Page 31 of Catching Sparks

The world ceases to exist when she slams her lips against mine. I shatter and glue myself back together in the same breath. Something inside of me snaps, a lock clicking open on the chain around a beast that’s been starved for a lifetime.

And Poppy’s its meal of choice.

12

POPPY

My back slams into the front door. Garrison drags his mouth across my cheek and over my ear to stare at the doorknob behind me while he works to unlock it. His arm presses against my side, the sound of the key in the lock heightening my excitement.

Our breaths are ragged, mouths hungry in the dark. He grips my hip to keep me upright before he’s pushing the door open and we’re moving again. Backward, sideways, I don’t know. I’m floating, tipsy from the apple pie shots but drunk off the taste of the man pressed against me, his lips and tongue finding mine again.

I should tell him where to go to get to my room, but the thought of separating, even just for a second, has my mind thrashing in refusal. Our shoes scuff the floor as Garrison leads us through the house, slamming a hand to the walls as if searching for a light switch to illuminate the darkness.

Frantically, I fumble for the buttons on his shirt and pull at them the moment I feel their smoothness beneath my fingertips. Too long. It will take too long to undo them one by one.

It takes two strong tugs on the silk fabric for the buttons to tear free, pinging off the walls and onto the floor. I drop my head, pressing my forehead to Garrison’s hot mouth as my hands dive between the silk and straight to his bare chest.

“I liked that shirt,” he says gruffly, moving us through a doorway.

I splay my fingers and push them outward, across the soft skin beneath them. His nipples are hard against my palms, and I dig my teeth into his bottom lip, tugging at it, either playfully or in an attempt to rile him up, I’m not sure.

“I’m sure Mr. Black Card can go buy a hundred more if he wants to,” I reply, my voice almost unrecognizable through the raging need within it.

A gasp explodes from my lips when he takes two powerful steps forward and sends me tumbling back. A mattress catches my fall. My mattress. I spread my arms, burying my hands beneath my pillows as I stare at him in the dark, only a faint outline of his body appearing. I’m so fucking riled, the pulse between my legs a living thing driving me to insanity.

“Do you really want this, Poppy?” he asks, the question a dark rumble scattering over my flesh.

As my eyes adjust to the dark, I make out more of him. The broad width of his shoulders and inward curve of his waist. Even the firm line of his puffy lips as he focuses the full weight of his eyes on my splayed form.

I nod my head, not a single fragment of hesitation in my mind.

“Say it out loud,” he demands, shrugging his torn shirt down his arms.

“I want this.”

Strong hands grip above my calves and tug. I slide down the bed, my knees hanging off the edge, boots clacking at the heels. My heart races, sweat beading on my brow as he nudges my legs open and steps between them.

He reaches for his belt, unbuckling it before working on the zipper of his slacks. Leaving them open and hanging on his hips, he grips my knees, thumb stroking the bottom ridges of them once.

“It’s going to be hard and fast. You have me in fucking knots,” he warns through his teeth, jaw hard, tense.

“Likewise.” It’s a brutal understatement.

Garrison leans over me, hands climbing up my legs, over my thighs. Our eyes don’t stray from one another as I pull my hands from beneath my pillows and raise them to his biceps, exploring them as I move up to his shoulders, holding him tight.

We’ve been playing with each other since the moment we met, and now that we’re here, I don’t know where to begin. There are endless possibilities of what I want to do to him. With him. For him. I’m desperate, and I know he recognizes that in me just as well as I recognize the same thing in him.

“Do it, Garrison. Just fucking do it,” I mutter, half begging and half demanding.

His eyes burn beneath furrowed brows, two flaming balls of need. It’s all I can do not to cry out in bliss when he grips the hem of my shirt in a tight fist and shoves it up my body. The room is still dark, and Poppy from ten years ago would have liked that. Asked for it, even. But the woman I am now wants this man to see me. All of me. There’s no reason to continue if he doesn’t want me the same naked in the light as he does with my clothes on.

“Turn the lamp on,” I tell him.

He’s quick to do it, reaching for where it sits on my nightstand. It fills the room with a low light, not enough to blind, but enough to ensure we can see each other the way I need us to.

“That’s the last order you give me tonight.”

“We’ll see about that.”

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