It was like I’d been fucking unleashed. I popped open my door and dragged her across the seat, my hands to the backs of her knees. Her skirt rode up her thighs, and it took all my fucking willpower not to undo my belt, unzip my fly, and take her right there and then, halfway out of the goddamned Chevy. Like she was made for me, like she knew what I wanted before I knew it myself, she hooked her ankles around my waist and wrapped her arms around me. The plan in my head was to carry her straight upstairs. But I didn’t get any farther than the front fender.

I cupped her ass to position it above the wheel well and got her on her tiptoes. I kissed her, hard, to get us back to where we were when she stopped the kiss, with my lips on hers, me pushing her tongue aside. I kissed her rough, rude, and messy to show her exactly what I wanted. She did this thing where she’d kind of gasp through her nose, hold her breath almost, and it made me fucking wild. Her purse fell from her shoulder, and she let go of me just long enough to let her bag fall to the driveway. I planted my hands on her ass and hoisted her up on that good old American steel.

I felt a lacy edge of that red thong. Unless she’d changed it before her date, which meant I was in for a surprise. Pink maybe. Or white. Fuck. Fuck.

Keeping her close, I swept her hair off to one side of her shoulders and kissed a long line up her neck, to her earlobe, and over the earrings I gave her. “I love that you wear these all the time.” I could taste her perfume on her skin, and I tipped her back slightly and gave her a long, dirty kiss on her throat. She answered by hooking her legs together around me and arching her back so that her curls swept along the hood of my truck.

When she found her words again, she said, “I love that you still wear this.” I felt her fingertip slip beneath the necklace I wore. The heart she’d given me. She’d lost her half long ago. But not me.

“You can take it off, can’t you?” she asked. “That thing about your thumbs being too big is bull…”

I went back to her throat, on the other side now, and stole the rest of that sentence.

Of course she was right. It was bullshit, and we both knew it. I could get the thing on and off, but I never wanted to. Once I’d worked her up into more gasps and more arches of her back and a tighter hold behind my neck, once I’d gotten her needy, I pulled away. “Maybe I liked it. Having half your heart there.”

She’d never been one for sappy shit, but this moment was different. Instead of sass, I got a moan. Fuck yeah.

I kissed her again, but this time she gave as good as she got. She dug her fingers into the short hair at the nape of my neck. I could smell her—her wetness, her heat. It was something I’d never let myself even think about. And now, I couldn’t think about anything else.

We got into it. Grinding, biting, gripping, moaning. So into it that the next logical thing was for me to skip all the fucking foreplay and just take her. But I wasn’t gonna fuck Rosie Madden quick and dirty. I was gonna fuck her long and slow and make her remember every goddamned thrust. “I’m not going to take you on the hood of my truck.”

I watched her smile up at the stars. “But you’re gonna take me?”

“Oh, yeah.” I ran my fingertip along the lace right by her pussy. She was soaked. She was perfect. She was mine. “I am.”

I was going to take this slow—as slow as my cock would let me, anyway. I only needed a taste; I needed to understand what was coming. I needed to know her now, before I got to know her for real. Keeping my eyes on hers, I pressed inside her with two fingers. She was slick and warm and every fucking good thing on the planet. She wasn’t the one who moaned first. I was. Her wetness was like the drug I’d always wanted to get hooked on. “Jesus Christ.”

She made a long nnnnnnnn kind of a groan up at the stars as I found my way to her G-spot. Her body bucked when I did, and she whacked the hood of the Chevy with her palm.

“Attagirl.”

I slid my hand along her abdomen, imagining the ink under there, and told her, “I’ve wanted this for so fucking long. I just wouldn’t let myself feel it.”

She straightened up, her eyelids still fluttering. Still in that place where I was pushing her. “I don’t know how it hasn’t happened before,” she whispered.

“It’s going to happen tonight. So hang on tight.”

I knelt down in front of her, lowering myself into a crouch. I slipped my fingers out of her, and she hissed with disappointment, but I didn’t make her suffer for long. I moved her panties aside and licked from her opening up to her clit. Again, she banged the hood of the Chevy, harder now. Ferocious. But not nearly as fucking ferocious as she was making me feel. She tasted like salt water, like the thing that made the earth habitable at all. When I’d had a solid hit of her, enough to survive on for a few minutes, I pulled my mouth from her pussy and said, “Upstairs. Right now.”

