Holly’s Grizzly (Monster Relations Bureau #4)

9

Holly

I think I’ve pushed this grizzly to the edge of his good manners.

Finally.

Irving’s gone absolutely still at my light touch against his thigh, a faint rumble kicking up deep in his chest.

“Holly,” he says, voice low and gruff, rougher than I’ve ever heard it.

And damn, do I like the sound of my name when he says it like that.

He looks over at me, and I know I’m not imagining the hunger in his eyes, the want, the need. My breath hitches, my heart races, and an aching anticipation settles itself between my thighs.

Irving takes a deep, shuddering inhale, his body tense. “I need you to tell me if I’m misreading things. I didn’t ask you to stay because I wanted to… fuck, I don’t want you to feel like I expected… just… please say something and I’ll back off. I won’t do anything that you don’t—”

“You’re not misreading things,” I murmur just before I move, shifting off the couch and swinging one leg over his lap.

Irving is almost too big for me to straddle.

All that broad strength beneath me spreads my thighs wide, stretching my muscles to a delicious edge and sending a pulse of desire straight to my aching core. I press myself into the soft contours of his chest and stomach, loop my arms around his neck, and tangle my hands in his hair as I savor the warmth and the size of him.

He holds himself absolutely still while I get comfortable, hands hovering in the air on either side of my hips but not touching me, like he’s still not sure if he’s allowed.

“Irving,” I whisper, leaning in and brushing my cheek to his, trailing my lips over his bearded jaw, then lower to the column of his throat. “Touch me.”

It’s all the permission he needs. I kiss his Adam’s apple as it bobs in a harsh swallow, and murmur my approval when his big hands land on my hips. Gripping firmly, he presses his thumbs into the divots where my thighs meet my stomach, fingers digging into soft flesh that yields immediately.

He pulls me flush against him, bucks his hips up to meet mine, and the press of his thick cock makes my pulse leap and my pussy throb.

He’s huge here, too.

I mean, I shouldn’t be surprised. I got a little peek at him that first day in the forest, and the man is built like some kind of Nordic god.

I’ve never been with a guy this… large. Most of the men I’ve been with have been pretty much average—a bit slimmer here, a bit more muscled there—none of them built like this. Burly, solid, like I could throw myself against him or climb him like a tree and he wouldn’t budge an inch.

It thrills me. It makes me want to test that theory, to see how hard I could push, how much I could demand from him, everything he could give me before we both shatter.

His hands move over my ass, my waist, my thighs, learning all the curves of me and keeping me pinned flush against his hips. I rock on him once, twice, desperately seeking friction right where I need it most, and that rumble kicks up in his chest again.

“Holly,” he rasps, my name threaded through with urgent desire. “I want to kiss you.”

Instead of answering, I take him up on the offer, brushing my lips against his. Soft, at first, but quickly becoming something else. Polite to carnal, tentative to ravenous, he slants his lips over mine and brushes his tongue against me. I open for him and he immediately deepens the kiss. One of his hands tangles in the back of my hair, tilting my head to give him better access.

I can’t stop the soft groan that breaks from the back of my throat, can’t stop myself from grasping at his hair, getting two big handfuls of it and dragging myself even closer.

He growls his approval into the kiss and tugs at the hem of my shirt, rucking it up my thighs so he can get a better hold on me over the cotton briefs I’m wearing.

Irving’s hands cover my ass completely—grasping and squeezing, holding me in place when I try to squirm against him again.

“Be still,” he murmurs into my lips. “Unless you want this to be over before it’s even started.”

It takes me a moment to grasp what he means, and when I do, my cheeks go pink. I pull back enough to get a better look at his face, and a shot of triumphant satisfaction snaps through me at how entirely undone he looks.

