“Like an oil spill?”

He wipes a hand across his face, eyes crinkling in my favorite Finn smile. “Exactly. I just knew I would never be able to clean you off.” We both laugh and then his expression straightens. “I’ve never been able to be myself with anyone, not the way I am with you.” He bends down, kisses me. “I just figured you only wanted fucking, and so it’s the only place my mind went. I didn’t think we fit this way.”

“Me, either,” I admit quietly. “I just assumed you were like every other guy and would disappoint quickly enough.”

“That may still be true,” he says, kissing along my jaw. “I might just take a little longer.”

What he’s doing feels so good, just his lips on my throat and his fingers slyly sliding my dress up over my hips. “Take all the time you need,” I mumble.

He talks as he undresses me. “You liked watching me at that party tonight?”

One of my shoes, and then the other, hits the floor.

“Yeah.” In fact, I loved it. He didn’t seem completely in his element, but he was happy enough to try, for me. It’s what we’ll do for each other, I can tell. We’ll try to find that common ground and live there.

“Did you refer to me as your boyfriend to the Kardashian look-alikes in the kitchen?”

His hands slide up under my dress, hands spread across my hips before he grabs and pulls my underwear down my legs. Way, way too slowly for my mood.

I push up into his touch. “I didn’t refer to you that way, but your fangirls seemed disappointed that it might be true.”

He rolls me slightly to reach behind me and unzip my dress. “Did you confirm I’m taken?”

“They knew,” I say, arching so he can slide my dress down my body. When I’m completely naked, and he’s staring at me like I’m Thanksgiving dinner and the Crown Jewels and a Playboy centerfold all rolled into one naked body, I add, “They could tell from the way you looked at me.”

He snorts, unbuttoning his dress shirt. “The way I looked at you?”

“Yeah.”

He shrugs out of his shirt and leans back over me, immense. “And how do I look at you?”

His arms strain against the cotton of his undershirt and it seems somehow to barely contain his biceps, the width of his chest. The way the T-shirt is smoothly tucked into the flat front of his black dress pants . . . sweet Jesus.

He runs a warm palm up my stomach and spreads his giant hand across my ribs. “Snap?”

“Shh, Poodle. I’m having a Johnny Castle, Dirty Dancing moment right now.”

“Is this a good thing or a bad thing?” he asks, bending to lick up my neck.

“I carried a watermelon.”

He pulls back and looks at me before ducking to sniff my breath. “How drunk are you?”

“For the love of God, man, I’m not drunk. Get naked or put that mouth between my legs.”

I expect him to be a good boy and comply—he’s been so good tonight—but he disappoints.

Standing, he reaches for my hand and pulls me up, wrapping his arms around my waist. “I’m not fucking you on the floor,” he says.

“Then why did you put me there?”

“Impatient. Maybe clumsy.”

I laugh. There is not a clumsy bone in Finn’s body, but there are definitely 206 impatient ones.

He leads me down the hall to my bedroom, passing the hall closet without a second glance.

“You’re not going to tie me up tonight?”

He shakes his head.

“But I like it.”

I hear his quiet laugh. “I like it, too. I just don’t want to do it every time we’re together.”

“I’ll put my hands all over you,” I say, as if it’s a threat.

“That’s the point.” He turns, bending to kiss my neck and inhales slowly, smelling me.

Reaching down, I pull his shirt free from his pants. “So the rope isn’t really for bondage, it’s—”

“Sometimes it is,” he admits quietly, sucking on my pulse point. “I like the freedom it gives me to touch you any way I want. I think we both know I’m a controlling type.”

I laugh and it turns into a moan when he runs his hand down my shoulder and across my breast.

“But I also just like the evidence of it.”

I bite my lip, grinning as I unbuckle his belt, unfasten his pants, and push them down his hips. “ ‘The evidence?’ ”

He watches my mouth, stepping out of his clothes. “I like leaving marks. I like seeing you wet, and watching you walk differently in the morning because I fucked you so good your legs aren’t working right.” Finn swipes his tongue over my throat, making me shiver. “How you looked the morning I saw you at Starbucks? You’ll never look like that after a night with me.”

