Chapter 16: Room Service
The hotel keycard felt like a stolen secret in the back pocket of her jeans. Stone stood in the elevator, watching the numbers climb, her reflection in the brass doors a ghost of anticipation. The message on her phone, just two words, had been a lit fuse. ‘Suite 2212. Now.’ No greeting. No question. A command.
The hallway was hushed, carpet thick under her boots. She found the door. For a moment, she just stood there, her hand hovering near the handle. The memory of last night—the closed bedroom door, his ravaged gaze—crawled over her skin. This was different. This was a choice, made in daylight.
She didn’t knock. She swiped the keycard. The lock clicked.
The suite was all cool, modernist lines and twilight. Floor-to-ceiling windows showcased the city stirring beneath a bruised purple sky. The air carried a faint, expensive scent of sandalwood and something sharper, like whiskey. And him. He stood by the window, his back to her, a silhouette against the skyline. He didn’t turn.
“Lock it,” he said, his voice a low rumble that vibrated in the quiet room.
She pushed the door shut. The deadbolt slid home with a final, heavy thunk.
He turned then. He was dressed in the dark grey suit he’d worn to the office, but the tie was gone, the top button of his shirt undone. His eyes were not the hungry flames from the hallway. They were darker, stormier, a deliberate and dangerous calm.
“What are we doing, Erik?” The question left her lips, small in the vast space.
A bitter, almost imperceptible smile touched his mouth. “You tell me. You were the one with your hand in your cunt outside my bedroom last night.”
The crudeness was a weapon. It worked. Heat flooded her cheeks, but a matching heat pooled low in her belly. “You watched.”
“I saw.” He took a step forward, then another, closing the distance with a predator’s patience. “I saw a grown woman getting off on hearing me fuck her mother. Your mother.” He was right in front of her now, his height blocking the light from the window. “That’s what you want, Stone? That’s the special thing you were saving yourself for? This filthy, fucking mess?”
His words were meant to wound, to push her away. Instead, they coated her in a perverse thrill. He was naming it. He was seeing her, all of her.
“Yes,” she whispered, her green eyes locking onto his blue ones.
Something in him shattered. The calm control snapped.
His hands were on her before she could blink. One fisted in the front of her t-shirt, the other clamped on the back of her neck. He spun her and slammed her back against the wall next to the door. The impact knocked the air from her lungs. A framed print rattled.
“You stupid girl,” he growled, his face inches from hers, his breath warm and furious. “You have no idea what you’re playing with.”
“I’m not playing,” she gasped.
His mouth crashed down on hers. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a consumption. Hard, punishing, all teeth and possessive tongue. She kissed him back with equal ferocity, her hands flying to his hair, tangling in the thick strands, pulling him closer. The taste of him, of coffee and dark intent, was addictive.
His hands moved. They shoved her t-shirt up, rough palms scraping over her ribs, squeezing her breasts through the lace of her bra. A guttural sound tore from his throat. He broke the kiss, his lips trailing down her neck, biting the tendon there, not hard enough to break the skin but hard enough to make her cry out.
“This what you wanted, babygirl?” he muttered against her throat, his voice thick with contempt and desire. His hand yanked at the button of her jeans, tore the zipper down. “Huh? You wanted Daddy to ruin you?”
The word, in that context, from his mouth, sent a violent shock through her system. It was wrong. It was everything.
“Yes,” she hissed, arching into him.
He hooked his fingers into the waistband of her jeans and her panties and shoved them down her thighs in one brutal motion. The air was cool on her exposed skin. He didn’t even bother taking them off. He just grabbed her under her thighs, his hands like steel bands, and lifted her. She was weightless. Her back scraped against the wallpaper as he slammed her higher against the wall, forcing her legs apart and wrapping them around his waist. The rough wool of his suit pants scraped the insides of her bare thighs.
She felt the hard, thick ridge of his erection through the fabric, pressed against her soaking wet center. He ground against her, a slow, torturous mockery of what was to come, and she whimpered, her head falling back against the wall.
