moan. God, oh God. “I’m going to put you on my lap tonight. Your bra is going to be off. Gone. Burned, for all I care. And you’re going to ride cock.” Another finger joined the first, pumping in and out slowly, her breathy whimpers caught by nips of his lips. “I want to know how you feel from every single angle by tomorrow morning.”
Maybe . . . she should reveal herself as the secret admirer in the morning, then?
Breaths rasping together, he shoved her panties down another inch, fingers pushing deep, their bodies rattling the door in an attempt to get closer.
Wow, they really needed to get inside.
Her house was surrounded by trees and her nearest neighbor wasn’t close enough to witness her getting mauled on her porch, but it wasn’t unusual for Lavinia to drop by for a visit. Also, the mailman happening upon them was a very real possibility.
“Inside,” she sobbed when his teeth sunk into her earlobe.
“Yes.” He stooped down to pick up her keys, shoving one of them into the lock, cursing. Picking another one. And then finally they were stumbling into the dark of the cottage, the dogs going absolutely nuts at their heels, their barks happy at first, before turning sort of outraged over being ignored. “Hold on,” Julian said, drawing back and reaching into his pocket. He took out a balled-up napkin and unfolded it, revealing pieces of steak he hadn’t finished at lunch. “Here, boys.”
Hallie blinked as he laid down the strips of beef on the floor, replaced the napkin in his pocket, and captured her hand once again. “Did you plan that doggy bag diversion?”
“Yes. Believe me, I wanted to finish the whole steak.” His gaze raked over her face. “But I wanted a distraction more.”
“Diabolical,” she whispered. “We should get out of here before they finish. We have about four seconds.”
“Jesus.”
Julian started to drag her toward the bedroom, but she tugged him toward her backyard instead. Maybe since she couldn’t give him total honesty—not tonight, not when everything was so utterly perfect—she could give him this intimacy. Her personal garden. Her most private, intimate place. Even more so than the bedroom. On the way outside, she flipped the light switch and held her breath. Watching his face transform with awe when he stepped out through the screen door made Hallie’s pulse go haywire.
“This is where I spend most of my time,” she said, trying to see the space through his eyes. Wondering if it looked as magical to Julian as it always felt to her. Or if he viewed the towering greenery, jewel-toned lights, and wildflowers as an unplanned hodgepodge.
He circled the yard with narrowed eyes, as though taking the time to make a sound judgment. Hallie had a premonition that she would remember this moment for a long time, maybe forever. Julian Vos touring her backyard with a serious expression, professorial hands clasped behind his back, surrounded by rioting blooms and hanging vines while removing his coat, the sunset loving his bristly jaw and playing over the hill-and-shadow patterns of his muscles.
“What do you do out here with your time?”
Now she understood. When she’d informed him this was where she spent most of her time, that wire in his brain had lit up. The one that dissected minutes and hours and years, turned them into something scientific. “I have my meals out here. I read and garden and talk on the phone and play with the dogs.” She thought of the way he’d been exposed at lunch, his behind-the-scenes care of her revealed—and her lips started to tingle. “I think of you.”
His steps slowed. “Is that so?”
She gave a brief hum.
Jaw ticking, he went back to surveying the backyard, but he was moving in her direction now. With such brisk purpose, she couldn’t breathe. Touch me.
“If I’d known you were in this perfect, hidden garden thinking of me, Hallie,” he said, frowning at her mouth. “I’m afraid I would have ripped your door off the hinges to get to you.”
“I wouldn’t have minded.”
Admissions. Truth. She would give him as much as she could to make up for the one thing she was too scared to tell him. Yet. They were finding middle ground. He’d taken a few steps into her chaos, and she’d started serious planning of the library job. Booking more appointments, committing, doing her best to arrive on time. And it felt good. She couldn’t screw this up by revealing how absolutely harebrained she’d been.
What if the revelation was his tipping point and he walked away?
They looked at each other for so long, the sky darkened a degree with the onset of evening, turning from pink to burnt orange, the bourbon of his eyes rich and smoky. She was tempted to give him more truth but could only bring herself to act on the impulse with her body. She could open herself up and be vulnerable in this way—and, God, she wanted to. Needed to. Didn’t want to hold back a single thing from this man.
