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It was incredible. This need. This desire. Coursing through her. Arcing between them.

She wanted him.

And everything that came with him. The scars, the baggage. All of it. Because he wouldn’t be the man before her without them.

And she might’ve had a crush on Gideon Payne, the golden boy of Pyrite Falls, but the feelings that she had for the man in front of her, this damaged, half-feral man, went so much deeper.

They kissed until she was slick with desire, until her body felt hollowed out with need. They kissed until she was trembling. Until she thought she might expire from it. They kissed until she thought she would be undone. Wholly and completely.

And then, when she was slick and ready with need, he took her back to his bedroom.

It was Spartan. Unsurprising, since he wasn’t planning to stay. But she had expected some evidence at least that he lived there. But she realized, and nearly laughed, that it was his military precision.

It was still like barracks.

She was suddenly hungry to know more. About that life. About the ways he had transitioned between having a home and a wife and being overseas.

She wanted to know what his plans with Cassidy had been. Had they wanted children? Had they tried to have them? Had they eaten dinner together every night? Had coffee together in the morning? What had domestic life looked like for him, and what had his life in the military looked like? She had known this man for years, and yet it felt like she didn’t know him at all.

There were so many years between his leaving, and this one. She knew what had made him the feral thing before her, but there were other steps. She wanted to know who he’d been in that life that had been blown up along with the rest of him.

But then she couldn’t think anymore, because he laid her down on the bed and kissed every inch of her body. Because he opened her thighs wide and settled between them, and then he looked up at her. “Remember what I told you? If I said I was going to kiss you, I’d fucking do it.” She nodded, wholly incapable of speech. “I’m going to kiss you now, Rory. I’m going to kiss you right here.” He kissed her inner thigh, and she shivered. “And here.” He kissed her again. “And here.”

This time, he landed directly at the heart of her, moving his tongue through her seam, penetrating her deeply. She gasped, arching up off the bed. She wasn’t dumb, she knew about oral sex, but she hadn’t known that it was quite so...

He licked into her again, and she gripped his shoulders.

Yeah.

She hadn’t realized you could dothat.

He pulled her toward him, clasping his hands over her stomach as he drew her down more firmly against his mouth, moving upward to suck that sensitized bundle of nerves between his lips before he went back down.

He made a savage, satisfied sound as he ate her, and she was lost. She forgot to wonder about the past, and she didn’t wonder about the future. Because now was all that mattered. Now, with Gideon’s mouth on her.

She grabbed hold of the sheets, balled them up in her fist and flexed her feet out, trying to root herself to the mattress. Trying to get a hold of something. Anything.

She felt lost. Utterly and completely lost. In this. In him. In all that he was.

She moved her hips in steady rhythm with his tongue. And then he unclasped his hand and put it between her legs, pushed a finger inside her as he continued to tease her with his mouth.

Then he added another, the stretching, stinging sensation foreign.

“Gideon,” she said, a plea. For what, she didn’t know. For him to stop, for him to keep going.

Definitely for him to keep going. Need was tightening inside her, her climax building.

She might be ignorant of sex, but she knew how to furtively bring herself to completion.

This was not the same. This was slick and graphic and wonderful. It was debauched and beautiful, and she couldn’t have asked for anything better.

“Come for me,” he growled.

And with an order like that, she could not resist.

She had no desire to resist.

She shattered, her internal muscles tightening around his fingers as she found her release.