I exhale a jagged breath when he sucks hard against my shoulder, pulling a mark to the surface. “I like seeing what I do to you,” he says, “especially you, because I can tell how much you trust me—and seeing how good I can make you feel makes me insane. Rope is just something I’m very, very . . .” He lifts his head from my neck and kisses my mouth, my jaw, my cheek, and hovers near my ear, whispering, “Very comfortable handling.”

“Oh.” Oh sweet lord. I’m aching, my skin flushed. I swear if he touches me between my legs once I will go off like a bomb. “So possessive,” I mumble, arching my neck to give him better access.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “That’s exactly it.” Studying me, he guides me to lie on the bed and crawls over me. He’s massive in the dark room, a planet looming over my bed. Slowly bending his head to my chest, he licks my nipple, sucking and playing with my breasts until the tips are swollen and aching, flushed and hot. “Like this,” he whispers, bending to lick, and suck, and pull the peak between his lips some more until my skin glistens in the shadowed room. “I like these wet and hard . . .”

He bends again, biting just beneath my nipple. His teeth press in harder and sharper until the only sensation I’m aware of is the sharp line of them, the pressure and the delicious sting, sting, sting—

“Ah!” I cry out, and just before I think he’ll draw blood he pulls back, running his tongue over the bite mark, kissing it sweetly.

“Feel good?” he purrs into my skin.

I’m about to answer, “Hell no,” but the pain is gone and in its place is a feeling unlike anything I’ve experienced before: throbbing heat and intense pleasure commingle. His bite has created a tiny spot of insatiable hunger on my chest. I want his mouth back there, sucking and soothing and biting me more.

“More,” I manage.

Finn’s eyes seem to gleam with victory at my reaction—my hands pulling his face to my chest, back arched off the bed—and very carefully he bites deep grooves into an intricate pattern all over my breasts. Around my nipples and in the full curve below. Along the sides, and at the smooth slope of them just above the swollen peaks.

He kisses each spot, licking and sucking until my skin shines, and I’m on the verge of screaming. He drags my hand up so I can feel each small indentation. “Touch them,” he says, dragging his teeth down over my shoulder, to my arm. “Tell me how it feels when I lick you.”

The tiny grooves remind me of the rope marks, but are more intimate somehow. These red marks that tell the room and the sky and the swollen moon outside for only a tiny trip of time: I belong to him. My body is his.

I don’t want them to disappear, and can tell he doesn’t, either, returning to the first one, pushing his possession back into my skin.

I need his body pressed to mine, covering my breasts so the puff of his breath across the peaks won’t make me cry out, and I want the wet, soothing slide of his tongue over the sensitive bite marks. I feel cracked open, devoured and hollowed out, filled with a desire so consuming and deep I can sense how warm and soft I am beneath him, ready to pull him down onto me. Into me.

He sucks at me while his hands are busy elsewhere and I hear the crinkle of a condom wrapper and the wet sound of its lubricant as he rolls the latex down his length.

“Tell me if it’s too much,” he says into my skin as he positions himself and then presses his chest to mine, sliding into me in a long, smooth stroke.

I might be screaming or cursing or begging—I don’t know. My skin is aching for friction but terrified of it all the same. It’s a divine torture. The bite marks pulse and heat, and my chest is so wet Finn slides across me, groaning as he moves in and out. Oh God. The drag of his skin across my breasts burns and aches, pleasures and soothes, and when he lifts his chest away I need it back. Pulling him down over me I beg for faster.

Please . . .

“Tell me how it feels,” he rasps.

“It feels . . . it feels . . .” My breasts are pulsing with every heartbeat and so sensitive I’m sure he could drag his tongue across the peak and—

Finn bends and presses his flattened tongue just below my nipple and drags it up just as he shoves in deep and begins fucking me in these tiny perfect jabs. I cry out, clutching him.

It feels like I’m yours.