* * *

We didn’t make it upstairs. Not even close. Walking up the staircase, I had one hand on her hip, and the dim light from the bulb over the stove showed me the skin of her inner thigh. Taking hold of her from behind, I gripped her hips hard to stop her from getting even one more step away. I turned her around on the stairs, which put us eye to eye. I kissed her again—kissed her until she hung on to the banister, kissed her until she had to sit down. I went right down on top of her, right there on the stairs. I moved her skirt up again, the cool skin of her ass like a magnet to my hands. Her fingers undid my belt, and I undid my fly. When my cock came free, she wrapped her hand around it and groaned. With the other hand, she gripped one of the old carved balusters.

I straddled her on the staircase, so fucking close to entering her I could feel my balls constrict already. “I need to get inside you. Right now.”

“Do it.”

“No condoms.”

“Hell no.”

Jesus Christ. With my knees to the staircase, I got down low on top of her, no distance between us at all, and then pressed right into her. Into that soaking wet paradise that was hers alone. And mine, too. “Fuuuuuuuck,” I said, pinning her hand back to the staircase, gripping her fingers between mine.

“Slow, slow, slow,” she gasped. “Fuck. Slow down.”

The idea that I was hurting her stopped me cold. “Shit, you okay?”

But she was smiling still, beaming even. I could see it by the oven light. “Oh, yeah. I just want to savor every single second.”

There were things happening in my head that felt like fireworks. Like a collision of universes. What could never happen exploding into the inevitable. Like I had a fast-forward button in my head, I saw my cum inside her, her coming on me. “Fuck slow, Rosie. I’ve waited long enough.”

She laughed, raising her head from the step. “Fuck me like your best friend first. Think you can do that?”

From the way her pussy was making me feel, my balls answered first, with an instinctive fuck no. But yeah, I could. I could savor it. I could go slow. Anything for her. “But you gotta let me fuck you hard after.”

She nodded, her eyes twinkling. “Deal.”

I pulled out of her for one second and yanked my pants down my ass so there wouldn’t be anything between us except her panties—more like a bow on a present than a barrier. My knees ground into the steps, and I pushed myself up over her. She looped her hand around the back of my neck and gripped the staircase for support again. “Okay. Slow.”

Slow. Slow. Quarter inch by quarter inch, I opened her up. Like a flower, like a safe. I wasn’t a guy who got emotional about fucking—but this? This was different. This was all that shit I never knew sex could be. It was sexy and sultry and fucking beautiful.

“You’re huge,” she said when I was halfway in. I felt her fingernails dig into my neck, and I had to resist the urge to slam into her hard enough to make her roar.

“Can you take it?”

Her eyebrow arched. “What do you think?”

The way she talked, the way she felt, made me feel like I wasn’t even on the planet anymore. In my head, I panned out to what I couldn’t see—her adorable feet, her toes curled, her pink toenails shimmering. Being inside her was like that, a fucking out-of-body experience. I undid the bow at the front of her dress with my teeth, freed her left breast from the cup of her bra, and brought my mouth to her nipple.

Fucking fuck. The rest of her was soft, but her breasts were even softer. Her nipple tightened up as I ran my tongue around it. Underneath her, the risers groaned as she writhed.

The steps had seemed like a sexy idea at first, but now I knew I needed her horizontal, I needed her on her knees, I needed her every goddamned way I could get her, and I couldn’t do that with risers digging into my thighs. So I summoned up all my strength, pulled out of her, and carried her to her room.

* * *

In the moonlight from the skylight above, she stripped for me again, like she had when I was standing above her. This time, though, she meant it. This time, she worked it like a pro—like she’d stripped on poles and driven a thousand men insane. She stepped toward me, running her finger up my forearm, and then back down again. “You’re so sexy, you know that? Sexier every day, somehow,” she said

I fucking loved her this way—raspy, naughty, dark. She tugged my T-shirt off over my head, sending it flying into the shadows. It sounded like a bottle of something fell over—one of her zillion lotions, and she turned away. While she was distracted, I shoved her back onto the bed, hard, and she squealed. She scooched up toward the pillows, every valley and curve highlighted in the moonlight. She crossed one leg over the other, bent at the knee. Then she rolled onto her left hip and traced her finger over her tattoo.

