Becca Ritchie - Hothouse Flower

I cross my ankles around his waist, dying in this heat, in this insane pleasure. I don’t stop to think about what all of this means. I just focus on the feelings, some I’ve never even met before.

He breaks away again, this time to suck on my neck, his lips soft but the pressure hard and aggressive like him. My next moan sounds like a piercing cry. The spot between my legs has found his cock, only the fabric of our clothes separating us. The more he sucks, trailing a line to my breasts, the more my back arches, bucking against him. And in turn, his crotch drives a little harder into me.

I barely notice that he’s untied my hair, the band around his wrist. The long blonde strands stick out wildly. The intensity between us stirs our need, and I thrust forward while he grips my ass, lifting me off the wall. He suddenly spins me around, and my back digs into the stair railing.

He kisses me again. I cry out as he hoists me higher, my bottom resting on the railing now. I sense the forty-foot drop behind me in the stairwell, the danger present, the risk quickening my heart.

He holds me securely, his arms firmly on my hips. And then he grinds forward, his dick right up against the spot that begins to ache and pulse. I have never been so wrapped up in a single person, in a single moment.

Ryke Meadows has invigorated my body and soul.

He is more than just my pillow.

My wolf.

My bodyguard.

He’s my everything.

Every time our lips meet, it’s like a new burst of energy between us. Our hands find new tantalizing places, mine slipping below his jeans, resting on the top of his toned ass. He skims my bare, sensitive skin along my ribs. His incredibly high stamina surpasses mine, and he has to stop kissing to let me catch my breath.

He runs his finger over my tingly lip. “Every theory you’ve ever fucking had about men, I’m going to prove wrong,” he tells me.

My chest collapses. I may pass out from this moment. I truly thought it would never come. “I had a theory that not kissing is sexier than kissing.” I was so stupid. I could do this forever with Ryke.

“I know,” he says. “And now?” His eyes fall to my lips.

I smile bright. “Just fucking kiss me.”

And he does, a grin lifting his lips. But the embrace turns just as sensual, just as intoxicating as the last. His hand rises up my shorts, underneath my panties, landing on my ass. He squeezes and I cry into his shoulder.

I dig into him and clench his hair harder, and then I kiss the corner of his mouth, denying him my lips for a second. He tries to go forward to kiss me fully, and I resist, drawing back an inch. He stares at my mouth, his lips parted as he watches me with a lustful gaze. When I close the gap between us, my tongue runs against his, and his muscles harden. A groan catches in his throat.

He’s heated every ice cold crevice. Nothing about being with him is uncomfortable.

It feels right.

I toy with him again. And I lean back, subconsciously thinking a wall will brace me. There’s nothing. Air rushes out of me as I fall backwards, but Ryke supports me with his hands on my bottom. He lets me hang upside down, the blood rushing to my head.

These electric sensations heighten by ten more notches. I laugh, and he lifts me back up. My hair drapes messily in my face like I forcefully came to a stop on a roller coaster.

My voice reverberates off the cavernous stairwell. “I have a theory that skipping foreplay makes sex better, remember that?”

We’ve crossed one boundary, and I know we’re both the type of people to never slow down, to run around the bases at high speed. I want that with him. To freakin’ make a home run like we’re track stars on a baseball field.

He kisses my cheek, which almost restarts us all over again, but we restrain ourselves from attacking full force. “Not now,” he says. His eyes flicker to my canvas watch.

“I’m not tired,” I tell him. “If anything, I’m…” I can’t even say it.

“Wet?” He takes his hand off my ass and slips it down the front of my shorts. Holy shit. His fingers don’t go beneath my panties. He cups my heat, his eyes never leaving mine. “You’re not nearly soaked enough for me, sweetheart.”

Ahh. I breathe heavily and I wrap my arms around his neck. Take me there. Right when I think he’s going to brush my panties to the side and slip his fingers into me, he retracts his hand from my shorts.

“Why stop?” I frown. “Is it because we’re in a stairwell?”

His hard gaze soaks in all of me. “Calloway, I’d fuck you in every corner of every hallway and then do it over again for good measure.”

My jaw unhinges.

“And I’d be more likely to fuck you in a stairwell than on a bed.”

“Why?”

He combs his fingers through my hair and holds the back of my head. “It’s more fucking fun.” He kisses me strongly again, my whole body pulling towards him. My hips roll into his pelvis. He turns his head from me and grips my waist hard. “Fuck,” he groans. His eyes fall to the way we’re pressed together, his cock rubbing along a throbbing place of mine.

“How big are you?” I ask with heavy breath. I can feel him through his jeans. I know he’s big. I know he’s hard. I know he’s everything that I want.

“You’re not finding out today.”

I stick out my bottom lip.

“Don’t flash those green doe eyes at me.”

“They don’t melt your heart of stone?” I banter.

“Stone can’t fucking melt,” he retorts. “It just grows hot.”

“Are you hot now?”

His brows rise. “What do you think?”

I smile again. “So…” And then my lips slowly downturn as I realize something. He never answered me about his “girlfriend”—not really. “Are you going back to that girl when we return to Philly?” Is this some Paris hookup while we’re both away from our families?

He glares. “Fuck no.”

“Would you be upset if I dated the model from the other night again?”

His reaction says it all. He sets me on my feet with firm hands, and he clenches the railing on either side of me. Anger laces his dark eyes. “Do you want to date the other model?” His words sound stilted like he tried pretty hard not to swear.

