I was tugged along behind him like a small ship bouncing around in the wake of a bigger ship.

It’s not like I looked to give up my power or my will, but I was pretty happy when the chance came to hand it over to him and I gave it up willingly.

Breathlessly.

Tired of fighting this thing between us.

At the car he pushed me against the passenger side door, my body between him and the cold metal of the sedan.

“Are you sure?” he asked. ”You have to be sure. I can’t—”

Instead of answering, I kissed him. And it wasn’t his careful kiss from the other night. This was my kiss. Full of my hunger. Full of my desire.

Fiercer than I’d ever been. Than I’d ever felt.

I pulled him to me by his jacket and I all but forced my way into his mouth. He tasted like mint and heat and coffee, and he quickly became my favorite flavor.

“Get in the car,” he said, pulling away. He opened the door behind my butt and all but pushed me inside. He ran around to the driver side and was in the car and driving between one deep breath and the next.

He turned left at the corner and then right, back toward the city.

“I’m at—”

“We’re going to my place,” he said.

Fine. That was fine. I mean, was it dangerous… maybe. Did I care? Fuck no.

I kept my hands to myself, curled them into my lap, pressed my legs together, trying to shrink almost into my skin so I didn’t reach out for him.

I couldn’t even look at him.

I had to contain this feeling. But it was hard. So hard. When all I wanted to do was touch him.

“Are we close?” My voice shook.

He groaned low and deep in his throat. “Five more minutes, princess.”

I nodded stiffly and glanced out the window. Jumping when I felt his hand against my leg. I closed my eyes, focused on breathing as his hand crept higher up my thigh.

“Look at me,” he said and my head rolled across the seat back so I could focus on him. God, he was handsome. And he was not scowling or blank-faced. He was focused and he looked, when he glanced my way, like he wanted to eat me up.

I shifted in my seat, spreading my legs, giving him room to play if that was what he wanted.

He smiled, his eyes back on the road but his hand finding its way beneath the sweater to cup me, the hot damp core of me in his palm. Separated only by my thin leggings.

“You’re wet,” he breathed like he was rather astonished by that.

“I am.”

“Hot.”

I nodded, gulping down air.

“Does it hurt, princess?” he asked. His fingers squeezing me, just a little. Just enough. I moaned. “Does it hurt wanting so much?”

“It does,” I breathed.

He turned two left turns, and he stopped, put the car in park. In the silence without the engine, all I could hear was my breathing. My heart beating. We were in the parking area behind some condos, surrounded by dumpsters and other cars. One streetlight turned the air to gold around us, and when he looked at me, his face was dark. Completely shadowed.

“I want to make you come,” he said.

I knew what he meant. He meant right here. In this golden air, the chill of the night on the other side of the car. If we got out, the chill might get to us. We’d have to navigate doors and locks. Walk down hallways. There would be all this time and space for this feeling, this nuclear-level threat of combustion to leach away.

I didn’t want that either.

“Please,” I whimpered.

He unclipped my seat belt and pulled my hips lower in the seat. I felt like a puddle against the leather. This seemed fast. We’d kissed twice. And now his hand was slipping down the front of my leggings. It should seem weird. Weirder. But it felt so perfectly right. Like an antidote.

My entire body was tense. So tense when his fingers brushed the top of my underwear I jumped. His eyes, suddenly wary, flew to mine and his fingers, the rough scrape of them over sensitive skin, stopped.

“It’s okay,” I whispered with a shaky laugh. “It’s good.”

“We don’t—”

“Please,” I said, wondering why we sounded like two virgins on prom night. Wondering why I felt like a virgin on prom night (not that I had been a virgin on my prom night, but still). I put my hand over his, pressing it down between my legs, his finger pushing through the damp seam of my pussy, brushing over my clit.

Making both of us gasp.

I couldn’t look into his eyes anymore; it was far too much intimacy with a man whose last name I didn’t even know.

