Chapter 2: Don't Be So Desperate 🌶️🌶️🌶️

The fluorescent overhead light caught his face full-on when she finally turned, and Sloane realized she could see him clearly now.

Holden had grown.

He was taller than she remembered. Some of the boy was gone from the line of his jaw — what was left was harder, more sure of itself. The black suit gave him a quiet kind of menace. His hooded grey-blue eyes were lit from below by the thin strip of LED along the floor, and a small white catchlight glinted in each pupil. The thick line of his brow was pulled low. His mouth was a flat, unhappy line.

He looked, in short, exactly like a man who had spent the last hour finding out something he didn't want to know.

He was angry.

Sloane was suddenly very aware of how he was pressing against her. He was bigger now — wider in the chest, broader in the shoulders. With his hooded eyes pinning her like that, the pressure was strong enough that her breath went short.

A long-lost lover meeting like this, she thought flatly, was supposed to be tender.

Especially one who'd rolled around in bed with her for the better part of two years.

She came back to herself in pieces. She wasn't going to lose face to him. Not him.

She tucked the loose strands of hair behind her ear, let out a small, curated little laugh, and reached up to fist the silk of his tie. She yanked.

He hadn't seen it coming. His weight pitched forward, his left hand slammed flat against the stall door behind her with a heavy thud, and suddenly half of Sloane's body was tucked into the curve of his.

She slid the tie around her fingers — slowly, twice — pretending to admire it. The rhinestone chip on her acrylic nail caught the light and threw a small bright flash up into Holden's eyes. She watched his pupil tighten against it. His brow drew lower.

She leaned in. Slowly. Her perfume bloomed on the front of his shirt. Their noses brushed. She let the tip of her tongue trace the seam of his upper lip — just once, flickering — and then dropped a soft, weightless press of her mouth to his. He hadn't even started to react before she pulled back.

The air between their mouths was already too thick. Past the line. She knew it. He knew it.

She tilted her head and made her face the picture of wide-eyed innocence.

"If I hadn't been like this," she said softly, "would you have ever slept with me, back then?"

Holden was breathing hard. He'd gone hard the second she'd pulled his tie. He could keep up the cold thing only so long.

He shoved one step forward and pinned her flat against the door.

The hunger in his eyes wasn't even hidden anymore.

He hooked one arm under her knee and lifted, fitting her thigh up around his hip. His hand slid up the back of it, slow, like he was making sure she felt where he was going. Then he bit down on her lower lip — hard, no warning — and shoved his way into her mouth.

His other hand was everywhere. Up her ribs. Under her dress. He pawed her open the way a starving man tore at bread. She was startled into pushing him off — but his hand had already followed the side seam of her dress up, found the edge of her bra cup, and stripped the silicone insert off her breast in one move. He pinched the nipple between thumb and finger, hard, twisting.

A sharp involuntary sound spilled out of her into his mouth.

His teeth caught her swollen lower lip. He spoke against it, slurred from arousal:

"Open your mouth, Sloane."

She was light-headed. He'd kissed the air out of her and she didn't know how to argue. She parted her lips and he was instantly inside, his tongue hooking past her teeth, pushing deep — and then, slowly, deliberately, dragging up against the roof of her mouth.

He remembered.

He remembered exactly where she was most sensitive.

The wave of it slammed her body all at once, a long shudder rolling from her scalp to her toes.

His right hand pushed between them. He flipped the hem of her dress out of the way, palmed the front of her panties, and dragged the heel of his hand up the seam of her, slow, again and again.

"Mm — "

She tried to clamp her thighs together to stop him but he was relentless, his body already wedged between her legs, refusing to let them close. He hooked two fingers into the side of her panties and tugged the fabric to the side. The pad of his finger slipped into her wet heat — and then up the slit, fast — and she keened against his mouth.

She threw her arms around his neck for purchase, terrified she was going to drop. Her hips lifted helplessly into his palm. He didn't slow. The ridge of his thumb worked the swollen knot at the top of her in tight quick circles, grinding pressure and friction at exactly the speed that made her body tighten and tighten, climbing — climbing —

The wet sound of him working her was obscene. It echoed off the tile walls.

He was building her right up to the edge of it, fast, and she was almost there, almost there —

And then he slowed.

On purpose.

Sloane's whole body cried out at the loss. He had her so kissed-stupid she couldn't keep her eyes open. When he finally pulled his mouth off hers, a thin silver thread of saliva stretched between them and snapped wet on her chin.

She slumped forward into the front of his shirt, both hands fisted in the fabric of his sleeves. He brought his hand up between them and held it in the strip light, where the slick on his fingers caught the glow and shone like something obscene.

"Sloane," he said, and laughed under his breath, low. "You're so wet."

She was strung up halfway between climax and ruin. She slammed her fist into his chest.

"Are you going to fucking fuck me or not?"

His mouth tipped up at the corner. He undid his belt one-handed. The rasp of leather, the metal click of the buckle — and then the soft heavy weight of him pulled free, ready, slapping wetly against her thigh. He hooked her other leg up too, and she was wrapped around him entirely, suspended off the floor, only the door at her back and his hands on her ass holding her up.

His head dipped to her ear. His voice was a low, languid drawl.

"Don't be so desperate. Put it in yourself, baby. Good girl."