That’s how she found herself stepping forward, kissing the underside of his chin, her fingers working to unbuckle his belt.
Immediately, he started to breathe hard, his nostrils flaring, but he never stopped looking her in the eye. Not until she eased the zipper down past his thickened shaft and reached into his pants, stroking the full length of him through the opening. Then his lids locked down like shutters, squeezing tight. “Hallie,” he choked. “What are you . . . oh Christ. Oh shit.”
She wasn’t sure what led her to kneel. To guide him to her mouth and take him inside so eagerly. Maybe because she’d fantasized about this countless times, although, in her fantasies, they were usually in one of his lecture halls at Stanford—a fact which she’d take to the grave. Or maybe she just wanted to do good with a mouth that was holding on to a lie. She closed her eyes and worshiped the smooth steel of him, her hand growing more and more confident in its newfound skill as it pumped top to bottom, increasing the hard swell of him with every fisted stroke.
“Can’t . . .” he heaved, fingers tangling in her curls. “Can’t be your first time sucking . . . ?” Moaning around him, she nodded, and his breath caught, followed by the taste of warm salt in her mouth. “Fuck. I shouldn’t have asked. I shouldn’t have—I’m going to finish. Stop. You have to stop.”
Oh, right. Like that was going to happen. Did he have any idea what it was like to watch the straitlaced professor of her dreams lose the grip on his self-control, to know she was the cause? At some point, he must have plowed a hand through his usually perfect hair, because it stood on end in places. His jaw was clamped down, throat flexed, and the flesh in her mouth was painfully erect. She remembered him like this last night. At the end. How he’d been at his stiffest right before the fall, and she cherished this knowledge about him now. His telltale signs. His weakness—her. I’m his weakness. There was so much strength and power in that knowledge that her confidence ticked up another notch, and she popped him out of her mouth. While maintaining her hold on his erection, she found his balls with her lips and blew a gentle raspberry onto one of them, before drawing it into her mouth on a groan.
“No, no, no, no. Hallie. Get up. No more of that. Goddamn, sweetheart.” His fingers twisted in her hair involuntarily, a violent shudder passing through his powerful body. “Wait. Don’t stop stroking,” he heaved thickly. “Hard. While you’re sucking them . . . shit.”
Using his hold on her curls, Julian hauled her face away, and as she gulped down oxygen, she savored the sight in front of her. The shine she’d left behind on his aroused flesh, the hair she’d never seen on his upper thighs and low on his muscular belly. All of him. All of him was so startlingly raw and beautiful. But then he was dropping to his knees and slamming their mouths together, angling her head to the right and invading her mouth with an animal sound.
Lust inundated Hallie, burning and wild, and she kissed him back, distantly aware of Julian searching for something in his wallet. Protection. Putting it on in a hurry while they raked every corner of each other’s mouth with long strokes, hips pressing, grinding.
He must have finished applying the condom—thank God, thank God—because he gripped her jaw and tilted her face up to meet his scrutiny. “How long have you been wanting to fuck me with this pretty mouth?”
“A long time,” she admitted haltingly, barely recognizing her own voice.
She could see he wanted to question that too-revealing piece of truth further—and maybe he would later—but right now, the urgency was so great. The fire on high. “As long as we’re working fantasies out of our system, how about you turn around and bury those knees in the dirt?”
Lord. Oh Lord. “Yes.”
As soon as the word slipped out of her mouth, the next move was taken out of her hands. Julian turned her around and used his big body to press her forward. “Slide them around,” he panted in her ear. “Get them filthy.”
Hallie’s eyes nearly crossed, her heart beating so fast and furious, she could feel it in her throat. Never in her life had she felt as sexy as she did while twisting her knees down into the garden soil, Julian’s mouth raking up and down her neck, encouraging her with groans, his hands working the dress up her thighs.
“Are you ready to show me this body, Hallie?” His voice was a scrape of flint. “All of it?”
