Page 143 of Problematic Summer Romance

My name, whispered, groaned, pleaded.

A muttered, “Fuck.”

After a little while he keeps my head still and he thrusts inside my mouth, slowly, gently. “Fucking hell, Maya.”

I suck, a strong pull. His fingers tighten against my scalp, trying to pry me away.

“Maya,” he warns.

I hum around his cock. Feel him shiver.

“I’m really trying to be a gentleman here.”

A lurid pop. “Are you?” I ask, delighted by the roll of his eyes as I lick the underside of the head.

“Yeah. But—” I twist my hand at the base of his cock, and his words catch. “But I’m starting to think that you’d let me do anything to you, Maya. Anything at all.”

“I’m not sure how—oh—how you had missed it before—what are you—?”

He has my back pressed against the mattress, and is inside me,just like that. A little too hard, too fast, the burn of the stretch otherworldly, the multiple thrusts until he really is all the way in, ruthless, perfect—

“Yeah,” I say.

“Jesus, Maya.” His hands close around my wrists. Trap them above my head. “You have no damn patience.”

Not when it comes to you, I want to say, but my mouth is too full of his kiss.

“I haven’t taken a single breath since Sicily,” he says against my ear, inhaling me, rolling his hips into mine. “I can’t stop thinking about you. It’s fucking distracting. You aredisruptive. Of my work. Of my sleep. Of my ability to think.” I thought he was all in, but no. Another push, and he bottoms out. “Fuck.Fuck. You feel better than anything I could make up with my mind.”

I smile against his jaw. Try to free my arms. Realize that I can’t. So I say, “Conor?”

“Yeah.”

“I want you to fuck me a thousand times. Everywhere you humanly can.”

He very nearly comes. His breath is loud, a rough exhale against my shoulder, then a deep grunt as his hands rip the sheets off the mattress as his cock jerks inside me. “You are so fuckingdangerous.”

I grin, and he splays me open like I’m a doll, unmoving under him, and kisses and kisses andkissesme, the shallow, lingering slide of his mouth against mine, his hand coming up to the stem of my neck to angle me to him, and I try to move my hips so that we can finally—

He pulls out. Flips me on my belly. Slams back in, fucking his way into me, and it’s so agonizingly good, I see stars.

“Menace,” he growls in my ear, and when he starts moving, the rest of the world recedes, his thrusts so hard that I’m sure he’ll finish before me, but his hand reaches around, his fingers find my clit, and this is so beyond the realm of good, I’m not sure what to do with my own body. I claw at the pillow, say nonsensical things that only amount toplease, don’t stop, if you stop—please don’t stop. The pleasure blasts through me with the force of an earthquake. I press my palm against my mouth to muffle my scream.

“No.” Conor yanks my hand away, laces his fingers with mine, pins it to the mattress. “No. You’re going to fucking scream it. I want to hear it. I want to hear you and you’re going tolet me.”

I do. And I dissolve.

It’s not until much later, his arms wrapped around me like safety ropes, that it occurs to me to say, “Conor?”

“Yeah?”

I squeeze my eyes shut. Smile into the pillow. “Welcome home.”

Chapter 43

It’s early days.

Between the two of us, there’s a lot of love that had nowhere to go for a long while.

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