“Wow, you managed to say that without cursing.”

“You’re killing me.”

I poke his chest with my finger. “You crushed my heart when you told me to go sleep with another guy.”

“I didn’t fucking—” He growls in frustration and runs his hand through his hair. I love, love when he does that, even when he’s upset. It lights my core on fire. “I never wanted you to screw someone else! For fuck’s sake, it broke my heart telling you to even pursue another guy.” He glances at his jacket pocket and groans with more irritation. He takes out his vibrating phone and ignores the call, putting it back. “Look at me,” he says.

My eyes meet his. He cages me back against the railing. “I can’t watch you flirt with another fucking guy.”

I shouldn’t bring it up again, but I do. “I watched you go down on another girl.” Pain wells inside me again, my stomach tightening at the image. “You kissed her knee. You looked at her like she was beautiful—”

He covers my mouth with his large hand. “Fucking stop.” He breathes heavily, a guy that runs marathons, a guy that scales mountains in minutes. “I never slept with her, but I can’t take back what you saw. I wish to God I fucking could.”

He never slept with her. This almost brings tears to my eyes. I see how much this moment is tearing him up, and the torture that I feel reflects equally in his rigid posture and cinched brows.

He keeps his hand over my mouth. “I’ve ignored a lot of bad shit in my life, but I don’t want to ignore this one good thing anymore. It’s too painful.” He stares at me deeply, my chest rising with something pure and warm. “I kissed you tonight because I want your lips to only touch mine. From now until forever. That’s the fucking truth.” He drops his hand.

My heart can’t stop slamming into my chest. From now until forever. I skim my hands down his arms. He doesn’t withdraw. He’s serious. He wants to be together, no more dating other people. “What about your brother?” I ask the million dollar question, the crux. “And my mom…my dad?” They’re the biggest roadblocks.

“It’s up to you,” he says. “We can tell them, or we can do this in private and wait until the age gap isn’t a big deal to them anymore.”

“When will that be?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Maybe when you’re twenty.”

A year and a half. I think I can wait that long. If we tell everyone now, I see my mom tearing him away from me. I see too many headaches and more heartbreaks. I just want something good. Something right without anything abysmal attached. So I say, “I don’t want to tell anyone.”

He nods and looks relieved by my answer. I don’t think he was ready to confront his brother. He backs up a little, but as he watches me, he grimaces. It’s the same expression he had when I brought up Ian. “I’m going to spell it out for you,” he says, “because I’m still fucking worried you don’t understand what I want.”

I smile. “Okay.”

“We’re together,” he says pointblank. “I’m not going to be with anyone but you, even if no one else fucking knows that. We don’t date other people for show. They just think we’re single.”

I nod. “I like it.”

I hear his phone buzz. He takes out his cell again, annoyed. He ignores the second call. “We need to go upstairs to your room.”

I tilt my head with a playful smile. “How forward of you.”

“Cute,” he says. “But we’re not fucking. We’re meeting two people there.”

I frown. “What?”

“I didn’t fly alone.”

The bottom of my stomach drops and my eyes grow to saucers.

“You think I could leave Philly to check on you without worrying anyone else? They read the tabloids too.” They learned that I was thrown out of the Havindal collection.

“Who?” I ask. “Who came?”

He touches the small of my back and guides me up the stairs. “Surprise.”

I do like surprises.

But this one will be bad no matter what. Being alone with Ryke sounded like a hot, steamy vacation. Add in one of my sisters or his brother, and it turns awkward and uncomfortable…but definitely more dangerous.

Danger. That is alluring. And it’s what partially drew us together in the first place.

I realize, right now, that this is the beginning of something new.

RYKE MEADOWS

Lo raises his arms as we walk down the hallway towards him. “I called you ten times. What the hell were you doing?”

I point to Daisy beside me, a normal amount of distance between us even though I’d rather be back in the stairwell, with her wrapped in my arms. “I was trying to find this one. She wasn’t in her room.”

“I went for a vending machine run,” she says, masking the lie with a bright, overwhelmingly beautiful smile.

Lo relaxes some. He wears a backwards baseball cap, looking like a fucking ‘90s kid. But it’s partly to disguise himself from people, not that it’s doing a good job. He has striking features that bring attention, even among male models.

“So you came to check up on me?” Daisy asks with an even larger smile, bouncing on her feet as we stop by her hotel door. She looks to the other person next to my brother.

Two inches taller stands Connor Cobalt.

We’re the only ones who hopped on Connor’s company jet.

And it’s a new situation that none of us are used to—the three of us alone with Daisy. Usually it’s Lily, not the youngest, wildest Calloway with us.

“Yeah,” Lo says. “How are you doing?”

“Better.” She fits a strand of hair behind her ear.

Daisy looks fucking terrible. And I don’t say anything about it, but I think we all can tell that she hasn’t been sleeping. She’s really fucking pale, her body frailer, and all I want to do is hold her and tuck her into bed. I wear my concern outwardly, and I don’t give a shit if someone hounds me for it. I’m fucking concerned, and I’m going to stay that way.

“Right…” My brother says, not believing her at all as he scrutinizes her features.

I asked Lo to come along. I’ve been so fucking worried about his state of mind that it’d be just as hard leaving him as it was leaving Daisy.

But the tension builds in the room because we all know his feelings about my friendship with her. Now that Daisy and I have moved beyond that title, the lie weighs heavy on my chest.