Chapter 562 | Making Up For Lost Time

Chapter 562: 562 | Making Up For Lost Time

She wasn’t performing. That was the part that got me every time. When Diane got like this the composure didn’t drop so much as invert, turned inside out into something just as certain but hungrier, a woman who’d spent nine years arranging her whole life around the people she loved and had exactly two people she let see her want anything for herself.

I was one of them. That fact still didn’t feel real, and the Luster humming off her skin, and the way she moaned around me low in her chest like the taste of me was doing something for her too, none of it felt real, and all of it was.

She built me up slow, and then she built me up fast, alternating between the two with the sense of someone who could hear my breathing and read exactly how close I was getting.

When my hips shifted up into her mouth she took it. When my hand tightened in her hair she moaned like she wanted it tighter. She used everything, her mouth and her throat and her hand and the occasional graze of teeth that shouldn’t have felt as good as it did, and her free hand drifted lower to cup and roll me with a gentleness that undid whatever the rest of her was doing.

"I’m close," I managed.

She didn’t slow down. She got faster, took me deeper, and her eyes came up to lock on mine so I’d have to watch her do it. Her cheeks hollowed. Her throat worked around me.

The heat built at the base of my spine and rolled outward and I felt every muscle in my body pull tight.

Then she stopped. Pulled off entirely. Squeezed the base of me hard enough to hold everything right at the edge without going over.

"Not yet," she said.

"You have got to be kidding me."

"I never kid about this." She sat back on her heels, licked her lips, and looked entirely pleased with herself and my suffering both. "I told you. Mommy’s making up for lost time.

That means we’re not rushing. That means I get to do this as many times as I want before I let you finish, and I’ve been thinking about it for eleven days, so I want it a great deal."

"Sloane’s timer."

"Sloane’s timer is a suggestion I’m choosing to interpret loosely." She wrapped her hand around me again, slow, watching me twitch against her palm. "Besides. You heal fast now. Concerningly fast. Juno’s words, I’m told. I intend to test the limits of that tonight. Purely scientific."

"Everyone in this house does science by having sex with me."

"It’s a good household with rigorous standards." She leaned down and took me back into her mouth before I could respond, and whatever I’d been about to say dissolved into a sound that would have embarrassed me if I had the capacity left for embarrassment.

She brought me right back to the edge in half the time, and she did it while making eye contact, and just when the heat started to crest she pulled off again and squeezed and held me there, shaking.

"Diane."

"Hm?"

"You’re a menace."

"I’m attentive," she said, and there was the smile, warm and wicked and entirely certain. "There’s a difference. One day you’ll understand it." She pressed a kiss to the tip of me, soft as anything, then looked up through her lashes with an expression that had ruined better men than me.

"Now. Once more. And this time I’ll let you finish, because you were good, and because you almost died, and because I love you and I am incapable of denying you anything for longer than about four minutes."

"That’s a real specific number."

"I’ve timed it." She swallowed me down.

There was no teasing this time. She went at it like she meant to end me, took me deep and stayed, her throat and her tongue and both hands working in something I could only describe as worship if I wanted to be honest with myself, and I mostly didn’t but the word fit.

She moaned around me and the vibration lit me up and her fingers dug into my hip hard enough to leave marks that would be gone by morning, and I let my hand tangle in her hair and hold, not guiding, just holding, because she’d told me not to do anything and this was as close as I was going to get to obeying.

The heat crested and this time she didn’t stop.

"Diane, I’m going to—"

She hummed. Took me deeper. That was the entire answer.

It hit like something breaking loose, longer and harder than eleven days of nothing had any right to produce, and she stayed exactly where she was and took all of it without pulling away, her throat working, her eyes still up on mine through the whole thing so I had to watch her swallow me down. My whole body shook with it.

The bond wasn’t a factor here, that was Sloane’s thing, but I swear I felt the room tilt anyway, the light going soft at the edges, every nerve I had reporting for duty at once and then collapsing.

When it finally ebbed she eased back slow, dragging her lips along oversensitive skin in a way that made me twitch and hiss, and there was a strand connecting her lower lip to me for a second before it snapped.

She licked her lips clean. Wiped the corner of her mouth with one knuckle. Looked up at me with the specific satisfaction of a woman who’d gotten exactly what she wanted and knew it showed.

"There," she said. Her voice had gone rough. "Better?"

I stared at the ceiling and tried to remember how words worked. "I need a minute."

"You have about ninety seconds, by my count." She crawled up my body, pressed a kiss to my sternum, my collarbone, my jaw, and settled against my side with her leg thrown over mine and her hand splayed flat on my chest to feel my heart hammer. "I felt you get hard again halfway through. Don’t think I didn’t."

"That’s not a fair fight."

"I’ve never once fought fair in my life, sugar. That’s why I’m the best in California." She kissed the corner of my mouth. The last of the fear that had lived in her face for eleven days was gone now, burned off, replaced by something warm and possessive and entirely at peace. "That was the appetizer. I have you for two hours. I plan to be very thorough."

"Sloane’s going to knock on that door in about forty minutes."

"Sloane can wait forty minutes. She’s my daughter. Patience is a thing I keep trying to teach her." Diane’s hand drifted lower down my stomach, tracing, finding me already stirring again the way she’d known I would. Her smile went slow and dangerous.

"Now. Let’s see just how fast you really heal."