“When did you get it?” I ran my finger along the thorns, and she propped herself up on her elbows.

“Last year…” She trailed off, like she was teasing me to try to figure it out.

Last year. I tried to think back, but I was in the tunnel with her. There was no time before this goddamned moment. But then it hit me. Maybe it was in the summer. “When you were in the city?” I traced the edge of one of the bright red petals.

“Yeah. I had a thing with a tattoo artist named Francisco. He put it on me.” She laughed softly, pure vixen with her tongue pinned between her teeth. “Said someone so pretty should have some art on her. Said it would be a shame to stay pure.”

The idea made me fucking jealous. Some guy, crouched down beside her on a tattoo chair—after hours, lights low, talking to her about being beautiful. About being perfect. About being exactly what she was. I hated it, and I loved it all at once. There was no word in the English language for that goddamned feeling. “Hurts, right?”

She nodded. “Like a son of a bitch.”

Somehow, that got to me so deep in my bones it made me sick. The idea of her suffering, with that needle on her skin and me not there to hold her hand. Goddamn it. But then again, no way in hell would I have let another man spend so much time on these hips. Not now. “He was from the Dominican Republic. He used to be a prizefighter, and he took me out for arepas every night.”

“I want to know, and I don’t want to know,” I told her and caged her in, straddling her with my legs and boxing her in with my arms.

“I’ll tell you whatever you want.”

I was slowly moving down her body with my tongue and stopped right above her belly button. “You said a thing. What kind of thing?”

“A passionate thing.”

I moved to the left and kissed her hip bone. Dirty, though. Rude. Wet. “You love him?”

She raised her fingers, like she was showing me the size of something tiny. A BB, maybe. A ball bearing. “A little.”

I moved past the ink, along the curve of her hips, into that dark and perfect V between her legs. “Can’t believe you never told me.”

“You don’t know everything about me, Max,” she said, sliding her thighs against one another, squirming with anticipation. “Not even close.”

Her smell was on my stubble and welling up in her pussy, so fucking close I could almost taste it. Honey sweet, and so much more. Maybe I didn’t know half of what I thought. Maybe I didn’t know half of what I needed. Maybe all these years I’d been running my engine on low-octane fuel. “Don’t I?”

She shook her head and gracefully moved her hair over one shoulder with a roll of her neck. “Maybe you don’t know anything at all.”

Awww, fuck. I answered her first with a dirty suck of her clit that made her gasp. I let it go and said, “Maybe you don’t know anything about me either.”

Again, I moved my tongue along her, pressing into her opening, parting her lips with my fingers, getting in as deep as I possibly could. I could have lived on that taste and nothing else forever. When I’d gotten her worked up, gasping and grabbing the sheets, I pulled away. I made her suffer, and her eyes narrowed in the dim light.

“I want you inside me again, Max. I need it. I need to feel you there.”

Regular Rosie was polite. Sexy Rosie was bossy. Seeing her bossy and sexy was like being shown the back room at Blockbuster back in the day. I knew I’d never be the same again. “Say please,” I told her as I climbed on top of her. I positioned my cock right at her opening. She squirmed for it. She pawed for it. She licked my ear.

“Say please,” I growled at her.

She groaned in a way that told me I’d hit the spot with that—that she liked it. I knew she was right; there was a whole lot about her I didn’t know at all. She was apple pie on the surface. But even apple pie can get molten hot.

“Say it.” I edged into her, but not far, not even enough to lose my head inside her, and pulled out. Fucking torture, but it was worth it, because she was dying for it. Same as me.

“Say it,” I told her again, gripping her hand and pinning it over her head onto the pillows. I took her nipple between my teeth and bit down. With her free hand, she gripped my ass, trying to pull me in, but no fucking way was she winning that. I kept her pinned and told her, “Beg for it.”

Again, she made that low nnnnnn, like a purr.

She squirmed. She bucked. She panted. She laughed. Then finally, she said, “Please. Please. Please.”

Yeah. Fuck. Yeah.