Knowing she wouldn’t be able to speak above a wheeze, she nodded vigorously.
“No, I need the words.” He palmed her backside through the dress, his hand dragging up her spine to tangle in her hair, drawing her head back in a way that made her feel utterly and welcomingly possessed. “I need you to say, Julian, get me naked. Look at every hot inch of me.”
The ground spun in front of her face, her inner thigh muscles turning to the consistency of microwaved butter, the slow slicking of liquid heat making it uncomfortable to be wearing underwear at all. Just say it. Say it. “Julian, get me naked. Look at every hot inch of me.”
“That’s my girl,” he praised, jerking the panties down to her knees, then off. Tossed away. Bent forward on hands and knees, she battled to breathe through the rough lowering of her dress zipper, the soft material being stripped down her body, over her right arm, then left, the entire thing sent in the direction of her panties. Oh God. Oh God. Nothing but a bra left. And did it even matter at this point? She was bent over, knees covered in dirt, wearing nothing but moonlight, and nothing, not a single thing, was left to his imagination. “Jesus, Hallie.” In one deft movement, he shucked her bra and dropped his clothed chest down onto her bare back, his hands sliding up her rib cage to take firm hold of her breasts. “You have no idea how gorgeous you are, do you? I’m stalling right now. I’m stalling, because I know as soon as I put it in, I’m going to come, you’re so fucking beautiful. I can’t deal with how tight you are on top of everything else. God, this ass.” The last part was said through his teeth, followed by a shaky exhale in her ear. “You’re going to get so comfortable with me looking and touching and tasting every part of your naked body that you’ll learn to bend over with your butt in the air, just like this, and ask me to eat it whole.”
With that, he thrust into her from behind, and she screamed behind her teeth at the perfection of it. How he filled and stretched her, how the blast of sensation chased away the lingering soreness from her first time. And then there was nothing save the way he groaned in her ear, thrusting into her slowly, slowly at first, then with more and more force, the expensive material of his shirt rasping up and down her back.
“You like that?”
“Yes.”
He collected her hips in a bruising grip, straightened in his kneeling position, and seemed to indulge himself for several sweaty moments, pounding into her quickly, hard enough that the heels of her hands slid forward in the grass, her knees burrowing deeper into the earth. She could feel the willpower it took for him to slow down. The way he bit off a frustrated sound and dug his fingertips into her waist, easing his thrusts into deep grinds that made lights twinkle in front of her eyes, her intimate muscles seizing around him like an omen. Welcoming him, wetter each time, a throb escalating in the deep recesses of her womanhood.
His tongue licked up her spine, his fingers dropping down between her legs, pressing and rubbing right where she needed it. And she wanted to tell him faster, faster, but her vocal cords seemed to have been rendered useless, so she reached for his hand instead and moved it in the right rhythm. He hummed into his next lick of her back and kept the pace she’d asked for, and his grateful acceptance of her expressed needs turned her on more than anything. So much that she couldn’t stem the compulsion to reward him with pulsing constrictions of her inner walls, one after the other, until he gave a strangled yell and drove deeper, faster, with rough smacks of his lap against her backside.
“Look at that fucking shake,” he growled through his teeth. “God, I love it.”
Whatever self-consciousness of her body or her flaws that remained had already fled, and now beauty and exhilaration and boldness bloomed where it had once been. “I want to see you shirtless,” she panted, positive he wasn’t going to hear her, but the confession blew out of her nonetheless. Where had that come from? She sounded almost irritated.
“What’s that, Hallie?” he said into her neck, never ceasing the rough forward momentum of his hips. “Shirtless?”
Why are you like this? “You j-jogged through town shirtless today. In front of people. And I . . . I mean, I haven’t even seen you that way and . . .”
He slowed to a stop, and without his movements inside of her, she could marvel over how truly large and hard he was. How much space he occupied. “Are you . . .” He labored to breathe. “You’re not jealous.”
“I think I’m a little jealous,” she muttered haltingly.
