I know she thinks we need to rush, but as soon as Adrienne closes the front door, I take her bag from her hand and set it down. We’re going to do this right, and we’re going to do it slow.

“Now Miss Adrienne, whatever has you so worked up?”

She gives me an incredulous look. Incredulous, but aroused. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are bright. My dirty, delightful wife. “I am not an innocent governess and you are no rakish duke. Take off your clothes.”

I ignore her and press her back against the wall, looming over her. “I love your bossy temper.”

She reaches for my belt. “Fine, you can leave your clothes on.”

Ha. I catch her wrists and pull her hands up between our bodies. “Nice try.” I kiss her fingers. “An hour and a half, you say?”

She takes a deep, tormented breath and gives me a pleading look. “Yes.”

“Do you think I’m terribly cruel?” I move on to the knuckles, nipping at them as she glowers at me.

“Uh, yeah.”

I turn her wrist over so I can kiss the exposed, soft skin on the inside of her arm. “I can’t help it, you know. You’re too beautiful not to touch. To tease.”

“But now we’re alone,” she whispers, sliding her hand out of my grasp and winding her arms around my neck. I let her. I’d let her do anything she wanted.

Almost anything.

She doesn’t get to be in charge right now. I take her wrists and push them over her head, against the wall. “Exactly. We’re alone. And awake. No kids. In our home. You want to know why I couldn’t keep my hands off you on the train? Because I knew that for all the amazing sex we had this weekend, when I got you home, I’d get to make love to you. I thought it might be tonight, after you’d had to slide back into being mom, and I wanted you to hum all evening with the awareness of just how much I want you.”

Something bright flashes in her eyes. Excitement, maybe, but something else, too.

I lean down and drag my lips along her jaw. “We don’t need to escape from reality,” I say roughly as I breathe her in. “I want you just as much, here.”

She exhales quickly. Relief. That’s the something else I'd seen in her eyes, and can feel rolling off her body now as she presses against me. “Same.”

I hold her there, my reluctant prisoner, while I trace my fingers down her body and tease them under the hem of her shirt. She’s soft and delicious. I move my hand back up again, this time under the fabric, against her skin. I find her bra and cover the swell of her breast with my palm, not missing that her nipple is pulled tight already, a hard nub that must send jolts of awareness to her core as I rub against it.

More than twenty-five years we’ve been doing this, and I’ll never tire of that sex-glazed look in her eye, the way she goes soft and wanting when I work her up. Sure, I teased her on the train, but this is something else. This is foreplay with intent. So much intent.

I watch her melt for me. I imagine heat stoking inside her, turning her liquid from the inside out, and I amp up my touches. Firmer, brusquer. I pinch her nipple now, through the fabric of her bra, and she gasps.

Music to my ears.

I cover her mouth with mine, swallowing her desperate pleas for more. I kiss her until a primal need to take my wife—hard, fast, and so thoroughly she can’t walk for a while—is thudding in my veins.

Wrenching myself away from her, I grab her hips and pivot us both, pointing her toward the stairs. “Up you go.”

She scampers ahead of me and I follow, once again unable to keep my hands off her.

In our room, she moves to close the door behind us.

“Leave it open,” I tell her, and she gives me a wide-eyed, disbelieving look.

I don’t know why it matters, but it does.

She swallows hard, but doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t close the door, either.

“If they come home, the front door is locked. We’ll hear them better this way.” Lies. I like the element of danger way more than I’m being a sensible father right now.

Her eyes light up, knowing. She sees me to my core, my wife does. She licks her lips. “You’d like it if I had to suddenly be quiet, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d hate it,” I growl as I nudge her onto the bed. “Because it would mean we’ve been interrupted, and I very much want to wring you out completely before the kids come home.”

I fall on top of her, being careful not to be too heavy as I fit us together. Still too many clothes in between. I peel her shirt up as she fumbles with my belt. We roll sideways in a tangle of limbs and clothes, until we’re both naked and I’m between her thighs, my cock jutting up against her belly as I kiss her again.

Never enough kisses.

Never enough time.

So much to pour into forty-five hours. Too much to say and words are definitely inadequate.

One last attempt to show her everything she means to me before this window of opportunity, this gift of time, closes.

She curls her legs around me as I work my way down her body, until my hands are full of her breasts and my face is buried in the sweet valley between them. I nuzzle her there, where her skin is sensitive and I know it’ll make her shiver. Then I lick my way over the field of delicious goosebumps on her skin, tasting every inch of her breasts before I reach her tight, ready nipple.

Ready for me to circle, to tease.

Ready for me to swallow, to pulse against my tongue as I suck on her flesh.

My wife.

She reaches between us, and I let her capture my erection with her clever, knowing fingers. She strokes me with a familiarity that makes my knees weak. Her thumb rolls over the sensitive head, flared and swollen and wet at the tip. I grow harder still. I’m so ready, but I want her on fire before I take her. I want her so hot that I can be rough, that she’ll need me to be that for her.

And in return, she can set me ablaze, too. Consume me with her heat and her beauty. I’ll thunder into her and she’ll wrap around me, taking every last inch.

I duck my head to her other breast, loving that nipple with my mouth, my tongue, my teeth, until she’s squirming beneath me, trying to bring us together.

I smooth my hand over her thigh, opening her wide for my touch. Her curls are slick, that’s how wet she is for me, and inside, she’s hot and soft and grippy as I give her first one, then two fingers.

“Now,” she breathes, and I’m not going to argue with that.

Even after a weekend of fucking, the first press feels like there’s no way I’ll fit inside her. I always do. She’s perfect for me. I just need to work for it. She throws her head back and groans in delight at the intrusion. The horny, happy sound only makes me thicker.

She wiggles beneath me, rolling her hips as we work together to get me deep inside her. Each pulse is wet and warm, like tongues against my cock. Like I’ve got a dozen Adriennes all worshipping my dick, and how do I keep control at an image like that?

I can’t. No way.

I hold her still as I piston my hips, rocking all the way into her. She cries out my name, then whispers, “Again, do it again.”

I push her hands above her head, our fingers linked. All of me presses against all of her as I thrust into her again. No chance of being careful now. I’m heavy and hard and demanding as I take her right to the edge, as I make her tremble and shake for me.

“Fuck.” That’s what I’m reduced to, single word, guttural curses.

But she’s right there with me in the sex-drunk haze. I feel her lips on my neck, then her tongue.

Blackness starts to crowd at the corners of my vision as I plow into her. Savage, desperate rutting. I can feel her tightening up, clutching at me inside and her limbs tensing too. As if she were actually climbing toward that figurative peak.

“Come for me,” I say roughly. The headboard slaps against the wall and we both reach for it, pushing it into the wall in a desperate attempt to not wake anyone up.

Oh, how conditioned we are.

But we’re alone.

We can make as much noise as we want. I reach between us and cup her breast, catching her nipple between my fingers.

“Oh, yes!” She grinds against me as I bury myself inside her, holding still because I’m so fucking close to exploding and that can’t happen until— “Jesus, yes. Stew. God. I’m coming!”

I thrust again, losing myself inside her pussy.

My. Fucking. Wife.

“Love you,” I say, my voice ragged as I brace my arms on either side of her.

She kisses me, her breath coming hard and fast. “Me, too. Okay. That was worth the wait.”

And we still have time to share a shower.