I didn’t turn around. I didn’t walk back to her either.
Truth be told, I already knew exactly what Maria wanted without needing to read her mind. And fuck, she was
tempting
— scorching hot, ripe with twenty years of pent-up hunger radiating off her like
heat from asphalt.
Hot and relentlessly
clawing
at every inch of my self-control.
She was right there: fifty-something perfection wrapped in sheer black lace, heavy breasts rising and falling with shallow breaths, dark nipples stiff and begging against the fabric, water still glistening on her skin like an invitation
I was dying to accept.
Much as I wanted to claim both
Luna and her mother
in the most deliciously forbidden way possible only compared to what mom and my sisters have — much as every
Taboo
ability in my arsenal was screaming, roaring, howling at me to close the distance, rip that robe open, pin her to that bed, and
fuck
her so thoroughly that twenty years of emptiness would finally shatter —
I couldn’t.
It was killing me.
While I could
bury
myself
balls-deep
inside a woman I’d just met and make the moment feel sacred and permanent — as long as I genuinely loved her enough to want her in my life forever and she wanted me back —
this was different.
Most of the time the equation was beautifully, dangerously simple:
mutual desire, mutual intention,
mutual understanding
that this wasn’t a cheap transaction but the beginning of something real and unbreakable.
It had been the same with Margaret.
The dynamics with Charlotte had only been messier because Charlotte wasn’t fully mine yet.
But while I could take most of my women the very first time we were together and have it mean something deep, foundational, and lasting, it was never that clean with my
mother-in-laws.
There was a crushing weight to that title. Loving them meant loving them
through
their daughters — through layers of family loyalty, guilt, shared history, and bonds that had existed long before I ever stepped into their lives.
It made it impossible to simply take what was being offered and sort out the
emotional wreckage
later.
And to make it even worse — fuck, it was making my cock throb so hard it hurt — what Maria was offering right now wasn’t a
beginning.
It was raw,
no-strings sex
. A dirty little secret.
A one-time desperate release she could lock away under
mistake I’ll never repeat
and use as fuel to survive the next twenty years of soul-crushing loneliness.
And while logic screamed that it technically shouldn’t matter — because deep down I could already feel the iron certainty that she would eventually be
mine,
the same way I felt the inevitability of sunrise, and I could always pursue her properly afterward, build something real and lasting from the
ashes of one reckless
, mind-blowing night — the thought of actually doing it was so intense it was short-circuiting every rational neuron I had left.
Every single one was currently hijacked by the vivid, filthy image of Maria sprawled beneath me on that bed:
black lace robe torn open, heavy breasts bouncing with every brutal thrust, dark nipples caught between my teeth, her bare thighs wrapped tight around my waist as I drove into her again and again, finally giving her the kind of relentless, claiming fuck that would make her forget her own name.
My cock disagreed with my decision.
Violently.
It had been filing formal complaints with my nervous system since the second I walked through that door — since I saw the damp hair
clinging
to her shoulders, the water droplets sliding between her full breasts, the way the sheer lace clung to every lush curve, and the way her nipples tightened into hard, dark peaks under my gaze.
Right now it was staging a full-scale mutiny, thick and aching, pressing painfully against the front of my jeans with an urgency that bordered on rebellion.
Every heartbeat sent another pulse of pure, traitorous need straight to it.
Just turn around. Just take her. She’s right there. Wet. Ready. Begging without saying the words.
I overruled it anyway.
By forcing myself to focus on the woman instead of the body. By seeing
Maria
— the lonely, wounded, fiercely proud mother — instead of the sinfully tempting offering she was dangling in front of me like forbidden fruit.
This was Luna’s mother.
And the hurt in her... that deep, two-decade wound that had driven her to this exact breaking point — standing in a guest room wearing nothing but a black lace robe she had chosen deliberately, offering herself to her own daughter’s man because the loneliness had finally become heavier than the shame —
I couldn’t exploit that.
I couldn’t use her raw, aching hunger as a shortcut to make her surrender to a real relationship with me after the fact.
I couldn’t fuck her while she was still
bleeding
from the inside
and then try to
corner
her into something permanent because her body had made a desperate decision her heart and mind weren’t ready for.
It didn’t make any fucking sense.
I’d had
spontaneous,
no-hesitation sex a many times before. I’d cucked men on the first encounter without a single flicker of doubt. I’d taken women in bathrooms, offices, and never once second-guessed myself when the desire was mutual and the liberation was real.
But this was different.
Maria wasn’t being liberated from a bad husband. She was being slowly
devoured
alive by loneliness.
And there was a profound, gut-wrenching difference between
freeing
someone and
feeding
on their
desperation
like a predator.
If I took her now, she’d hate herself by morning maybe. She’d already been at war with herself before I even stepped through that door — I didn’t know the exact details, but I knew women, and I knew exactly what that haunted, conflicted, starving look in her eyes had meant when she answered.
Taking her in the middle of that civil war would feel like victory tonight and like soul-crushing betrayal tomorrow.
I refused to be the reason Luna’s mother couldn’t look at herself in the mirror without flinching in shame for the rest of her life.
Sigh.
Relationships and family dynamics, man.
Even a man with my power has to draw a
line
somewhere... no matter how loudly my body screams that I’m a fucking idiot for doing it.
"Can you come with us?"
I turned fully to face her — robe slipping dangerously low on her shoulders, golden light caressing every curve, hardened nipples still visibly straining against the sheer black lace, bare thighs slightly parted on the bed —
And asked the question I had actually come here to ask before her collarbones, her heavy breasts, and the sinful promise between her legs had tried to hijack the entire conversation.