“Look at you,” he sneered, his eyes blazing down at her. “Dripping for it. Dripping for your stepdad.” He used his body to pin her there, one hand still holding her thigh, the other fumbling with his belt buckle, the button of his trousers.
She heard the rasp of his zipper. Then his hand was between them, guiding himself. The broad, slick head of his cock nudged against her entrance. She was impossibly open, stretched around him from last night, but he was bigger, harder, angrier. He didn’t wait. He didn’t ask.
He drove up into her with one sharp, merciless thrust.
The feeling was so intense it bordered on pain. A sharp, stunning fullness that stole her vision for a second. A choked scream lodged in her throat.
“Fuck,” he groaned, his forehead dropping to her shoulder. He was buried to the hilt, his hips flush against hers. He held himself there, pulsating inside her, both of them trembling with the shock of the connection.
Then he moved.
He pulled back and slammed home again. And again. It was a brutal, punishing rhythm, each thrust jolting her body against the wall. There was no tenderness, no art. This was raw fucking, pure need stripped of every pretense. The slap of his skin against hers, the wet, filthy sound of her body taking him, filled the elegant room.
“Is this it?” he grunted, his teeth grazing her earlobe. “This the special treatment you saved your tight little pussy for? Being fucked like a whore against a wall?”
“Don’t stop,” she begged, her words fragmented by his pounding. Her nails clawed at his shoulders, dug into the hard muscle of his back through the fine cloth of his suit jacket. Her ankles locked tight at the small of his back, pulling him deeper with every drive of his hips. Pleasure, sharp and coiling, was building from the very brutality of it. Each slam hit a place inside her that made stars burst behind her eyelids.
He adjusted his angle slightly, and on the next thrust, he hit something so profound her eyes flew open. A ragged cry tore from her lungs.
“There,” he commanded, his breath hot and ragged in her ear. “Come on, baby. Come on Daddy’s cock. Show me how ruined you are.”
It was the permission, the filthy, beautiful permission in his voice, that undid her. The coil snapped. Her orgasm ripped through her, violent and convulsing. She clenched around him, a series of frantic, fluttering pulses, her body shaking uncontrollably against the wall as wave after wave of pure, sharp ecstasy obliterated thought.
Feeling her seize around him broke the last of his control. His rhythm faltered, turned erratic, frantic. With a final, deep snarl that was half agony, half triumph, he buried himself as deep as he could go and came. She felt the hot, pulsing release flood her insides, a shocking intimacy that was more possessive than any word.
For long moments, they stayed like that, pinned together by gravity and spent passion, the only sound their ragged, mingled breaths fogging the cool air. Slowly, he softened inside her. His grip on her thigh loosened. He let her legs slide down until her feet, still tangled in her jeans and panties, touched the floor. Her knees buckled, but he was there, holding her up, his arms around her now, her face pressed into the rough weave of his suit.
He was still holding her when his phone buzzed on the bedside table. The sound was obscenely normal.
He didn’t move to get it. It buzzed again. And again. Insistent.
Stone knew. They both knew.
Erik slowly, carefully, pulled out of her. A wet, warm trickle followed. He gently tugged her jeans back up over her hips, his hands surprisingly steady now. He zipped and buttoned his own trousers with quiet efficiency.
The phone stopped buzzing. A second later, a text alert chimed.
He walked to the bedside table, picked up the phone, and looked at the screen. His shoulders, so powerful moments before, seemed to sag under an invisible weight. He didn’t show her the screen. He didn’t need to.
“It’s Eleanor,” he said, his voice flat, drained of all its former fire. “Dinner reservations. She’s wondering where I am.”
He turned to look at her. She was leaning against the wall he’d just fucked her against, her hair a wild cascade of red, her lips swollen, the scent of their coupling clinging to her skin. In his eyes, she saw the hunger warring with a despair so deep it turned her bones to ice.
The ruin wasn’t just for her. It was for them all.
“You should go,” he said, not looking at her. “Use the service elevator in the back.”