Chapter 544 | The Fitzgerald Family Motto

Chapter 544: 544 | The Fitzgerald Family Motto

"FUU—"

I bit my own fist. My ribs screamed. My shoulder pulled against the brace. None of it registered. Only the overwhelming signal of Sloane’s throat constricting around me, the hum as she swallowed, the water in her eyes. She refused to pull back.

Sloane Fitzgerald never retreated from a challenge.

She came up for air gasping, her lips swollen and glistening, a string of saliva connecting her mouth to me that caught the medical bay light, and she grinned with the specific feral satisfaction of someone who had just landed a killshot.

"That’s one-twenty," she said, reading the monitor. "I want one-forty."

"You want to stop my heart."

"I want—" She crawled up the mattress, careful of the IV and the brace, and positioned herself above me with her knees on either side of my hips and her stolen hoodie riding up to expose the compression shorts underneath. "I want to feel alive. I want to feel you alive. I want..."

Her voice cracked. The competitive armor fell away and underneath was Sloane at seventeen, raw and terrified and desperate and needing something that the bond could transmit but words could not adequately describe. She needed proof. The heartbeat under her palm was proof. The rising number on the monitor was proof. My body responded to hers despite the broken ribs, the depleted stamina, the burns still healing.

The three-second silence in the bond was over. It would not return.

I pulled her down by the collar of the hoodie and kissed her hard enough that her moan vibrated against my teeth, and I caught the sound with my mouth the way I should have caught the fire, swallowing every decibel before it could escape into the hallway where Diane Fitzgerald sat with a phone and opinions.

Sloane rolled her hips forward once, grinding against me through her compression shorts, and the friction was insufficient and perfect simultaneously. I hooked two fingers into the waistband and pulled the fabric sideways, not off but aside, and found her already wet, slick and swollen, her body running ahead of her brain with the specific Fitzgerald impatience that characterized everything she touched.

"We can’t—you’re injured—your ribs—"

"Two broken ribs." I slid a finger inside her and she bit down on my collarbone to muffle the moan that would have carried to the parking lot. "One hairline fracture. Juno was very specific about my restrictions and this was not on the list."

"Hnnn—ahh—" She pressed her face into my neck and her whole body shuddered, her walls gripping my finger with desperate heat, and the bond went white at the edges as her pleasure crashed into mine and mine reflected back into hers in the specific closed-loop amplification that the Emotional Duplex created at point-blank range. "More—god, more, I need—"

I gave her a second finger and curled both forward against the spot I had mapped over two months of dedicated research, and Sloane’s spine arched and her mouth opened against my throat and I pressed my palm flat over her lips to catch the sound that came out of her, a ragged high keening that would have been audible from the cafeteria.

"Quiet."

"I can’t—" The words muffled against my hand. Her hips rolled, riding my fingers with increasing urgency, the mattress creaking beneath us in a rhythm that the cardiac monitor translated into a steadily climbing number.

One-eighteen. One-twenty-two. One-twenty-seven.

"Lukas, I can’t be quiet when you, when you do that thing with your—"

I did the thing again and she bit my palm hard enough to leave marks.

The bond carried her approaching peak like a wave I could feel building in both our bodies simultaneously, her pleasure and mine indistinguishable at this proximity, spiraling upward through the Duplex in tightening loops. My thumb found her clit and pressed in the slow circles she liked and her legs clamped around my hand and her breath came in short sharp pants against my muffling palm and the monitor hit one-thirty-two and kept climbing.

"Come for me," I said against her ear, barely audible, and the command dropped through the bond like a stone into water. "Come quiet and I’ll give you more later. When I can hold you the way you deserve."

Sloane bit down on my fingers and came with her whole body, trembling and arching and clenching around me with contractions so strong I felt them in my damaged ribs, and the muffled scream that escaped my palm was still loud enough that the fluorescent light overhead flickered and a tiny amber spark, a miniature detonation no bigger than a match head, popped against the metal bed rail with a sound like a snapping twig.

One-forty-one. The monitor flashed a cardiac alert in red. I dismissed it with my free hand before the nurse station could register the spike.

Sloane collapsed against my chest. Her breath came in ragged gasps that gradually slowed, smelling of me and her own satisfaction.

Through the bond I felt her settling, the raw electric grief of thirty hours without certainty giving way to something quieter and more permanent, the specific warm frequency of a girl who has confirmed that the person she loves is real and solid and present and responsive to stimulation.

"One-forty-one," she murmured against my neck, satisfaction and exhaustion braided together in her voice.

"You hit your target."

"I always hit my target." She shifted, and her hip brushed against me where I remained hard and unattended, and her grin had the specific quality of someone who had won one battle and was already planning the next campaign. "You didn’t finish."

"I’m being generous."

"You’re being practical." She kissed my jaw, the corner of my mouth, the scar through my eyebrow. "Juno comes at six. Diane’s down the hall. And you made a sound at one-twelve that I’m fairly certain traveled through at least one fire door."

"That was your fault."

"Everything is my fault. That’s the Fitzgerald family motto."