Window Shopping, page 17
“Leland,” Aiden says, his thumb pressing into the center of my palm, moving in a slow circle and robbing the breath clean out of my lungs. “Your mother is looking for you outside.”
“My mother?” The head of Aiden’s assistant snaps up, his eyes appearing over the top of his Mac. When he sees us standing just inside the door, our fingers twined together, his eyebrows shoot up to his hairline. “Ohhh. My mother. That’s right. We’re going to lunch. So nice of her to drive in from Connecticut at the last second.” He stands and swipes up his keys, checks for his wallet, and breezes past us with a thousand-watt smile. “The official word is that you’re discussing the direction of the spring window designs.”
“Thank you,” Aiden says to his assistant’s retreating back.
The door closes, leaving us alone in the office.
“People are totally going to know what we’re doing in here,” I murmur, Carol of the Bells starting to play. Aiden turns to face me, crowding me against the door, sending a wave of heavy heat careering into my belly. “What, um . . . what are we going to do in here?”
A shudder goes through his sturdy frame. “That’s up to you, sweetheart. I just needed you to myself.”
He reaches past my right shoulder and taps a switch on the wall. There’s a mechanical whir and the room begins to darken. A thin black shade is coming down over the window, still allowing some light in but blocking most. In the space of seconds, the office goes from a professional setting to something else entirely. But when Aiden drops his mouth to mine and whispers my name, we could be on the N train during rush hour for all I care. I just want to kiss this man. My toes are curled up tight in my boots, anticipation making me dizzy.
God, he’s so big. Did I notice that enough before? How his shoulders block out the world? How it feels so natural to rub our foreheads together, to treat my hands to a ride up and over his pecs. Touching this man is like second nature while being entirely new. Thrilling. Right.
“Stella,” he says, tilting my chin up. “Are you sure you’re okay after what happened?”
I start to lie, to say yes, but the words won’t come out. Not to him. “It shook me up. But now . . . I don’t know, I feel shaken up in a good way. Maybe that doesn’t make sense. I just know I’m not scared anymore, but my adrenaline is still pumping. I haven’t come down.” I press up on my toes to meld our mouths together. “Don’t let me come down.”
Our kiss is a perfect assault. It’s nothing like the other ones, because there’s no holding back. There’s no reason to temper the heat, except maybe the fact that we’re in his office in the middle of the day. Our location is the furthest thought from my brain, however, when our lips open in tandem, the condensation from our labored breaths making the kiss slippery. Hot. Sexual. We’re in the dark and there’s nothing to stop this. Nothing to stop Aiden’s tongue from pushing past my lips to stroke mine. Nothing to keep his hands from cupping the sides of my face, his thumbs tracing the curve of my jawline. With a groan, he tips my head back to kiss me more fully, taking the access I grant him with hunger growing more and more unchecked.
“Dammit, we should have gone back to my place,” he rasps, drawing me onto my toes and crushing me to the door, dragging his hot, open mouth up the curve of my neck. “I just need to be alone with you so bad.”
“I need to be alone with you, too,” I breathe. “I missed you.”
“Did you?” he pauses to say, pausing our kiss long enough to search my face—and I don’t hide anything. For now, I’m an open book and the unspoken sentences he reads in my eyes make him huff a hard breath, our mouths crashing back together with more intention.
More urgency.
Our hips roll together, my stomach dragging sideways over his sizable erection—and I’m immediately pinned harder to the door. There’s a short pause, neither of us moving, balanced on razor wire or maybe the point of no return. And then he slides his feet back to position his sex lower on my clothed body, pressing that ridge tight to my mound and grinding upward, bringing my boots momentarily off the ground, before they land again. We exhale shakily, his hands climbing up the sides of my hips, framing and squeezing them hard, humping me again.
“Oh my God,” I whimper, wrapping my left leg around his hip, watching his mouth skate through the valley of my breasts, kissing each of them through my shirt, his hips shifting restlessly between my legs. “I’ve never been this turned on in my life.”