A heavy beat passed, full with the sound of crickets and mountain breeze and short, punctuated breaths. Then, with a pained grunt, he pulled out of Hallie and gently rolled her over onto her back . . . where she had a front-row seat to his disbelief. But he didn’t question her. He didn’t tell her she was nuts or debate how she should be feeling. Instead, he just found her mouth with his own, winding their tongues together while unbuttoning his dress shirt. He tugged it off hastily, ripping the remaining buttons free, sending them arcing into the grass. She kissed him with her glazed eyes open, watching all of it, seeing how tightly he closed his own while devastating her with the skilled journey of his tongue, deep and smooth.
Then he was shirtless, looming above her in the moonlight with a heaving chest. And wow, oh wow. She’d expected the lean lines of a runner’s body, and there was definition where she thought to find it, but in between, the roundness of muscle and man and flesh was incredible. Human. His natural body type was not that of a runner. No, the huskiness, the thickness shone through regardless of his strict regimen. It was there in the fullness of his stomach and the meaty breadth of his shoulders. If he stopped running, he probably wouldn’t fit into his suits before long, and why that should turn her on so much, she had no idea.
“Christ, Hallie. The way you’re looking at me . . .” He shook his head slowly, laughter strained. “Just come and get it, already, you gorgeous woman.”
As she rose to her knees and went forward, straddling his lap, she couldn’t remember a single time she’d been anything but this—desired and cherished and locked in swelling heat with this man. With her butt cheeks clutched in his hands, he guided her down onto his shaft, his eyes turning glassy as she went, jaw falling open on a moan. She felt her power and flexed it, holding on to his bare shoulders and rolling her hips. On the very first one, his head fell back, teeth digging into his bottom lip, his left hand fumbling to become an anchor in the dirt, his right thumb finding the bud at the juncture of her thighs, moving in that fast, firm rhythm she’d shown him, and yes, yes, she’d be rewarding him for paying attention.
“Oh shit. Oh Jesus. Don’t stop,” he gritted out, strumming her, lifting his hips to meet the increasingly frantic bucks of hers. Their mouths collided in fast, wet kisses, and in between, he scrutinized her movements, her body, with a gaze that could have melted steel. “Hallie, I’ve got about thirty seconds of watching your tits bounce while you grind that tight thing down on my cock, all right? Please, sweetheart. Come on my fucking lap. Christ, come on.”
He didn’t have to encourage her, it was already happening, but the way he looked at her, the way he spoke to her in that desperate rasp, propelled her closer to the edge. “More,” she said through numb lips. And without her elaborating, his thumb pressed tight to her clit and rubbed deeply, deeply enough that she wailed his name, the dam finally bursting inside of her.
Hallie wrapped herself around him as the tumult washed over her, nerve endings snapping like blue fire, the terrible, wonderful pulling and releasing of her core, so intense it was almost too much to stand, but the rush . . . God, the rush on the tail end of it was blistering and beautiful and left her awestruck. Left her clinging to Julian’s bucking body, before he went very still beneath her. Then he barked a curse and started to shudder, over and over again. Both of his hands were on her backside now, yanking her up and back in disjointed pulls and pushes, with a sharp, involuntary slap of his palm that she liked very much, thank you.
And then they both tumbled sideways into the grass, struggling for air, the sunset having faded to serene blue above them. Drowsy eyes met through the tall blades of green, and they smiled, tangling their fingers together between them, gravitating closer, closer until their naked bodies were pressed tightly against each other.
It would have been perfect if it weren’t for the one black spot of deception that grew inkier and denser between them as her skin cooled.
But Hallie was the only one who could see it. And now that she’d allowed even more time to elapse with the secret between them, she started to get scared. What if he stopped looking at her like a goddess . . . and more like a girl who wrote intoxicated love letters in the back of an Uber?
Maybe they just needed a little more time to establish their relationship, to prove it could last before she threw a new test into its path?
Yes. That had to be for the best, didn’t it?
She’d take back the confession letter and tell him later, once they were more solid.
However long it took to gain the courage, she would tell him.
Later that night, when they were asleep in her bed, Julian’s arm curled around her waist, she carefully slipped free of his embrace, left a pile of treats for the dogs, and slipped out into the night.