NICK
Those pearls. Holy fuck, those pearls. The feeling was unbelievable. It also made me think about a pearl necklace of a totally different kind—my cum all over her gorgeous skin—and that idea got me so goddamned close to exploding in her mouth that I had to stop her. “Fuck, Stella. Easy, easy.”
Her eyes flashed in the dim light, satisfied and a little devilish. “I love making you lose control.”
Control. In her hands, I had none at all. Not then. She looked up the length of my body, wide-eyed. Sinful. She had all the power, and I fucking loved that she knew it.
“I want to fuck you speechless and senseless,” I told her, pulling the wig off and tossing it aside. “But I also want to pamper the hell out of you.”
She slid her tongue back down my cock and loosened the pearls. It made me grip her hair tighter, that sudden rush of blood to the head.
There was a time for messy, sweaty, aggressive fucking. There was a time for screwing so hard we broke the bed. There was a time for daring her to come harder, come longer, come more . . .
And I knew this wasn’t it. Because for as hard as I wanted to fuck her, for as loud as I wanted to make her scream, for all the terrible things I wanted to do to her, I also had a bone-deep need to be tender, soft, and kind. All the things I never knew I needed to be.
So that’s exactly what I did. I pulled her up toward me and kissed her until her hands moved up to my face to hang on tight. When I had her like I wanted her, I slipped my hand behind her, rolled her onto her back, and got on top of her, the pearls still tangled up between us.
“My turn,” I said, coming up onto my knees and taking the necklace in my hands. I helped her scoot back so her head was on the pillows. I opened her legs to the moonlight. Screw the North Star; as far as I was concerned, nothing was more valuable than her perfect pussy or the wetness spilling out of it. I parted her lips with my fingers and let the pearls fill the gap between her ass and her clit. I cupped my hand over her to keep the beads up against her, then pulled them slowly, one by one, along her slit. As each bead pressed into her, she gasped, and gasped again. The longer I did it, the wetter she got, until a damp pool had gathered between her legs on the sheets. When I couldn’t handle being outside of her for one more second, I balled up the pearls in my hand and dropped them on the floor. One of her legs I left straight between mine. The other I bent at the knee and anchored against my shoulder.
She gripped my forearm with one hand and the edge of the headboard with the other. Mixed up with the dark, warm scent of her pussy, I smelled the sweet, delicate smell that was her and her alone. “I never want this to end,” I told her as I pressed into her. Letting her knee slide down, I pushed her legs apart and took her old-school missionary. Traditions die hard for a reason.
She looped her hands over my shoulders as I drove into her, and she put a kiss to my cheek. She inhaled as she did it, like she was taking me in, same as I was doing with her. “I know.”
“Never, Stella, you get that? Never.” I gave her a good solid thrust that made her growl into my shoulder, but then I eased up again.
“I know. I don’t either.”
Until that moment, sex with her been a lot of things. It had been fun. It had been good. It had been hot—fuck knows, it had been hot. It had been spontaneous. But it had never just been sweet. “I want to be good to you. I want to give you everything you want.”
She slid her fingers through my hair, her pinkie trailing along the back of my neck, as light as a feather. “You already are.”
There were so many things I thought about then. Her name tattooed on my chest. My ring on her finger. But the longer I took her and the sweeter I let myself be, the more and more one single idea stayed on a loop. The simplest thought. The most basic thought. The thing I wanted from her—with her. The thing I’d never imagined before. I envisioned her tight pink pussy full of my cum and just exactly what that meant. I rode the idea like a fucking rocket toward orgasm. As I drove into her and loved her and let my heart feel, really burst against her, I realized that more than anything—more than any heist, more than any job, more even than the motherfucking North Star itself—I wanted her. And my baby inside her. I didn’t want to just fuck her for now. I wanted to fuck her for keeps.
I exploded into her, powering my cum into her pussy. She sank her teeth into my bare shoulder as I roared out a long, “Fuuuuuuuuuck,” from between gritted teeth. But even as I was still coming, I knew there was something else that I had to give her right then and right fucking there. I felt it, and she needed to know it. Still pulsing into her, I gave her one final ball-busting thrust and stayed buried inside her as I growled out the thing I never planned to say to anybody, until her. “I love you. I love you so fucking much.”
She just pulled me close to her, wrapping her arms around my back and her legs around my waist. Our pants were damn near in unison, and I’d never felt as close to anybody as I did to her then. “I love you too,” she said. “And I never want to say goodbye to you.”
Fuck. My heart. My mind. My reality. “You’ll never have to,” I said, deep and dark and dead fucking serious, as I throbbed inside her. “Never.”
She fell asleep in my arms, and it took every ounce of willpower I had to shift her off me and roll out of bed. She was so beautiful there, with a streak of moonlight making a sliver stripe across her body, that for the second time since I’d met her, I wished I knew how to sketch, how to photograph, how to do anything to make that kind of beauty indelible. I didn’t, though, and all I could do was soak it in. Once I’d gotten enough to last me a few minutes, I pulled the comforter up around her so she didn’t get chilly with the sea breeze. I put on my boxers, my pants, and a T-shirt. I slipped the room key in my pocket, put on a pair of sandals, and headed down the empty, quiet hallway. Rather than the elevator, I took the stairs, which were just like any back staircase in any hotel, full of echoes and too bright, with flame-retardant foam all over the I-beams.
I came out into the lobby, quiet too except for the trickle of the fountain. I knocked softly on the window of the dog nursery and took Priscilla from the sleepy dog sitter’s arms. Up the elevator Priscilla and I went, her lying on her back in the cradle I’d made for her in the crook of my elbow.
Without turning on the lights, I nestled Priscilla into the luxurious bed with Stella. Again, I stood there, soaking it all in. When the moonlight had moved off the two of them, I turned and quietly opened the minibar. I grabbed a travel bottle of whiskey and opened the fridge to get a can of club soda. As I grabbed the soda, I saw it.
Stella had said anything would do to drop on the guard’s head. Honey, she’d said. Shampoo. But if the guy had an issue with bird shit, I thought it was best to get as close to bird shit as possible. And there it was—a container of plain Greek yogurt. I took it out of the fridge and put it on the shelf with the nuts.
Again, not exactly Mission: Impossible. But room-temperature yogurt would definitely do the trick.
I headed out to the balcony with my whiskey and soda in hand. Tomorrow, things would change for us. But not more than they’d changed already. Because I’d experienced some kick-ass shit and some terrible shit. I’d been up and I’d been down.
But this time tomorrow, we’d both be out of the game. We’d have a bright new future. And that future, with her, would make all my old mistakes and all the old bullshit absolutely worth it.