“Is that what I am? Turned on?” He surges up, forward, pressing his bared teeth against my ear, his thickness pulsing at my inner thigh. “Stella, you’ve got my dick so hard, I’m going to pass out if I don’t come.”
Hearing the words dick and come from this man’s normally squeaky-clean mouth hardens my nipples like pearls. His hair is in disarray, his mouth shiny and swollen, bow tie askew. Gorgeous, aching man. Desperate man. I love the change that comes over him when we’re intimate. It’s like watching the sun set, filling the sky with orange fire.
And his hands are magic. Magic. Massaging my bottom now, slowly, reverently, as if he’s discovered buried treasure after years of searching. His confident touch strokes up and down my buns, heating my flesh through my skirt, our mouths in a state of madness now. There’s no savoring, no going slow. Our mouths are open and we’re taking. My upper half is flattened to the door. I’m a willing victim. I want to rub myself against his hard shaft, but despite the lust storm building inside of me, there is a modicum of awareness left.
I care about this man.
I pushed him once to do something out of character and I won’t do it again.
If we’re going to rein it in, now is the time. A few more seconds of his mouth punishing mine with such perfect sensuality and I’ll forget my own name.
“Aid—” His tongue rakes up my neck and my breath stutters out. “Aiden.”
Eyes glittering, he cages me in tight to the door. “Yes, Stella.”
Wow. His voice is bottom of the barrel deep. “We can stop,” I whisper.
He stares at my mouth like a starving man. “Is that what you want?”
If I say yes, I’ll be lying. So I remain silent. Breathing, breathing.
“Uh-huh,” he drawls, in kind of a . . . cocky manner? “That’s what I thought.”
Yeah, wow. He looks kind of arrogant right now and oh man, it is really working for him—and me. Without untangling our gazes, he fists the hem of my shirt, untucks it from my skirt and peels it off over my head, making me gasp. Now I’m in a bra and a skirt, pinned between my boss and the door. Did I really think this man was a dork once upon a time? Because right now, the bow tie is my only reminder of my first judgment of Aiden Cook. Gone is the Tennessee gentleman and he’s been replaced by an absolute panty-melter.
“Listen to me,” he says against my ear, brushing his lips up and down the sensitive shell until my eyes start to glaze over. “I’ve stretched my patience as far as it will go when it comes to you, Stella. I’m starved. And there’s no more paperwork for this. I’ve fulfilled that obligation. The only requirement I’m interested in now is the one between your legs.” He turns and carries me across the office, settling my backside on the edge of his desk and yanking my hips to the very edge. “I need to fill it. As long as you want that, too, I’m done stopping.”
“I want it, I want it,” I whimper haltingly. “I want you.”
No points for subtlety.
But at least I can say I gave him one final out before we corrupt the walls of his office.
My fingers go to work on his belt buckle, unfastening it in a hurry and letting the heavy silver sag, wasting no time unbuttoning his pants and lowering the zipper. Oh my God. Oh my God—he’s huge. Thick and solid and long. Hard as nails. I rub my palm against the distended cotton of his briefs, watching his eyes grow dazed and molten at the same time. When I tug down the waistband of his underwear and stroke his bare flesh, his body gravitates closer as if compelled, his mouth slamming down over mine, our hands moving together in a vigorous motion, up and down the rigid stalk of his arousal.
“Keep that up while I get your panties off,” he says hoarsely, clamping his teeth down on my bottom lip, growling low in his throat while he shoves up my skirt and drags my basic black underwear down my thighs. It happens so fast. I’m so mesmerized by the flex of his forearms, the heaving breadth of his chest, that my hands stop moving and he begins to thrust into my fist instead. And if I was entranced before, that was nothing compared to now, because his hips move in such smooth pumps that my pulse begins to leap everywhere.
Especially there. Right there, between my legs, where I’m so wet. So wet without knowing how or when it happened, only that this man inspired it and there’s nothing like him. Nothing like the way we touch each other.
We converge like it was choreographed, his hips pressing in between my spread legs, his mouth on my neck, a big, male fist winding and winding in my hair.
