“I didn’t know it was possible to feel this way about anyone. It feels like more than love,” she whispered, echoing my thoughts.
I folded my body over hers. “I know.” I began to move in and out, feeling our fate surrounding us, binding us stronger. The push and pull of our bodies sinking me further into our destiny.
She caught my jaw in her hand, her fingers pressing into my stubble, and brought my lips to hers. She plunged her tongue into my mouth, her groans shooting vibrations of pleasure down my spine.
Breaking our kiss, I braced myself, hands flat on the desk either side of her and took a breath. It was too much. This woman was too fucking much for me.
Her hair splayed on the glass desk, the reflection of her body everywhere I looked from the glass windows to the chrome legs of the table, she surrounded me and it was overwhelming and perfect and I wanted it to last forever.
But I needed to fuck her. I needed to come. And when we were done, I needed to do it again and again and again.
A lifetime of this woman wouldn’t ever be enough.
I was two seconds away from giving up, from surrendering to my orgasm, but I wanted her pleasure more than my own, and by some force of will, adrenaline seared through my limbs, giving me the strength to keep going, to keep chasing away the ache in me that she created. For it was only her who held the cure.
“Beck!” she cried out.
The desperation in her eyes told me she couldn’t take anymore, and I understood.
“Come, Stella. Come for me.”
She sighed, thankful and longing, and her body silently erupted beneath me. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and I was gone. I was lost to her and I pushed in again, gasping at the fierce rumble of my orgasm that gathered into a roar when it reached my chest and exploded.
I wasn’t sure I could withstand the power of my climax, the pleasure I got from being with her.
After a moment of blackness, I opened my eyes to find her gazing up at me. Panting, I lay my head on her chest and tried to find my voice. “Tell me what you want?” I asked, my breath heavy against her skin.
“You,” she whispered. “I want you. I need you. It’s only you. Ever.”
Since I met her, whether I’d known it or not, those were the words I’d been waiting to hear from Stella. Hearing it calmed me. As if the final piece of the jigsaw had been found. And I needed nothing but her—not buildings or developments, not acceptance from a section of society that had so resolutely rejected me. I didn’t need anything but to be with the woman who had changed how I saw myself. She was the woman who healed my wounds, faded my scars, and showed me my future.
Epilogue
Six months later
Stella
Was it wrong to feel a sexual connection toward a slab of stone? I took in the thin, gray veins of the white Statuario marble and shivered. So beautiful.
“Stella? Are you drooling?” Florence appeared at my side.
“Maybe. What are you doing here?” Had I been too engrossed in fixtures and missed a lunch date?
“I called by the office and they said you were down here.”
The last time she’d called by my office, it had been a different office, a different job—an entirely different life that I was leading.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, sweeping my hand down the cold, smooth surface and turning away in case I got tempted to lick it.
Florence winced and I guided her out of the penthouse unit we were working on and toward the lift. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I wanted you to hear this from me,” Florence said as she stepped inside.
“Oh God, will you stop starting sentences like that?” I laughed. “At least this time, I know you’re not about to tell me that Karen’s running off with Beck.” There was never a day that went by that I doubted Beck’s love for me. He was a man who believed that love was a verb and found every way he could to show me how he felt.
He’d taught me what real love was.
“Well, no, but you won’t believe it when I tell you what she’s done now.”