“Slowly it builds. Faster. Deeper. Your heart races and you hold your breath… waiting for the crescendo…”
The tiny hairs on my arms and neck rose as my skin pebbled. Every cell in my body reached out to him, wanting to be closer to him. It was as though he were touching me with his words… with every stroke… with this song…
“Lean into it. Let it take you. Everything vibrates. The world disappears. It’s just you… and this. Do you feel it?”
The music crept beneath my skin, like liquid fire pouring through my veins and consuming all my senses. Yes, I felt it. I felt him. Everywhere. I blindly gripped one side of the piano, squeezing, clenching, holding onto something, anything. Because there was an edge and my self-control was about to plummet off it.
Then it stopped.
My eyes flew open, and I let out a shaky breath. The air was filled with tension… magnetism… with this imaginary force that swirled around us. Sutton’s expression was unreadable, but I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt it—the want. His clear-blue eyes deepened to a rich sapphire as they drifted to my lips. As if on cue, my tongue darted out to wet my dry mouth.
I swallowed hard. “You’re good at that.” I didn’t specify what that was.
At playing piano. At setting my panties on fire with your stare. At making my insides feel like mush. At making me forget why this is all very, very wrong.
“I’m good at a lot of things.”
After what I just experienced, not a single part of me doubted that was true.
Fifteen
I hadn’t played for anyone other than my parents and that uptight Debussy-wannabe in France. I didn’t play for the attention. I played for myself. Like burning sage or bathing in holy water, exorcising my demons with each stroke of the keys. Sometimes I sat in this room for hours, pounding, then pressing gently, then pounding again. Until my lungs were out of breath and my body glistened with sweat. I loved hearing the soft sounds evolve into something deeper, more powerful, then I’d bring them back down again. I controlled it. My touch controlled it. It was my drug. I brought Katie here because when she ran into me in the hall, she looked every bit as broken and strung out as I felt. I thought if I played for her, then maybe, just maybe, she would let her demons out to play with mine, that we could both be free. Even if only for a moment.
She stood here in this hot pink blouse cut low enough to tease her cleavage but not actually show it and a dark blue pencil skirt (the color of my nuts currently) that looked like it was painted on her curves. I almost wished she’d go back to the fucking sundresses. I didn’t know which was worse. At this point, I was convinced she could wear a bedsheet and make it look sexy. My bedsheet, to be exact. My bedsheet and nothing else but tangled hair and a freshly fucked glow.
Her chest heaved, and the heartbeat in her delectable little throat pulsed with need. Watching the way Katie responded to me play was my new addiction, and Beethoven’s Silence was now my favorite song. I imagined her sitting on the lid, legs spread, pussy open for my eyes only, her body writhing against her own hand while I played until she came. One day, I would have her exactly like that. One day very soon.
From the minute I learned her last name, I wanted to destroy her. To break her apart, piece by piece, until there was nothing left of the girl who ate cotton candy in front of Ferris wheels and quoted erotic poetry. I wanted to make her pay for her father’s mistakes because my father never had the courage to. And now he was sick and would never have the chance. But all that changed the last time I saw her, the night her eyes told me she’d lost the internal battle we’d both been fighting. The battle between what we wanted and what we knew we shouldn’t have. Now I wanted to destroy her in a different way. I wanted to claim her, to taste her, to feast on her until there was nothing left for anyone after me. I wanted to ruin her for all the Keatons of the world who thought they’d ever have a chance.
“So, this thing with Keaton…”
“Is over. It was a moment and now it’s gone. That’s all.”
Good. Because I didn’t like to share. I felt a pang of guilt that I was actually glad that she might have had her heart broken by him, but it was short-lived.
I nudged the piano bench backward as I stood, my hand wrapping around her tiny waist and sliding her in front of me. “And this? Is this a moment?”
The keys sang a cluttered melody when her ass pressed against them. She shook her head. “No. This is…” She licked her lips again. “This is a mistake.”
I hooked my fingers under the bottom of her skirt, inching my hands up her legs and pulling the fabric with me, stopping only when it was hiked up around her waist, showing me the outline of her perfect fucking pussy through the white lace of her panties. Suddenly, it was all I could think about, the only thing I craved, just one touch.
She was right. This was forbidden. But her eyes met mine and they were so dark, so hungry, I’d give her anything. Everything. I would rip out my soul and hand it to her if she asked me to.
Forbidden. I hated that word.
I eased myself between her thighs then brought my mouth to hers, hovering but not quite touching. My cock brushed against that sweet spot between her legs, and she let out a gasp. “I almost made you come, and I hadn’t even touched you yet. Does that feel like a mistake?”
Her shuddered breath skated across my lips, so I pressed harder, and she gasped. I kept my cock tucked safely inside my pants but that didn’t stop me from feeling how wet she was. She was right there… open and ready… at the tip of my dick. One more centimeter, and I’d be inside of her.
She arched her back, slowly rocking her body into mine. Grinding, seeking, chasing. Again. And again. Her actions were a delirious contradiction to her words. This was definitely not a fucking mistake. “Oh God,” she breathed, and I couldn’t tell if it was a plea or a prayer, but I was about to answer it.
I took a fistful of her hair, the way I’d been wanting to do since the minute I saw her, and tilted her head back, exposing the delicate column of her neck. An overwhelming urge to mark her there shot through me. And I would. One day. One day, I would mark her everywhere. With my mouth. With my cock. With my cum.
I brushed my nose against hers then brought my mouth to her cheekbone. “See what you do to me?” I drove into her again, my thick head pushing through the barrier of fabric and slipping past the seam of her lips. I pictured her swollen, pink, and waiting for me. “See what I do to you?”
Her hands fisted in my shirt. “We…” She swallowed, her chest rising and falling with each rapid breath. “We can’t do this.”
I hiked her leg around my waist. The movement caused her panties to shift to the side, leaving her bare cunt exposed and ripe for the taking. I was suddenly painfully aware of how close we were, of how easy it would be to drag my zipper down and bury myself inside her. “Oh, we are fucking doing this.”
I situated myself between the seam of her lips, right up against her clit, and she whimpered. Jesus, I was coming undone and we weren’t even naked yet. “Someone could see us,” she said.
She was right. My antechamber had no door, just an open arch leading inside. Anyone could’ve walked by at any given moment but… fuck them. The only thing I cared about was hearing my name on her lips when she came.