Happily Never After

HE DIDN’T SAY a word, but his jaw flexed and his eyes were hot as he watched me.

“So . . .” I said, not knowing how to perceive his silence.

“So, no. No thank you,” he said, his voice husky, but his hands found my hips and slid me closer to his body, dragging me to the edge of the kitchen counter.

“No . . . thank you?” I repeated, my pulse skittering as I felt his fingers dip under the hem of my dress to rest on the bare skin of my upper thighs.

“I don’t want you to ever have sex that isn’t for you, Soph,” he said, lowering his mouth to drop the softest kiss on my neck. “You getting yours, with me, is the fucking hottest thing I’ve ever experienced.”

My eyes fluttered closed. “Yeah?”

“Hell fucking yeah,” he growled, and dragged his teeth over my throat.

I didn’t know if it was the aftermath of my emotional confession, but raw want clawed at me, and my fingers clenched in his hair. Just like that, I needed him. I didn’t want foreplay or kissing or to be carried romantically into his bedroom, I just needed to be with him.

Now.

“Max,” I said on a breath, strung out on the punch of lust, “I have a condom in my jacket pocket.”

His tongue trailed down my neck and he sounded half-asleep when he rasped, “God, I love how organized you are. Is that the attachment to your presentation?”

“Yes,” I half said and half moaned as he pulled me even closer, so our bodies were flush as my thighs squeezed around his hips. I could feel his hardness and I wanted all of him.

“We’ve got plenty of time to get to your jacket pocket,” he said against my throat. “There’s no rush.”

“But there is, actually,” I admitted, grinding against him and making his breath hiss through his teeth. “Because I think I’m going to die if I don’t feel you inside me immediately.”

“So you’re saying,” Max lifted his head, looked down at me, and said in a low voice, “that I’ll be saving your life if I fuck you in my kitchen right now.”

The tension in his face, the fire in his eyes, weakened my knees as he visibly swallowed.

“I’m dying as we speak,” I breathed, reaching for the button of his pants as my blood pounded in my veins. “So you better get moving.”

His mouth attacked mine, aggressive and wild like it always was, like no one else’s had ever been. Since the very beginning, he’d kissed me like he was ravenous for me, like my kisses fueled his existence and he needed as much of them as he could possibly get or he would surely perish.

I knew without a doubt that I could kiss him forever and never lose a single butterfly.

It was like a fever dream, a blur of sound and breath as we frantically pulled at each other’s clothing. I tore at his buttons and dragged up his T-shirt, my fingertips itchy for the heat of his skin, and he whipped off my dress and underthings like they’d been mere holograms, never standing a chance when faced with his sinful intent.

And then—oh, God—Max was there, suited up, grasping my hips in his hands and going so fucking deep. Our eyes met and locked, and a thousand words and emotions neither of us could express yet were exchanged in that gaze. It took my breath away, the fierce promise in that fiery stare, and a full-body shiver rippled through me as he started to move.

“Did you know,” he bit out as he made my body hum with his exquisite movements, slow and thick as he made my insides melt with the hot-blooded way he looked down at me, “that I fantasized about exactly this the day you came up to my place for water?”

My eyes slid closed and my legs tightened around him, thighs trembling. The thought of him fantasizing about me was the equivalent of shooting gasoline directly into the center of a wildfire. I breathed, “While I was still here you thought about it?”

“Yep,” he said, making a sound in the back of his throat as he moved faster. “You stood right here, talking about kissing, and I swear to God I was picturing this.”

It was getting faster and hotter, and I was burning alive as he slammed into me.

“Just this?” I asked, my voice a cross between a whisper and a moan as he lowered his mouth and licked at my skin. “Tell me everything.”

“Table, too,” he breathed against my breast, and then his hands were under my ass, lifting me off the counter. He started kissing me again as he walked over to his gorgeous kitchen table with my legs wrapped around him, and I don’t know how he did it so effortlessly, but in a hot second we were on top of it.

Max laid me down on the center of the table, my back on the cool wood as his mouth delivered kiss after smoldering kiss, and I would’ve made a comment about the impressive sturdiness of his kitchen furniture, but then he shifted, and shit, our new position intensified everything as he moved with the kind of relentless power that made it impossible to think at all.

“Fuuuuccck,” he ground out, his voice thick as he pushed me farther up the table with the strength of his body. The muscles in his arms were rigid as he held himself above me, and I grasped at him for purchase, sliding my palms around his body to dig my fingernails into his backside and hold him tighter still.

I chanted his name, my heels digging into the table as I moved with him, unraveling and going utterly mad as he drove into me.

And just when I didn’t think the wire of tension could get pulled any tighter, Max growled into my ear, “Now it’s my turn to watch you shatter, Steinbeck. Go.”

And I did.