“Are you going to scream?” he asks raggedly.
I shake my head rapidly. “No.”
“Good girl,” he grunts, slanting his mouth over mine. “Put me in. Put me all the way in.”
Am I crazy to feel those words resonating everywhere? As I guide his stiff sex to my entrance and press the tip inside me, both of us holding our breaths while he sinks and sinks, me gasping over the full, stretching sensation, I feel his words in the dead center of my chest. Put me all the way in. This is more than a physical invasion; he’s making himself known everywhere. In my bones. Into the organ leaping in my ribcage. When his shaft can’t push any further, there’s a catch in my throat and I exhale in a rush, gathering him to me. It’s involuntary. Wanting, needing him closer, closer, closer. “Aiden.”
“Stella,” he groans, wrapping his arms securely around me, smothering my face into his shoulder, our breath racing in and out, loudly to our ears, but drowned out by Christmas music to anyone outside of the door. And in that single use of my name, in the way he holds me like I’m priceless, I know he’s experiencing it, too. This sense of joining more than our bodies. It’s like there’s something waiting, eager to be unlocked inside of me, reaching out for the corresponding key in him.
He’s giving it. He holds me so tight and gives it.
Powerful hips rear back and drill forward—and I just barely manage to muffle my scream into his shoulder, my fingers this close to clawing the shirt right off his body.
Aiden laughs in my ear, sounding pained. “What happened to not screaming?”
“I didn’t expect it to feel that amazing,” I manage. Amazing is an understatement. He’s touching every forgotten corner of me, pressing tight and deep, his body wrapped around me, anchoring me, making me feel safe, needed, lusted for. “It n-never has.”
He looks at me with an unnamed emotion in his eyes. “Nothing in my life has felt as amazing as you, either. Nothing.” I have no time to process the weight and intensity of our exchange before he’s drawing me off the desk, keeping himself planted inside of my body while striding across the room. Toward another door. A filing room, I realize, when he brings me inside.
A second later he kicks the door shut behind us and my bottom hits the surface of a low filing cabinet. And then he’s bearing down on me. Hard. Downright rough. Positioning my legs open wide with his lower body and the occasional desperate hand, his hips punching back and slapping forward, my cries muffled by his shoulder, but in the closet we don’t have to try as hard to be quiet and that’s a good thing, because the filing cabinet is bumping against the wall, Aiden is chanting my name into my neck and I’m panting words like harder, faster, deeper.
“I know, sweetheart. I know you want that cock hard and dirty.” He kisses me until my mind is spinning, then presses our foreheads together tightly, his pace picking up, verging on wild. “And now you know. I can eat your pussy gentle and fuck you rough. Not so nice now, am I?”
“No!” God oh God, I’m ripping off his shirt. I’m watching my hands do this thing and have no control over them. I just want to see him. I want every inch of him to be in my memory bank. I resent the fact that I haven’t witnessed him naked, haven’t slid my nudity all over him and reveled in it. All of it, all of it. Now. I can’t stop touching and whimpering and I can’t wait for this torture to be over, but I also never want it to end. “Aiden, please.”
“It’s a good orgasm. That’s what’s coming. That’s what’s making you crazy. I know—I’m hurting, too. Hurting and feeling so goddamn hot at the same time. Do you know how tight you are?” He slams deep with a growl. “Jesus, it’s so fucking tight.”
He’s right about the buildup inside of me. It’s like nothing I’ve ever known. There’s no reservations between me and this man. Not right now. We’re giving everything to each other, selfish and generous in equal measure and we’re giving it physically, emotionally, and the turmoil is beautiful. So beautiful.
The flesh between my legs is seizing up around his pounding thickness in ominous waves. And when I finally succeed in opening several buttons of his shirt and the hard slabs of his pecs flex in the muted light, his long, guttural moan hitting my ears, a rush of sensation so violently perfect I can barely fathom it goes crashing through me, my sex pulsing one final time and quickening around him, hitting me with a turbulent knockout blow of relief.
