Page 117 of At First Dance
When he slides two fingers inside me, I cry out, the sound echoing off the rafters. He eats me like it’s his favorite damn meal, whispering praise between every moan.
“Beautiful… so fucking sweet… been thinking about this every night…”
I fall apart beneath him, shaking, breathless, my thighs trembling against his shoulders. And even then, he doesn’t let up. He kisses his way back up my body, mouth finding mine, letting me taste myself on his tongue.
“You’re mine,” he growls. “You have to know that.”
“I do,” I whisper, tears stinging the corners of my eyes.
Then I flip him. Straddle him.
I ease him back onto the quilt, and the breath he takes isn’t steady—it’s the kind you drag in when you’re bracing for impact. The string lights honey his skin, turning the hard lines I know by touch into something I want to memorize by sight, slow.
“Hold still,” I murmur, already mapping him with my fingers.
Up close, I can see them all. I start with a weather-softened compass on his left shoulder, edges blown a little from sun and years. “Eighteen,” he says when I glance up. “Thought it’d keep me from getting lost.” His mouth quirks. “Turns out staying put worked better.”
Near his inner biceps, a stalk of wheat rendered in fine lines—nearly the color of his skin now. I trace each grain with my nail. “First harvest after Dad named me CEO of the farm,” he tells me, voice low. “Didn’t think I could do it. We did.”
There’s a neat line of numbers under his collarbone, almost delicate, that are coordinates. “The bend in the creek,” he adds before I ask. “Where I let my mind take a rest.”
Over his ribs, a thin, pale scar catches the light—barbed wire, I know without him saying. I kiss just above it, and he shivers.
“More,” I whisper, greedy for the story of him.
And then I see it, tucked just beneath his right pec, where the sweep of muscle meets his ribs: a little songbird perched on a strand of fence wire. New enough that the lines are crisp, the black still a whisper of midnight, the skin around it the faintest pink. My finger hovers, careful. “When?” I ask, breath gone thin.
He swallows. “Week ago,” he answers, like a confession. “Couldn’t get the sound of your song from the barbecue out of my head. Figured if it was staying, it might as well have a place to land.”
Something in me gives, clean and quiet. I press my mouth beside the bird and feel him exhale under me, a rough, helpless sound I want to keep.
“Hi,” I say to the songbird, then to him, and keep going, kissing slow paths over old ink and older stories—compass, wheat, creek—letting my hands learn what my eyes are only just catching up to. He’s all heat and patient strength and the kind of control that feels like worship. When I circle back to the new lines—the fence wire, the tiny feet—I feel his pulse kick against my lips.
“Careful.” His voice is a rasp, not a warning so much as a plea. “She’s still tender.”
“I know,” I whisper, and I do. I treat the little bird like a secret, then follow the trail the ink maps—down the firm plane of his stomach, the dip of muscle where he’s strongest. He’s already tense beneath me, a question strung tight, and when I look up, hunger and something softer war in his eyes.
“Ivy.” My name, wrecked and reverent.
“I’m listening,” I tell him, palms sliding to his sides, thumbs stroking where breath becomes body. He catches one of my hands, brings it to his mouth, and kisses the palm like he’s thanking it for learning him.
I take my time because I can and because he lets me. Mouth to skin, past ink and the history it carries, tasting salt and summer and the man who puts his body between storms and everyone else.
He’s already hard. Already twitching. And when I wrap my lips around him, he lets out a string of curses that echoes through the loft.
He fists the blanket, hips jerking as I suck him slow and deep, swirling my tongue and humming until his legs shake.
“Ivy,” he warns, voice wrecked. “If you keep going…”
I crawl up his body again, chest heaving. “Then take me,” I say. “Please.”
He flips me in an instant, gripping my hips, sliding inside me with one long, slow thrust. We’re both so far gone that when he slides to the hilt, I can feel my walls begin to quiver. Rowan’s brows furrow as he murmurs about going slow.
But I want nothing to do with that.
Reaching up, I thread my fingers in his hair and yank at the strands as I pull him toward my lips.
“You better fuck me like you own me, Rowan Wright.”