His tongue soothes the burn but makes me arch, makes me beg and beg for his hips to move faster and his mouth to make my breasts wetter and for him to please

please

please

please make me come.

He makes a noise against my skin right when I jerk beneath him, gasping. His sound is half laugh, half thrilled groan and in a flash he draws my hands up over my head, pinning me, working me with his hips and his mouth until I’m thrashing.

I’m filling with pressure, climbing, skin flushing hot and wet, and then I’m screaming his name, consumed by the silvery, pulsing of pleasure until I can’t differentiate any particular touch. It’s only Finn over me and the pleasure tearing through me and his soft hoarse sounds of encouragement: “That’s it. That’s it. Oh, fuck me, you’re coming. Oh fuck.”

It’s strange to lose one’s mind, but it’s what he does to me—in these moments of wild bliss, when I’ve just come and he’s losing himself in me—everything else in the world disappears. The stars could fall, the ocean could take over the land, and I wouldn’t even realize it until long after Finn slows his hips and runs his hand up my leg and along my side, until he reaches my jaw, cupping it and telling me he’s never wanted anything the way he wants me.

IN FACT, IF the world ended tonight, I suspect we wouldn’t hear about it until morning. Finn gets out of bed only long enough to get rid of the condom and come back with a wet cloth, wiping the lubricant from my skin so he can do some of the most wicked things with his mouth between my legs.

His tongue laps at me, he grazes me with his teeth and growls like a wild animal, spreading my legs apart with one hand gripping my thigh, fingering me with the other. I feel the full depraved meaning of the phrase eating her out. He is devouring.

And then, with his eyes pinned up the length of my body, he slides his fingers lower and does something so unexpected, the only way he knows I like it is the way I scream when I come harder against his mouth than I think I ever have before.

Finn kisses my thigh, my hip, my navel, rasping, “Fucking hell.”

And then he pulls me down the mattress, setting my feet on the floor so he can bend me over the bed.

“You sore yet, you dirty fucking girl?” he asks quietly, tearing a new condom packet open with his teeth.

I turn and look at him over my shoulder, lifting my chin in challenge. “No.”

“Good.”

Because when he positions himself and pushes in so deep I collapse against the bed, I know he’s going to fuck me, dirty and hard.

It’s Vegas all over again: rowdy, with his palm on my ass and his other hand digging so hard into my hip I look forward to the tiny bruises I know I’ll find tomorrow. But I finally recognize Vegas for what it was: It wasn’t his “usual” stranger fuck, Finn being domineering and rough. It was Finn unbound, Finn laid bare with me, his perfectly matched stranger. All at once I know with someone else he would have been careful that first night—slower-handed, softer words, easy, rolling hips—but with me he couldn’t be.

He could only do rowdy because he felt what I felt: that whip-crack unleashing that comes when you meet the person who frees you.

Finn lowers us to the floor, running his hand down my sweat-slicked spine, and then I feel his own sweaty chest press into my back as he curls over me, entering me again and immediately riding me fast and smooth, his greedy hands cupping my breasts.

He’s insatiable on the floor, against the wall, back up on the bed with my legs on his shoulders. It’s like this, under the firm touch of his fingers, that I come apart with a scream and his teeth bared against my ankle. I can tell he’s close to his own release but he slows his thrusts, humming into my leg.

“What do you want me to do?” I ask, running my hand down his sweaty chest and lowering my legs to his sides.

“It feels fucking amazing,” he says through heavy breaths, bending to kiss me. “I want to come, but I also don’t.”

“There’s no rush,” I purr, pulling him down so his chest presses all along mine.

“I got a taste of you bare, earlier,” he admits quietly. “Do you have any idea how good you feel without this fucking condom? I can’t stop thinking about how warm and sweet you were.”

How is it possible I’d forgotten what we’d done in the car? A mixture of longing and anxiety shadows my thoughts.

“It’s like I’m trying to fuck this thing off.” He laughs into my shoulder and begins moving again. I remember how warm he felt, how smooth.