CLAIMED BY THE TRIPLET BIKER ALPHAS: A STEAMY MC ROMANCE

CHAPTER 29 – I DID

LAYLA'S POV

Neither of us moves for a long time after I say "then don't stop."

The library is so quiet I can hear the clock on the wall and the sound of his breathing and the specific silence of a man deciding whether to cross a line he's been standing behind for six years.

Eli stands. Walks around the table. Stops in front of me and looks down at me with those dark eyes that have been watching me since I was fourteen years old, and the expression on his face isn't urgency or desperation. It's certainty. The calm, settled certainty of a man who has already made this decision a thousand times in his head and is finally letting his body follow.

He holds out his hand. I take it.

He leads me to his room without a word. Closes the door. Locks it. Turns to face me.

And then he just – looks at me. The way he looks at a blank page before he starts drawing. Like he's seeing the whole picture before his hands begin.

"Eli–"

"Let me." His voice is barely above a whisper. "I've been waiting a long time. Let me do this the way I need to."

He steps forward and his hands come up to my face – both of them, cradling my jaw – and he tilts my head and studies me the way he studies his sketchbook. His thumb traces my cheekbone. My lower lip. The line of my jaw from ear to chin.

Then he kisses me.

Not like the wall. The wall was desperate and collision and his body taking over before his brain could intervene. This is different. This is Eli choosing every second of it. His mouth moves against mine slowly, deliberately, like he's memorizing the shape of my lips with his. His hand slides into my hair and his fingers spread across the back of my skull and he holds me in place and kisses me until my knees disappear.

"I've drawn your mouth a thousand times," he says against my lips. "None of them got it right."

He pulls my shirt over my head and I reach for his but he stops me – catches my hands and lowers them gently.

"Not yet. I need–" He exhales. "Let me see you first."

He steps back. Looks at me the way he looks at a finished sketch – with the specific attention of a man cataloguing every detail. My shoulders. My collarbone. The swell of my breasts above my bra. The curve of the bump. His eyes move across my body and every place they land heats up like his gaze is a physical thing.

He unclasps my bra with steady hands. Slides the straps down my arms. Looks.

"Eli, you're staring."

"I know." He doesn't stop. "I've been imagining this for six years. Give me a minute."

He traces the swell of my brast with one fingertip. Just one. Down the curve, across the underside, circling the npple slowly until it hardens and my breath catches. He watches my reaction with the same focused precision he gives everything.

"There," he says quietly when I shiver. "That's the face I wanted."

He takes my npple into his mouth and my hand flies to the back of his head. His tongue circles slowly – infuriatingly slowly – while his hand works my other brast with fingers that know exactly how much pressure to apply because Eli Ashford doesn't do anything without studying it first.

"Please–"

"Not yet." He kisses down my sternum. My ribs. The curve of my bump – his lips lingering there, a pause that makes my chest crack – and then lower. His fingers hook into my waistband and pull down and I step out of everything and he's on his knees looking up at me.

"Lie down."

I lie on his bed. He positions himself between my thighs and I'm expecting his mouth but instead he just – touches me. His fingers trace my inner thigh. The crease of my hip. The soft skin below my navel. He's mapping me. Drawing me with his hands the way he draws me with pencils, committing every detail to the memory that already holds six years of my face.

"Eli, I need you to–"

"I know what you need." His thumb brushes against me and I gasp. "I've been paying attention."

His mouth replaces his thumb and I arch off the bed.

He's nothing like Rafe or Colt. Rafe is controlled devastation. Colt is joyful chaos. Eli is meticulous. Thorough. He works me with his tongue like he's been studying exactly this for years – which he has, in every kiss and every touch and every loaded silence – and every movement is precise and deliberate and designed to take me apart one layer at a time.

"Oh God – Eli, right there–"

He stays right there. Doesn't speed up. Doesn't change. He finds the spot and he holds it with the patient persistence of a man who has never rushed anything in his life, and when I try to grind against him for more friction he puts his hand on my hip and presses me down.

"Stay still. I want to feel you when it happens."

His tongue flattens and drags upward and two fingers slide inside me at the same time and I make a sound that I'm sure the entire hallway heard.

"That's the one," he murmurs against me. He curls his fingers and works them in time with his mouth and my hands are fisting the sheets and my thighs are shaking against his shoulders.

"I'm going to – Eli, I can't–"

"Don't hold it. Let me have it."

I come with his name in my mouth and his hands holding me together while I fall apart, and he doesn't pull away. He stays through every wave, his mouth soft and steady, his fingers still moving, drawing every last tremor out of me until I'm gasping and pulling at his hair.

He comes up and kisses me and I can taste myself on his mouth. I pull his shirt off and his body is leaner than his brothers' – built like someone who fights with precision, not power – and when I press my mouth to his chest I feel his heartbeat slamming against his ribs.

"Now." I unbuckle his belt. "I've been patient."

"Have you?" The corner of his mouth twitches, and it's the closest Eli gets to a grin.

He pushes into me slowly. Inch by inch. Watching my face the entire time like he's memorizing every shift in my expression. When he's fully inside me he stops and holds there and looks at me with those dark eyes.

"I've imagined this exact moment since I was sixteen years old." His voice is strained. "And it's better. It's so much better."

He moves. Slow, deep strokes that hit something inside me that makes my vision blur. He doesn't speed up even when I beg him to – he keeps the pace and he holds it with the same patient devastation he used with his mouth, because Eli doesn't rush and he doesn't perform and every single thrust is its own complete sentence.

"You're so beautiful." He says it against my neck. "You don't know. You've never known."

"Eli – faster, please–"

"No." He angles deeper and I cry out. "I'm not rushing this. I've waited too long."

His hand finds mine. Laces our fingers together beside my head. He pins our joined hands to the pillow and looks at me and for a moment the vulnerability on his face is so raw I have to look away.

"Don't." He tilts my face back to his. "Don't look away from me. Not tonight."

I look at him. At the man who drew my face for six years and left lemon water outside my door and chose silence when speaking could have changed everything. And now his body is moving inside mine with a tenderness that is dismantling something I didn't know I'd built.

"Eli – I'm close–"

"I know. I can feel you." His hips grind deeper and his thumb finds my c**t and works it in slow circles. "I've got you."

I come undone so completely that tears spill down my temples. Not from pain, not from sadness – from the specific overwhelm of being seen like this. Of being learned instead of assumed. Of six years of attention making contact all at once.

He follows me with a broken sound against my neck and his hands gripping mine and his whole body shaking.

Afterward, he kisses the tears off my cheeks. One at a time. Patient, even now.

"I didn't know it could feel like this," I whisper.

He pulls back and looks at me. Steady. Sure. Like this is the one answer he's never been uncertain about.

"I did."

We lie in the dark and his fingers trace slow lines across my shoulder and I think about Garrett. About two years of s*x that I thought was the ceiling – predictable, adequate, a box to check. Every place Eli touched tonight was a place Garrett never once thought to explore. The ceiling was never real. It was just the limit of one man's imagination, and three brothers have demolished it so completely I can't remember what it looked like.

I listen to Eli breathe and I think about what I have with these men – Rafe's intensity, Colt's joy, Eli's devotion – and I decide I'm going to stop trying to name it.

I'm just going to let it be what it is.