My chest rises with my leaden breaths. I shake my head. “Why now?”
He groans. “Because now you’re Avery. Not drugged, not on some chemical to fuck with your senses. And if you can’t feel how badly I crave you—every fucking sexy bit of you—and if you don’t get that I’ve never seen you as a victim, not once…” he trails off, his gaze becoming heated. “Fuck, Avery. I just need you.”
“Touch me,” I say, the only response I can give him.
He doesn’t hold back. Not this time. Quinn consumes my senses; his masculine scent of cologne and leather, his rough hands adding friction to all the right places. And unlike before, when he barely allowed himself near me, he now ravishes me with a punishing voracity meant to tear down all obstacles.
As his mouth caresses my skin, his tongue and lips massaging the ache in my shoulder away, my hand subconsciously goes to my lips. Concealing the scar.
Quinn sharply changes course. His hand sinks into my hair, his thumb tilts my chin up, angling my face toward his. His other hand encircles my wrist, removing the barrier to my mouth.
“A force of habit…” I falter.
His gaze lingers on my lips as he moves in, sealing his mouth over mine and enveloping me in a sensual kiss. Then, he whispers, “Every. Fucking. Sexy. Bit of you”—his eyes ensnare mine—“is just as beautiful as the next part. You’re beautiful, Avery. Even your scars are beautiful to me.”
Then his teeth nip at my lip, tugging it into his mouth before he pulls me into a devastating kiss that shatters me.
I’m lit with a blazing heat as his hand finds its way between my thighs. With a swift, expert move, he tugs the lacy fabric aside, his fingers seeking me without hesitation. His back tenses underneath my hands as he swirls the pads of his fingers deeper. Cool air nips at my core, proof of my arousal.
“Christ, you’re so wet,” he whispers harshly against my ear, and I can’t help the smile stealing over my face. I’m wet—without any need of an aid.
I ache all over, completely insatiable. And when he pushes inside, filling me with two of his fingers and leaving them there…I tremble against him. “Oh, god, please move. I want to feel you inside me, Quinn.”
His rough growl heightens my need, and as he gives in, sliding his fingers deeper and with more force, all I can taste and sense is him.
I want to dissect this feeling—to try to understand how it’s Quinn that shreds my defenses. How with every other man—even with my cocktail—I have to power through the fear, block out the encroaching shadows.
But I can’t stop my mind from spinning long enough to unravel the meaning. Quinn tastes like pleasure and sin and longing. Such a powerful combination of emotions that steal my reas
oning…but it’s as if I’ve always been aware of them. Just hovering on the edge of the both of us, waiting to be recognized. Like I’ve been denying myself a right to this feeling all of my life.
And now that it’s unleashed, ripping us both open at the seams, I dread the loss of it.
I arch into him, unable to control myself as he works me closer, my walls clamping down around his fingers and my body begging for more.
He nips at my ear, ratcheting up my desire. “I should’ve taken your pain yesterday, Aves,” he whispers. “I should’ve tasted your sweet pussy until you came in my mouth…and the only thing you knew was pleasure and how badly I wanted you.”
His words caress me, and as I build toward a climax, desperate to push past any banked uncertainty, I cling to his shoulders. He drops down and takes a nipple into his mouth, his hot tongue tasting me through my shirt, his teeth firing a sharp spike of need right through me.
“That’s it,” he assures. “Let me feel you come… I need to taste you.”
He dips lower, leaving me panting and aching, but soon his mouth—that mouth I have never heard utter such sexy things—takes me completely, finishing me off. His tongue swirls fast and needy over my clit, tipping me over the edge, as his fingers bring on a deep and consuming orgasm.
He pushes one of my knees up, spreading my legs wider as he devours me, my core pulsing against his thrusts. Then he meets me there. His mouth swallows my moan with a hungry kiss, taking the rest for himself.
When my breathing calms, he slows the kiss and pulls away. His eyes fervently holding mine, he reaches down and unclips his phone. “Stay right here…” he says. “I have to return this call.”
“I didn’t even hear it ring,” I manage to say around the receding aftershocks still thrumming through my body.
He crooks a wicked smile. “That does a guy’s ego good, but it’s on vibrate.”
This side of Quinn…a girl could get used to. But just like that, Quinn is all business, his cop persona slipping into place like the gun he holsters to his shoulder harness.
He makes his call, getting updates from a tech on a recent search, and I can’t help but eavesdrop. This concerns me, too, and no matter how badly Quinn might want to shelter me, I have more knowledge than he can imagine.
That thought dampens the moment, knowing he’s completely unaware of my true abductor’s identity, and has no idea that I’m connected to Wells’ death, or how the men who took me yesterday somehow know how deeply my level of involvement goes.
I haven’t even had time to process the reality of it all. Or what the hell it could all mean. But I do know that whatever is happening between me and Quinn changes things. The slight guilt I felt before in keeping Quinn in the dark has just multiplied by infinity.