Page 22 of Lawless (Dauntless Island #2)

I threaded my shaking fingers in his hair to push him away—yeah, right.

That would have been the smart thing to do, but I was dumb as a fucking rock when it came to Natty Harper.

I held him in place instead and angled his face to turn his messy smear of a kiss into something slower, deeper—something that made him shiver against me, and my blood heat.

I was already half hard from the kiss, and Natty pressed eagerly against me.

His mouth tasted of mint toothpaste, and when I freed one hand from his hair to slip it down his back, his singlet felt soft and sleep-warm.

I ended the kiss and held him. He bowed his head, his breath warm against my throat. I closed my eyes. “Natty. Jesus.”

He hummed. A small sound of acknowledgement that he was as thrown by this as I was, maybe, or just letting me know he’d heard. His fingers twitched on my hips.

“I wasn’t going to come,” he said, breath gusting. He kept his head down, voice muffled by my creased shirt collar. “But I couldn’t help it. Is that okay?”

None of this was okay. It was a fucking mess, but I couldn’t stop myself from diving into it headlong. I wanted him, and it turned out I’d take whatever he was willing to give me and worry about regrets later.

“Yeah.” I tucked my fingers under his chin and tilted his face upward.

God, he was gorgeous. More than that though, he was Natty .

He was funny, and stubborn, and proud. He was shy or filthy, as fast-changing as the weather.

As sharp as the wind that blew in off the ocean, with a sting like salt, but he was also as deep and quiet as the night. “Yeah, it’s okay.”

He didn’t say another word. He just caught me by the hand and drew me through the station and upstairs, and I went with him. Because who could think about tomorrow when tonight was everything we both wanted?

* * *

N atty was a virgin. He hadn’t said, and he didn’t say, but he was wide-eyed as a possum— and twice as twitchy—as he lay back on my bed with a series of jerky movements that were trying too hard to appear casual.

Jesus, he was so out of his depth. I shrugged my shirt off and followed him down onto the bed, holding myself up on one knee and bracketing him with my arms. I kissed him and smiled—his answering smile came a fraction of a second too late to be anything but nervous as hell.

So I kissed him again, until some of the tension bled out of him and he sighed into my mouth.

Then, when I slid a hand down his side, my fingers following the ridges and dips of his singlet-covered ribcage, he blurted, “Condoms!”

“What?”

“We need a condom,” he said firmly. “And lube. Lots of lube.”

I wanted to laugh at him, but he tilted his chin in that stubborn way of his, and I couldn’t do it. Not when he’d pushed past his nervousness to speak up. “We’re not going to go that far.”

His expression did a complicated dance between relief and disappointment. “We’re not?”

“Nope.” I kissed him again, a short, sweet kiss that teased him and had him lifting his head to chase another one. I let him have it; I wasn’t a total arsehole. “Want to know what we’re going to do?”

“What?” he asked on a breath.

“Well...” I nipped his earlobe, and he shuddered underneath me. “Bearing in mind that you can veto any one of my ideas, even though they’re amazing, I thought that I would really love to blow you, and then jerk off for you while you watch.”

He made a squeaking sound, and then cleared his throat. “Um, yeah. That sounds, um... agreeable .”

“It sounds agreeable?” Okay, I might have smiled at that, because he was so fucking cute when he was trying to act like he knew what he was doing.

He narrowed his eyes. “I mean, I agree.”

Like we were going to shake on it or something.

My smile grew, and I apologised for it with another kiss.

This one was heated enough that Natty forgot to be pissed off at me, and moaned instead.

His fingers dug into my back, pulling me closer.

He shifted underneath me, and space opened up between his legs.

I slotted myself into the cradle of his thighs, a bolt of heat shooting through me as his erection grazed mine.

He squirmed, his eyes fluttering closed and his teeth digging into his bottom lip.

I rubbed my cheek against his jaw, so he could feel the rasp of stubble, and he let out a shaky breath and began to rock his hips.

He was going to go off like a firecracker; my mouth watered at the thought of it.

I moved back, so that I was kneeling between his tartan-covered knees.

I slid my hands under the hem of his Eels singlet and pushed upwards.

The soft, worn fabric pooled at my wrists as the movement revealed Natty’s abdomen and chest to me.

He was slim and lithe, a body built for cutting through waves.

There was a healing scratch on his stomach, probably from my oleander bushes, and I leaned down and pressed my mouth to it, delighting in the fact that, until now, his skin had only been kissed by the sun.

His shaky hand landed on my shoulder. “Dominic.”

I squeezed his hip. “You okay?”

“Yes,” he said, and nodded. “Keep going, please.”

I moved off him, my knees digging into the mattress beside him, and then I reached for the waistband of his tartan pyjama pants. I held his gaze. He nodded again and lifted his hips to help me drag the ridiculous pants down.

Holy shit, his dick was as gorgeous as the rest of him.

