“Alex. Stop,” I practically plead.

I’m not sure if it’s the supplicating tone of my request, or if he is surfacing from the almost drugged state our passion seems to induce, but he lifts his head—which had been buried in my neck—and looks at me with glazed eyes etched in concern.

“Did I hurt you?”

“No,” I assure him and tilt my h*ps upward so that he knows I’m totally digging the way he’s handling me. But I want something a bit different. “I want on top.”

Answering my flexing h*ps with a push back that causes me to groan, he arches an eyebrow up at me. “You want on top?”

“Yes,” I tell him with a grin. “I’m tired of you being in control all the time.”

In a move so fast I feel like I’m on a roller coaster, Alex flips positions, falling to his back on the mattress while holding me in place. I swing around and come to rest on top of him, with his hardness still wedged deeply within me. The new angle causes tingles to race up my spine and my breath to catch.

Alex gives sexy a new name as he raises his hands up and plants them behind his head, grinning up at me. “Do your worst, Sutton.”

“How about I do my best,” I purr, using my thigh muscles to rise up slowly. I pull up and just before he slips free, I slowly sink back down on him. The amused grin on his face slides off and his eyes flutter closed as he grits his teeth.

“Fuck, that feels good,” he says in an almost griping fashion.

Resting the palms of my hands on his rock-hard stomach for leverage, I rise up again slowly, and push back down with equal force. He rewards me with a groan and so I do it again.

And again.

And again.

I keep it slow as I watch his face register how pleasurable he is finding this.

“Go faster,” he begs me as his hands come out from behind his head and grasp on to my thighs. He gives a slight push as I move upward, seemingly helping me along. When I start to slide back down slowly, he tries to push me along but I resist, my thigh muscles quaking against the force he’s exerting.

When he is in as deep as he can go, his gaze pins me intensely. “Come on, Sutton. Quit playing around.”

I smile at him and push his hands off my legs. “You want it harder?”

“God, yes.”

“Faster?”

“Yes!”

“No,” I tell him emphatically and his eyes flare wide at my denial. “I’m in control now, so just lie back and leave me be.”

Challenge burns within his blue eyes as he raises his head slightly from the pillow, and I can sense he is on the verge of flipping us back over so he can take control.

I give him a warning look and say, “Don’t even think about it.”

The defiance reverberates off him but he doesn’t move a muscle, other than to lay his head back down and give me a tight smile. He doesn’t say a word but brings his hands back up to rest on my thighs. His touch is light and acquiescent, born more of a need to just touch me rather than to be in control, and that makes my heart squeeze in contentment.

When Alex picked me up for dinner tonight, I sensed that something was wrong. He was distracted, his mind definitely on something more than me or the delicious Peruvian food we were eating. I asked him twice if there was something wrong and he gave me an apologetic smile and assured me he was fine…just thinking about an upcoming game against a highly ranked opponent. I didn’t buy it for a second, but the second time he refused to give me any intel, I decided to drop it.

After dinner, Alex said he didn’t feel like seeing a movie, and frankly, neither did I. It had been five days since we were last together and when I wasn’t worried about his distraction during dinner, I was fantasizing about all of the wicked things he would do to me once we got in bed. I had never in my life thought about sex as much as I did with Alex. It made me feel shallow, at times, because I feared that perhaps I was enamored of Alex only because he was a god in between the sheets. But no…there were plenty of other things about Alex that I was enamored of.

I think about the kindness with which he treated Glenn, or how he pulled me into his arms earlier today when Cosmo got the better of me. I think of how he is enjoying the game of hockey after hating it so long and the patience with which he teaches me about it. The way he looks at me, the softness of his touch. The way he bribes Minnie with subtle flirting and mums so that he can squeeze into my schedule to see me. Yes, Alex Crossman is a self-proclaimed ass**le, and he’s warned me that he will hurt me.

But he hasn’t yet.

So far he has done nothing but make my blood race, my heart thump madly and my soul sigh with contentment.

The softness of the feelings I have right now for Alex demand that I continue the slow pace I’ve set while on top of him. We have always been “balls to the wall” when we’ve had sex—Alex’s characterization, not mine. We get so consumed with lust and sensation that we are always striving to go harder, faster, longer. Our movements are always frenzied and the talk filthy. It’s exciting but even more, it’s intensely intimate.

But right now, I want to see if we are still as combustible at a different speed.

Scraping my nails along the skin of his stomach, I ride Alex with long pulls against his cock, and every time I sink back down onto him, he gives me a groan of approval. His fingertips slightly dig into my skin but he doesn’t try to hurry me again. He capitulates, even closing his eyes so he can privately savor the sensations I’m providing.