Don’t. Don’t think of that stuff.

Who needed last names when we had this fucking connection?

I could feel him shifting next to me, finding an easier angle down my pants, and I wanted to smile, laugh even at us, because there was a part of this that was ridiculous.

But then he scraped the slick side of his fingernail against my clit. Pressed it down like a hard shell against me and I opened my eyes, blinking at the new sensation. He pushed harder, slid the fingernail against me, finding the edge and using that against me too until I couldn’t keep silent.

My moan was a garbled what and more combined, and he seemed to understand my stupid language because he gave me more. His lips found my neck and my head fell sideways, my legs spread wider, and he rolled my clit under his finger like it was a pebble. The bottom of my foot began to burn, some random nerve going berserk, and his tongue traced the curve of my ear, and somehow it was all enough.

It was barely anything really. His tongue and the touch of his finger, but I felt myself about to come. The great wave of a rogue orgasm spreading out through my body and then—

He stopped.

“What?” I breathed, my eyes open to find him a few inches from me. So intent. So dark and wild. “Why did you stop?”

“You’re so beautiful,” he said. “Just like this. Just on the edge.” He touched me again, his finger against my clit as if to hold me there.

“Please,” I breathed. This game was not unfamiliar, but I’d never been so willing a player in it. I’d said these words before but now, in this increasingly cold car, with this sometimes cold man, I meant them down to my blood vessels.

“And now,” he said, with a slice of a smile. “You beg me. How did I get this lucky?”

I would fall to my knees in front of this man. I—in fact—could not wait to do it.

“Please,” I moaned. “It hurts.”

He flinched. “I’m sorry.” And then his finger pressed against me like he knew my favorite touch, or perhaps—this, him now, was my new favorite touch. Everything was rewired inside of me. Everything was different. New.

“Yes,” I sighed as the wave came back, bigger and higher than before. My hands jerked out as if to keep me in place, as if the wave were a real thing, threatening to take me up and out of this car, away from him.

The cold of the glass barely registered against my palm, but I felt the rough scrape of his beard against my other hand.

“I want to be inside you,” he said.

“Yes. Yes. Inside.”

Did he want to fuck in this car? We could do that. I could just—

But then his fingers speared into me, thick and hard and I jerked, crying out. It was unexpected but right. So right. The rightest thing I’d ever felt. He was whispering things into my ear, soft words I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t hear him through the roar of my blood.

My hips jerked and the waves crashed and I held onto the collar of his coat so hard my fingers cramped.

“Fuck!” I cried and cried again. My hips rocking against his fingers.

I was blind and dumb to anything but this pleasure.

And then suddenly it was over, and just as suddenly he was gone. Out of the car, cold air blasting over me, and then the door shut. With fumbling fingers, I tried to fix my pants, my brain still buzzing.

What was—

And then my door was open and he was there, lifting me up and out of his car. He didn’t put me on my feet. No, like the Prince Charming I’d said he wasn’t, he swept me up into his arms.

“My bag,” I said.

And he ducked down enough so I could grab it. And then he shut the door with his hip and walked us in through what looked like the back door of a condo unit.

Small details registered and then vanished. So much security. Fences with touchpad locks. He lowered my feet at the door, his arm still around my waist, holding me so tight against him I could feel his erection through our clothes. I leaned up to kiss him, the hard line of his mouth irresistible in this mix of back yard shadow and light.

“Stop,” he said, putting his key in the lock. “Give me a second.”

Rebuffed, I leaned back and he glanced at me. “Kiss me now and I will fuck you against this door, and I don’t want to do that.”

“I don’t want to do that either.” But a little bit, I did.

“Then…” He blew out a breath and pulled in another one like he was trying to calm his hands. “Let me just—” He made a noise as the key slipped into the lock and then turned. There were two more locks like that, and finally he pulled me into the condo behind him, and it was dark but quiet and I heard his keys hit something hard, the floor maybe, but then it stopped mattering because his arms were back around me and he was kissing me.