He’s just as ravenous for me as I am for him, and relief floods in right alongside that triumph. I wasn’t imagining it all. Irving wants this, too. Maybe he’s been wanting it just as much as I have, thinking about it, fantasizing about what it would be like to—

“You like that?” Irving asks, a new, delicious edge to his voice as he slides a hand up to cradle the back of my head. “You like knowing just how worked up you make me, Holly?”

“Yes,” I whisper, and he growls again, tightening his grip on my hair.

“Then I’ll have to return the favor.”

He kisses me again, slow and deliberate, deep and commanding as he goes to work taking me apart.

While he feasts on me, his hands move to the buttons running down the front of my borrowed shirt. He undoes them one by one, tearing his mouth from mine so he can kiss each bit of skin exposed inch by delicious inch until the shirt hangs completely open, baring me to him.

“I love these,” he growls into the hollow between my breasts, cupping and squeezing them. “I fucking love them.”

“Not much there to love,” I say with a breathless laugh. I know I don’t have a whole lot going on in that department, but I appreciate his enthusiasm nonetheless.

Irving stills and looks up at me from where his mouth hovers just an inch away from my skin.

“Holly.”

He sounds serious. So serious. Firelight gleams in his warm brown eyes and something in me melts at the adoration I find there.

“You’re allowed to feel however you want about your body.” He licks a lazy stroke over one nipple. “But if you think for one damn second—” His teeth, this time, rasping against my taut flesh. “—that I’m ever going to agree with—” Lips pulling and sucking, releasing with a sharp pop. “—something negative you might say about it—” Finally, a kiss, right to the center of my chest where my heart beats wildly for him. “—then you’re sorely mistaken, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart .

I’m not sure where the hell that came from, but I’m not complaining.

Truthfully, he could say anything to me in that deep, rumbling baritone of his and I’d probably find it sexy as hell, but sweetheart ?

Yeah, that’ll do it.

He catches one nipple between his lips and sucks hard, drawing the sensitive peak into his mouth while he cups the other and massages slow circles around it.

Irving teases me that way for a long, long time. Like it’s imperative that no single inch of me goes without being explored and worshiped, he takes his time and savors.

It drives me out of my damn mind, has me shamelessly grinding my hips into his, whimpering low in the back of my throat for more until he finally gives me what I want.

With one big hand back in my hair—gripping firmly and holding me a few inches away from him so he can see my face—he drops the other to dip into the waistband of my underwear. He skates his fingers low over the curve of my stomach, and lower still until he reaches—

“Fuck, Holly.” Irving finds my soaked pussy, sliding his fingers through the pooled wetness there. “Fuck, you love this, don’t you sweetheart?”

I can’t answer with anything resembling coherency, so I kiss him again. I grind my hips into his hand and let out a short, broken moan into his mouth when he finds my clit and circles it with a firm, commanding touch.

Tension coils low in my belly, as hot and urgent as the flames in the hearth, and after all the teasing and touch and worship he’s given me, I’m shocked to find myself already on the brink of a climax.

This is… new.

I’m usually terrible at being able to come with a partner.

I always get so far into my head about what I look or sound like, if I’m taking too long, if the guy I’m with is enjoying himself, that it hardly ever works out for me. I’m not proud to say I’ve faked more than a few orgasms in my life, or played it off and pretended it was fine if the guy I was with asked if I came after the fact.

And Cody hardly ever bothered to ask. Or to give much of a shit after he’d gotten his and rolled over to go to sleep.

But I don’t want to think about him. I don’t want to think about anyone but Irving.

I don’t want anything but to be here, right here, with him.

It’s too late, though. Those doubts are already worming their way in and stealing my focus. As the orgasm that just started to build recedes, I can barely swallow my whimper of disappointment as I move with Irving and try to make it come back.

It must be bad enough for him to notice something is off, because his hand stills beneath me.

“Holly,” he says, and the stern command in his tone breaks through my haze of worry and arousal, though I think he has to say it twice for it to really sink in. “Look at me.”

I do, and the disappointment on his face makes my heart sink all the way to the hardwood floor below us.