I wouldn’t have fallen for an unkind man.

He takes my top and bra off, and I’m too stupid with aftershocks of pleasure to do anything but stand there and let him, watch him stare his fill with dark, unreadable eyes, even though I’m completely naked and my belly button is still an outie and the lacrosse scar is there, gleaming white in the dim lights of the room.

“Come here. Mara, you . . . Fuck. Come here.” His jaw is tense as he picks me up and carries me to his room. My first time here, but I know this place—because I know Liam. Dark colors. Framed pictures of semihostile nature from the trips he told me about. Sparse furniture. A stack of books on his bedside table. Reading glasses, the ones I tease him about, unfolded in the middle of his desk. I want to explore every corner, but there’s no time. The mattress bounces underneath my back, and then he’s taking up my entire field of view.

“Can I kiss you?” His mouth is hovering a few inches above mine, so I press my hands down his nape and arch into him, kissing him myself.

It’s slow, and warm, and achingly careful. He was fucking me less than a minute ago. He was so deep inside me that I felt deliciously split in two. But now there’s this gentle sliding of lips and tongues, Liam nibbling on me, holding first my chin, then the back of my head, and my heart sings for him.

I am catastrophically, ruinously in love with you.

“I love kissing you,” I sigh into his mouth.

“Mara.” His lips. His voice. “I want to kiss you everywhere.” He moves back, as if something occurs to him just then. “Can I go down on you?”

I feel my cheeks heat. Does he really want to?

“Just for a minute,” he adds, and then . . . Incredible, how he’s waiting for my answer. He just bent me over the kitchen sink and slid into me and made me come on his cock, but he’s asking for permission to eat me out like I’d be doing him a favor.

“Are you sure?”

“Thirty seconds. Please.”

“Yes. I mean, if . . . if you’re sure that you— Oh.”

He’s very good at it. Not . . . Maybe not deftly skilled, but he is completely lost to it, so thorough, so noisy in his utter, amazed enjoyment of the act, of me. My hips arch and he has to hold me down, carry me through the pleasure. It lasts more than thirty seconds. It lasts more than three minutes, maybe more than ten—but my thighs are trembling and my pussy spasms and I start to come like an ocean wave, and when I think the pleasure is finally subsiding he slides two fingers inside me and my hips buck up, because it’s not over. My entire world is spinning. I’ve officially had more orgasms in the past twenty minutes than in the last year.