Raheem.
Never Never Land.
Oh, I was gonna get it.
He felt me react and smiled against my temple.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “That’s where we at.”
We were still swaying, but slower now. Closer. The room had gotten darker around the edges. The candles were doing most of the work. The scent of stargazers, rum-tobacco wax, and him had braided together into something thick enough to breathe.
I looked up at him again and saw that his face had changed.
There was still patience there. Still that same careful, watchful tenderness he had been giving me all week. But under it was something else now. His dark brown eyes were heavy-lidded, fixed on mine with a heat he was no longer trying to make polite.
A man done playing with the edges.
“You good?” he asked, and I heard it for what it really was.
The last check.
The last moment to stop this before he tore my ass up and made good on everything he had been trying not to do too soon.
Heat went through me so fast I had to grip his shoulders.
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
I held his gaze. “Micah.”
His jaw flexed once.
“I’ve been sure.”
That was all it took.
He kissed me right there in the middle of his living room, and the first press of his mouth nearly folded my knees. Not rushed. Not messy. Certain. Like he had waited long enough and saw no reason in this world to do any more of it. His hand came up to the back of my neck while the other spread low over my waist and held me there, and I opened for him so fast it almost made me angry.
He made a sound low in his chest when I did.
“Come here,” he murmured against my mouth, and I almost laughed because I was already in his arms and somehow that still felt like a command.
Then he started moving me.
Slowly at first, his mouth still on mine, his hands guiding my waist as he backed me out of the living room, past the low glow of the candles and into the darker hallway beyond it. Every step felt deliberate. Every breath. Every place his self-control was starting to tear open. I held on to him and let him lead because the truth was, my body had already decided there was nowhere else it wanted to go.
By the time we reached his bedroom, I was breathless.
My back met the edge of his dresser first.
Cool wood against my spine.
He crowded in close, one hand at my waist, the other planting beside me on the dresser like he needed the leverage just to keep himself from taking too much too fast. His mouth left mine and moved to my jaw, then just under my ear, and my whole body gave a small, helpless shiver under his hands.
“You know what cumming on my fingers did to me the other night?” he asked, voice gone dark.
My thighs parted before I could help it.