“This what you want?” he teased, coming back over me again and lining our bare cocks up just right, sinking his weight against me. “Just like this?”
God, that deep voice got to me always, but especially now, especially like that. And I didn’t think I’d be able to hear him say any damn thing ever again without thinking of that moment.
Jesus fuck. I could not believe how hard I was. How close to the edge I was with hardly any contact at all.
The last few months aside, I’d hardly been a monk. I’d had more than my share of sexual partners, and I knew exactly what I wanted from each of them. I’d have told you, had you asked, that I’d lost my taste for quick-and-dirty frotting around the time I got over my fondness for lukewarm keg beer, which was to say sometime before high school graduation.
But this, with Riggs, was something next-level, something primal and raw. I had no technique to impress him with in this, and no artifice to hide behind either. I was one hundred percent pure need.
I felt cracked open, like some part of my soul was on display, and I couldn’t fight that any more than I could fight my attraction to him. Maybe it was because of the setting, far away from reality. Or maybe it was because of the hot, hushed night that made it feel like we were the only two people in the world. Or maybe because it was him. This guy I didn’t even know if I liked, but who I wanted more than my next breath.
I dug my fingertips into the firm muscles of his ass cheeks, molding and spreading them, urging him on. Our breath mingled as we panted open-mouthed in the still air. A bead of sweat ran down Riggs’s forehead onto my face, and I didn’t care. Riggs was fire, and I wanted him to consume me.
“You,” he gritted out, almost accusingly. He nipped the edge of my chin, then licked the bite. “Fuck.”
I threw my head back and groaned. He was so much, this man. Overwhelming my senses, short-circuiting my brain.
“Come for me, Duchess. I want to know what you sound like when you fall apart.”
Oh, shit.
“Riggs!” My legs stiffened, and my toes curled into the sleeping bag beneath me. I realized dimly how damn wrong it was that my body obeyed his command, bypassing my executive function entirely, but I couldn’t care because just like that, a tremor shook me from head to toe.
I came and came all over my stomach, with Riggs following behind me just a second later. He collapsed against me, like maybe his arms had given out, and for a moment I held him there, all his weight grounding me to the earth as we both caught our breath.
“Holy fuck,” I whispered.
Riggs snorted. “Yes it was,” he said, and I giggled—giggled!—helplessly.
But as my toes stopped tingling and my body cooled, I swear I felt the air pressure in the room change. It was like we both came back to our senses at the same moment and realized exactly what—and who—we’d done.
Riggs cleared his throat and got himself back into push-up position. He stared down at me, opened his mouth like he was going to speak, then hesitated. He rolled smoothly to his feet and headed to the bathroom without a word.
Mother. Fucker.
I squeezed my eyes shut and thunked my forehead with my palm. What the hell had I been thinking? If I’d been actively brainstorming ways to make the situation between us even more tense, I couldn’t have come up with a better option than this.
“Hey.” Riggs came back a second later carrying a wet cloth. In the light from the bathroom, I saw that he was still completely naked, but his face was firmly arranged into his default expression of Impatient, Impersonal Bodyguard, so he might as well have been wearing armor.
He stood over me uncertainly, like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to offer to clean me off.
I snatched the cloth from his hand and quickly mopped myself up before tossing it aside. “Thanks.”
“Yeah,” he said gruffly. He rubbed at the back of his neck while I stared up at him. Belatedly, I realized he was probably staring down at me because I was lying on his fucking Cinderella pallet and he had no place to sit unless he chose to sit next to me, which he clearly didn’t want to do.
Face burning, I clambered up onto the bed and turned away from him. I heard a rustling noise that meant Riggs had laid back down on his sleeping bag.
I took a breath. “So, that was… nice. But I feel like we should set some—”
“Sleep, Duchess.”
“Yes, okay. But first, let’s just agree that—”
Riggs yawned. “Jesus Christ, Duchess. I just gave you the best orgasm of your life. If you don’t pass out in the next five minutes, it’s because you’re trying to stay awake.”
I opened my mouth to protest, then shut it again on a yawn. I mean, he wasn’t wrong, precisely. About the orgasm part, at least. Not that he knew that, the egotistical jerk.
But he made it sound like he’d been doing me a favor! And if he thought I was just going to be able to fall asleep after he said something so rude and insulting, well, he didn’t know shit about physiological reactions to psychological stressors. Furthermore, never in the history of falling asleep had anyone fallen asleep because they were told to fall asleep… except maybe if you were a Marine, which I needed to remind him I… was… not…
I woke up in the morning to bright sunshine in my face. I was lying on my back with my mouth open, which meant I’d been snoring, and I was also horribly sure I’d been drooling.
The good news was Riggs was already up and gone, probably looking for breakfast, so I didn’t have to deal with him and all our awkwardness. The bad news was since Riggs was already awake and gone, it meant he’d seen me in all my postorgasmic hard-sleeping glory.
I groaned. The law of orgasms said the harder you came, the more humiliation you had to suffer the next morning, and apparently there were no exceptions for accidental midnight frots with your domineering bodyguard.
I got up and got ready, pulling on another variation of my cargo-pants-and-polo shirt look, and I grabbed my Horn, promising myself I’d check in with Kev again that morning. I’d been too busy the last few days to keep my promise of staying in touch, but I was pretty sure Saturdays were Kumquat Saturdays, and I didn’t want to let Kev down.
What I was not going to do that morning was obsess over Riggs or what I’d decided to call the Unfortunate Insomnia Frottage Incident. Riggs couldn’t answer a damn question about whether he’d had medical training, so there was no way he’d be capable of a mature discussion about the parameters of our nonrelationship. Therefore, we were just gonna carry on as we had done. Hate-rousal for the win.
“‘Take a bodyguard,’ they said. ‘It’ll be great,’ they said,” I muttered as I went out to the main room of the clinic. Great if you wanted emotional whiplash, maybe.
Riggs opened the door to the clinic as soon as I got out there, and for the first couple of hours of the day, he managed to find things to occupy him in the back room or out in front taking patient information.
Trust him to find a way to hover protectively while still clearly avoiding me.
Later that morning, though, when the crowds thinned out as the village prepared to celebrate the Feast of Santo Roque, Riggs finally stopped reorganizing supplies that clearly hadn’t needed reorganizing and appeared at the door of the makeshift examination room.