No more absolution. No more forgiveness. This was a kiss with need and hunger and pain in it. It was too much almost, like hearing something so honest it hurt. It was a kiss that rocked me backward and I would have stepped back, but for his arm around my back, pulling off my jacket.

And then I was pulling off his jacket. And I was kissing him in the same way, like I was transferring the weight and pain of all my secrets and all my doubts onto him, and he took them without question.

Oh my god, I thought, dimly in the very back of my head, the only place I could still think in words. This man will ruin me.

His jacket hit the ground, and I didn’t stop to bother with his shirt. I pulled at his belt, the zipper of his pants until I had the hard warm length of his cock in my hand.

He jerked, flinched almost like it was too much, just my fingertips against his skin, so I put my hand around him, holding his cock in my fist. My thumb slipping over the top, where he was wet.

And here’s the thing about me: I don’t give blow jobs. I don’t like them. I don’t like the mess of them, the fuss, the uncomfortable intimacy of my mouth around a man’s dick. I don’t like the power dynamic.

I don’t like them and I don’t give them.

But I went down to my knees in front of Jack because I wanted to. Because that was all I wanted. And I licked him, from bottom to top and tasted him. Tasted Jack.

And the intimacy I’d flinched away from all my sexual life was suddenly exactly right.

Rough, his fingers speared into my hair, pulling it as he cupped my head, cradling it in his hands as he pushed into my mouth. The tip of his cock brushing the back of my throat.

I shouldn’t like this.

I shouldn’t want it.

But I did.

“Yes, princess,” he breathed as he fucked into my mouth. “Take it. Just like that.”

I did, over and over, spit running down my chin, my eyes closed, an inferno blazing under my skin. Until finally he stopped me. I moaned in protest, but he pulled me up onto my feet.

For a second I got a glimpse of his eyes, wild and fierce, and I wondered if I should feel afraid, but I couldn’t even muster up the thought.

He turned me, until my back was against his front and his hands at my waist. He didn’t just shove my leggings down—he tore them.

He tore them off my body and I screamed at the sound, so turned on by the violence, so close to coming I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t feel like me and I’d never felt better.

His hand cupped me again, his fingers slipping between the very wet lips of my pussy.

“Come with me,” he said, walking forward, and I laughed because I didn’t have a choice. I didn’t have a choice even if he wasn’t holding me practically off my feet, against his chest.

We walked through a dark kitchen and a dark living room and into a bedroom.

Frosty white light came in through a high window, revealing the snowy landscape of his bed, surrounded by shelves and shelves of books. Books were stacked on the ground in the shadows by the bed. We stepped forward and I knocked over one of the stacks.

“Sorry,” I breathed, bending over as if to clean it up, and the press of my ass against his dick made him groan. Made him fold over my body, his lips at my shoulder.

“I’m going to fuck you,” he said. “I can’t wait. I can’t stop.”

Instead of picking up the books I put my hands against the end of the bed and pushed harder against him, not sure how much more permission I could give him.

But apparently that was enough. There was fumbling behind me and I looked over my shoulder to see him tearing open the silver packet of a condom. Again I had that sensation of the two of us being kids doing this for the first time—that’s the lack of finesse he had with that condom.

But then his hand was on my hip and his cock was at the entrance to my body.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“So ready.”

With a plunge he was inside me and I swallowed back a scream of surprise and pleasure. He was hard and heavy and thick and long and perfect. And I felt him everywhere, the tips of my fingers and the bottom of my feet.

I tore off my sweater, flinging it into the unknown, and he groaned his approval at the sight of my back, of my skin. His hands, spread wide over my shoulders as he pushed harder into me. Eased back and pushed harder. A steady rhythm that made my toes curl and my eyes close. That made my body clench and shiver like it was thing without control.