“Shit. Shit. Been dying to feel that pussy go off for me. Squeezes even harder than I thought it would.” Aiden picks me up off the file cabinet mid-orgasm, wrapping me in a bear hug and grinding his hips up, up, up so deep into me that there really is no description of the sound I make into his hot, perspiring neck. A second climax follows the first, turning those tiny, intimate muscles instantly sore, but that doesn’t stop me from riding his stiffness, jerking my hips up and back and inviting him to follow me into the storm—and he does.
He drops a hand to my backside, clutching, drawing me roughly to his lap and he breaks apart, stumbling back in the small filing room until his back hits the wall, his warmth filling me while he groans my name, plowing his lower body upward over and over again, his shaft pulsing inside of me, jerking with every ounce he releases. “Jesus, Stella, Jesus. How is it so good? How are you so goddamn good for me, sweetheart? Move. Move just a little more. Ahhh, fuck. That’s it, right there. Take the last of it just like that.”
We just sort of collapse at the same time.
My body loses any sort of tension, sagging into Aiden’s arms, and he slides down the wall, cradling me in his lap on the floor. It takes us long, long minutes to get our breathing under control. And if he’s in the same boat as me, he’s trying to corral his heart, too. Though I’m not sure that’s an option. It seems to be an unbroken horse that has escaped from its pen.
“Stella . . .” His palm smooths the length of my hair, letting out an incredulous breath. “God, I knew it would be like that. I just didn’t know it would be like that.”
I nod against his chest, knowing exactly what he means.
We’re ruined.
He lays a kiss on my temple. “Come home with me after work tonight. Stay.”
Somehow I know going to Aiden’s home, being among his things and experiencing his routines with him is going to ruin me even worse than what we just did. Despite the niggling doubts in the back of my mind, all of them in myself and my ability to be this new person . . . I am powerless to do anything but nod. To do anything but hand him as much of my heart as I have available. “Yes. I’ll stay.”
14
Aiden
I guide Stella into my apartment by the hand. “Keep your eyes closed.”
“I promised I would,” she laughs, squeezing her lids tighter. “You’re not going to reveal a giant Beanie Baby collection or something, are you?”
“I’m saving that for the third date,” I call back to her while crossing the room, flipping the floor switch to turn on the Christmas tree lights, as well as the lit-up garland that runs the perimeter of my living room window. I’m probably going to lose all of the progress I’ve made in convincing her I’m nothing more than a huge cornball, but so be it. I want her to remember the first time she walked into my apartment. I’m sure as hell going to.
Just seeing her outlined in the common hallway light in her puffy jacket and boots, her bangs dusted with the snow that has started falling outside, is twisting me up in more directions than a funnel cake at the county fair. I’ve lived in this place for five years and other women have darkened my doorway in that time. Those others . . . they had my respect, but my heart was never involved. Not a single corner of it. Not like this.
I’ve never turned on my Christmas tree and matching garland for anyone, that’s for damn sure. Never wanted to see her hair spread across my pillow so badly, I ache. And here I am, already making a list of things I’ve only experienced with Stella to make myself feel better for every encounter I’ve ever had with another woman. That’s how bad I’ve got it. I’m guilty for everything I ever did before we met.
She’s lit up in a soft, white Christmas glow as I approach her again, sending my heart off clunking in my chest. When I stop in front of her and unzip her jacket, her eyes are still closed. Slowly, I pull the nylon off her shoulders, watching color infuse her cheeks, the pace of her breath increasing slightly. As if I’m undressing her completely, making her naked, instead of just removing her jacket. But that’s how I’ve felt all day, too. My lust is on a hair trigger ever since this afternoon, when we ruined each other for anyone or anything else in my filing room.
Here’s another thing for my growing list of firsts with Stella. I’ve never come so hard that my life flashes in front of my eyes. No sir. Not until her. I can still feel the hot clench of her pussy around me, the way she clung, the smooth friction of her inner thighs on my hips, the way she begs for more, more, more with her whole body. Truth be told, I’ve caught myself staring into space with a semi-erection around nine times since this afternoon.
