Page 66 of Hold on Tight

Even if there had been times tonight he’d forgotten that this was supposed to be simple. Even if he’d talked to her about things he’d never discussed with anyone else. Even if he’d lost himself so completely in sex with her that afterward had felt like waking out of a dream—or from unconsciousness.

Eight years ago, he’d had trouble with this boundary, too, but he was eight years older and a soldier, and he could hold the line now like a grown man.

Sam, and sex. Those were the rules. Those were what the rules had to be.

“What are the parameters here? Do I have to leave right this second? Or just before Sam wakes up tomorrow morning.”

He’d surprised her. “Um, before Sam? I guess?”

“Okay, that’s good. I need to get an early start to Oregon tomorrow, anyway. But not right this second. Because I have some other plans,” he explained.

“Other plans?”

“That sex was great, but—”

She made a face of mock outrage. “But? But what? I ended a year-plus-long drought for you. I didn’t hear you complaining.”

“Oh, I wasn’t complaining. But it wasn’t enough.”

She made a small, strangled sound.

He lay down beside her and kissed her all over her throat, all over her chest, circling in until he kissed her nipples, then licked and sucked them, one after the other. His other hand played in her curls, found her clit. She closed her eyes. “Mmm,” she said.

“Faster? Slower? Harder? Softer?”

“Yeah,” she said, and he laughed and eased a finger inside her, loving the soft feel of her, curling his fingertip into her G-spot and making her moan. He could feel it, that moan, in the pit of his belly, at the bottom of his spine, where his own body was drawing up tight. He slid a second finger inside her and she made a fractured sound, which he swallowed with a kiss that turned into a leisurely exploration of her mouth, until she was humming.

He kept his hand where it was, not wanting to rush things. He wanted this to last a long time, long enough to watch her face, to watch the pleasure mount behind her eyes, to watch her mouth fall open.

When her hips rose off the bed so she could get a better purchase on his hand, he teased, “Want something more?”

She answered him with a noise that definitely wasn’t any word he’d ever heard. He got a condom from the nightstand, and he rolled it down and slid the head of his cock, so hard the condom felt too small, into her folds. She gasped and pressed up to him, and he was halfway in her without trying, she was that wet, she was that open. And tight, too—how was it possible she could be so wet and so tight at the same time? She was gripping him, and he was never going to last, except that just then, the socket of his prosthesis bumped her thigh and stopped his progress.

He hesitated, and she felt it.

Their eyes met.

He rolled off her.

“Don’t youdare,” she said.

“Wait,” he said.

“If you lose your erection …” She made it sound like a threat. Which made him smile.

“If I lose my erection I’m going to make you suck me until I get it back,” he said. He made it sound like a threat, too, and her eyes narrowed and she emitted a sound that roughly translated might have been, “Nngha.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and reached down and pulled the prosthesis off. He didn’t turn to see how she was reacting. It was Mira, after all. She would react however she did, and it would somehow be okay.

He began rolling back the layers of socks that compressed his residual leg, peeling himself like an onion back to his skin.

The silicone sheath came off second-to-last with a sucking sound he hated, but in the scheme of what they were doing, it was just one of those things, like the wet sound of his body in hers. And then he pulled off the liner and saw the thing that looked like a thigh only all wrong, and he had a millisecond of panic. That he’d done the wrong thing, that she’d scream and run away, or worse, stay, and be secretly disgusted.

But then he remembered.

It was Mira.

His heart slowed down.

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