He squirmed under my scrutiny like he was afraid I was going to recoil at the sight of it, or worse—laugh.

I didn’t measure dicks—they fell into three categories for me, and none of them were a turn off: bigger than usual, within the average parameters, and ‘I can work with that.’ Natty’s was within the average parameters and beautiful.

He was so hard it looked like it had to be painful, and the head glistened with precum.

His balls, nestled in a refreshingly unmanscaped thatch of dark golden hair, were already drawn up tight.

“Fucking beautiful,” I said as I leaned in and licked his shaft.

His flesh was hot and hard underneath my tongue, and that first touch made him cry out.

His fingers caught in my hair and tightened right on the softer edge of painful—it made my body thrum with pleasure.

I took the head of his dick in my mouth, the salt fresh taste of him exploding over my tongue, and every muscle in his body tightened as though I’d put an electric shock through him.

“Oh my god! Dominic !”

Pride thrummed through me, chasing hot on the heels of my arousal—Natty wasn’t going to last long, and the thought of having him shatter apart underneath me, of him coming in my mouth, put another fire under me.

I sucked, hard , then barely allowed him a moment’s respite, releasing him briefly to lick and kiss his shaft, before I did it again.

“Dominic!” He squirmed again, tugging harder at my hair.

I took him deeper, holding his hips still so that I was the one setting the pace—mostly because I didn’t want him to gag me until he’d figured out what rhythm was.

We didn’t take long enough for him to figure it out—Natty let out another cry, this one breathless and broken, like a gull’s on the wind—and came.

I swallowed, savouring the taste of him, and then I stretched out beside him.

He rolled towards me, panting for breath, and I brought him down with gentle kisses.

He made a questioning noise at the first one—not as enthusiastic to taste his cum as I had been, probably—but then he huffed a breathy laugh against my mouth and opened up for the next one.

“Good?” I asked against his lips.

He hummed happily, his hand squirming between us. A fresh jolt of arousal shot through me when he found the fly of my uniform pants and tugged it open. The zip rasped.

“I don’t want to watch you,” he said, and caught my lower lip between his teeth briefly. “I want to do it to you.” His eyes widened. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah.” My heart raced as another wave of arousal rushed through me. “That’s more than okay.”

Natty smiled and pushed me over onto my back.

He plastered himself to my side, and I would have kissed him except he was looking down at my tented underwear like it was an algebra problem he was trying to solve, I didn’t want to distract him—not when it was a problem I wanted him to solve as well.

Then he licked his hand and shoved it right into my boxers.

Of course he did. Natty was fearless; he knew how to pick up a mudcrab, and it wasn’t like my dick was going to snap his fingers off.

Oh, I wasn’t going to last long either. Not once he got my fingers around me.

His palm was a little dry, but the rasp of his work-roughed hands wasn’t unpleasant.

Shit, I was primed and ready to go. Nothing at this point could have stopped me, probably.

But Natty withdrew his hand, and then shoved my boxers down properly, and licked his palm again.

“Does that feel okay?” he asked, grasping me firmly and giving me a slow stroke.

If it felt any better, my eyes would have been rolling to the back of my skull.

“Yeah,” I ground out. “Feels incredible.”

Natty lost his maths exam expression, and flashed me the flirty, wicked grin I’d previously only seen from the distance between his window and mine.

He looked so hot, and so fucking pleased with himself, that I dragged him even closer for another kiss.

And we kept kissing, the heat between our bodies building to boiling point, the wet sound of his hand on my dick louder than our rasping breaths.

A rush of emotion swirled in my chest, rising in my throat and threatening to drown me.

I wanted to come, but at the same time I wanted this moment to last forever, because it felt so right .

Right that we were here, in my bed, so close that we were sharing breath.

Pleasure overcame me as Natty jerked me faster, and I came with a bitten-off shout, all over my stomach and Natty’s hand.

It took a while to float down from the high.

When I finally did, I reached over the bed to grab my shirt and cleaned us up with that. I knew that if I left the bed to go to the bathroom, Natty wouldn’t be here when I got back. I could read it in his eyes as he held his hand out to me. He was already wondering how to leave.

And here was that regret I’d known that I was only staving off briefly when I’d let him inside. Right here, like the kick in the guts. For a moment it had been perfect, but I was an idiot if I didn’t see what was coming next. Didn’t stop me from trying though.

“Do you want to st?—”

“I should go,” he said, not looking at me as he pulled his pyjama pants back on.

I’d thought he looked like an angel the first time I saw him, but I’d picked the wrong supernatural creature, hadn’t I? Because Natty Harper was about to fucking ghost me.

“You don’t have to,” I said, like an idiot.

He stopped in my doorway and looked back at me. I couldn’t quite read his expression.

“I do,” he said. “It’s Dauntless.”

Yeah. That sounded about right.

And then he was gone.