And I was. He was. He pushed forward again and my arms gave out and I sprawled against the bed and he followed me down, lifting my hips to keep taking him. Steady and steady and steady. He was the earth turning. The tides in the sea. The sun and moon in a constant cycle.

I put my finger between my legs, finding my clit in the slick of heat and come between my legs, because I had to come or I had to stop.

And I didn’t want to stop.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Make yourself come.”

I needed no other encouragement. No other sensation but him inside of me and my finger against my clit. There was no wave this time, only a lightning strike. Every muscle in my body curled and every blood vessel contracted and I saw stars and I screamed and I lost myself for just a moment in the white-hot blaze of my orgasm.

And still he was steady. He never stopped. A metronome of fucking. Inexhaustible.

“Please,” I said.

“More?”

“No. No. You come.”

He stopped. And I felt his stillness behind me. I shifted my hips, feeling him hard inside my body. Fucking him in half measures because of our angles and my body’s exhaustion.

“Jack,” I breathed, turning my head. “Please. I want you to come.”

I didn’t know why he stopped. And I didn’t know why he started again, but his hands fell onto the bed beside me and he pummeled me. I could only lie there, boneless and replete, a soft place for every wild thrust to land.

It didn’t hurt. Or if it did, it wasn’t the kind of hurt I felt at that moment. I turned my head, craning my neck so I could see his face.

See the very careful reader’s face as he came undone.

His head tipped back and he roared. His face red and sweating. His eyes closed. He jerked into me, a thing without power or control. A wild shudder rippled through him and then… it was over.

He fell down beside me on the bed, careful with the condom, careful with my body. He stared up at the ceiling. Again unreadable.

But it didn’t stop me from trying. From watching him and gathering clues in the bright flush on his cheeks, the sweat tricking down his face from his hairline. But he didn’t turn. And he didn’t say anything.

The longer I lay there, the colder I got. The facts as I knew them crept in through the bubble of lust we’d created.

I know next to nothing about this guy, and what I do know is bad. Dangerous.

As much as some romantic, foolish part of me might want that to be different, or might believe that his job wasn’t all he was—the facts remained.

Bad man. He said it himself.

I urged myself to get up, to find my sweater, to leave and not look back, but my body was in no mood to obey.

Get up! I told myself, and like I’d said it out loud he turned to face me, just his head. His eyes slumberous and quiet. His entire body still and replete.

The urge to touch him was impossible to resist, and my fingers found his hair and pushed it back from his forehead, the way I’d wanted to the minute I met him.

“I will take you home, if that’s what you want,” he said, his voice a rough whisper. “I’ll call you a cab. I’ll leave and you can stay here alone. Whatever you want. And I don’t say this to change your mind or influence you in any way, I say it only because I want to, but I would like you to stay. With me. If you’d like to.”

He was blushing again and I was so charmed. So physically awash, so quiet inside my own body that the idea of leaving was preposterous.

This man who didn’t ask for what he wanted, was asking me to stay.

“It’s safe here. I promise,” he said, as if trying to convince me. But I needed no convincing.

“I’ll stay,” I said. “With you.”

And his smile was a sunrise.

“Do you want some food?” he asked. “I haven’t fed you—”

“Sleep,” I said, my eyelids dipping. So many orgasms, I could barely stay awake. “Let’s just sleep. You can feed me later.”

He nodded and stood up beside the bed, where he shed his clothes like a skin. The fine shirt and the shoes he hadn’t bothered to take off. The pants, the belt clanking against the floor as they landed. He grabbed the top of the fluffy white quilt. The sheets beneath it were pale gray, and I shifted and he lifted me and helped me, and then I was in his bed with him beside me.

We faced each other and it felt like there was a lot I should say, but I didn’t know the words again. My limited vocabulary could not put its arms around this feeling.

“Thank you,” I whispered, touching his face again because it was so handsome and so close.

He laughed, a warm gust of air over my hand.

“Go to sleep,” he said.

And I did, feeling impossibly safe in this dangerous man’s bed.