You and Bucky decide to start holiday mood early in the form of trying out various holiday/winter recipes - one per day.
This isn't quite what you suggested in your ask, but it inspired something else I hope you like all the same...
GRAPES
Collection: DEVOUR Characters/Pairings: Mob Boss!James Buchanan Barnes x Female!Chef!Reader Word Count: 2.5k Timeline: The second December you spend together.
Content & Warnings: EXPLICIT SMUT (oral - female receiving, unprotected vaginal intercourse, creampie), no use of y/n
Author Notes: It's been well over a year since I've thought of these two, but when this was dropped in my inbox, it seemed criminal to give it to anyone but our chef!reader and her wonderful and audacious menace of a mobster.
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“What is this?”
Despite his dangerous tone, you barely looked up from your tablet, consulting your notes there before moving back to your mixing bowl and reaching for one of the lemons on the counter.
“What does it look like?”
You began zesting the lemon into the bowl of sugar that you’d already zested a hearty amount of an orange rind into.
“It looks like you’re testing more holiday recipes when you promised me you were done with our December holiday entertaining menus.”
You shrugged, catching a curl of zest between your fingers and pressing it to your nose. “It’s not for December,” you said. “It’s for New Year’s Day, which—technically—means January.” You set down the microplane and nudged the bowl toward him. “So, really, I’m ahead of schedule.”
He prowled closer, snatching the lemon from your hands. “Semantics, sweetheart. You’re splitting the holiday atom, here.”
He radiated an effortless authority, the kind that could cow senators and scare the shit out of rival bosses, but here in your kitchen, it failed to inspire any fear.
You snatched the lemon back, defiant. “Do you want to taste this or not?”
He rolled his eyes with a heavy sigh, but you could see the faint crease at the corner of his lip, the one that only appeared when he admired your stubbornness. He was tired tonight. Even in the private sanctum of your home, his shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow and his tie hung loose, a mark of resignation. You’d tried to tell him not to work so late, but James Barnes existed by defying instructions, not by following them.
One of the many reasons you were so well-suited for each other. Both stubborn, both driven.
He set his phone face down on the counter and leaned against the marble, watching you with bemusement, his earlier bluster only a front as he further transitioned into domesticity with you for the evening. “Walk me through your madness,” he said.
He needed distraction, you knew it. So you walked him through your current culinary project: sangria grapes. You explained how the grapes were marinating in a bath of dry red wine, orange liqueur, and two kinds of bitters, before being rolled in zested sugar, “So they’ll taste like the bastard child of a cocktail and a candied fruit.” You said it with pride, as if brilliant debauchery were a virtue.
Because sometimes it was.
He watched you mix with those wolf-blue eyes, the ones that could cool a room if he so much as narrowed them. But tonight he only watched. No power plays necessary. No games. No keeping the city in line. He just wanted to be here.
“Are you allowed to serve these to the public?” he asked, lips quirking.
"Maybe half the alcohol will evaporate before they get to the customer. Maybe not," you replied, meeting his gaze over the rim of your measuring spoon.
He grunted, the sound equal parts skepticism and reluctant delight. "You're a menace."
You grinned, pleased. "Takes one to know one."
Silence fell. The kitchen gleamed—the enduring comfort of the home you reveled in sharing together. He watched you, arms folded, fingertips drumming on the counter in a rhythm you’d grown to trust, as you fell for the man.
You set aside the bowl, dusted your palms on a nearby kitchen towel, and stepped around the island until you stood in his gravity. Close enough to taste the stress hanging off him like humidity. His eyes tracked your approach, and yours clocked fresh bruises at his knuckles. You reached up to cup his jaw in both your hands, stepping right into his orbit. His hands found their home at your hips almost automatically.
“Long day?” you asked, voice soft, more invitation than question.
He huffed. “Long week. I think the city is actively trying to kill me so it can retire me like a racehorse with a bad leg.”
“Good thing for them you’re not so easily put down.”
He grinned, all canines and hunger for you. "Exactly." He leaned in, nuzzling your temple with genuine tenderness. His breath was hot.
You pulled back enough to read his face, seeing the shadows lingering behind his eyes. “Do you know about eating grapes at New Years?”
He tilted his head, curiosity supplanting weariness. “Superstitious custom? Heard of it, never done it. Why?”
You reached around him to pluck a grape from the bowl, rolled it in the citrus sugar, and then and pressed it to his lips. He opened, obliging, and watched you as he bit down. Juice exploded tangy and bright in his mouth, orange and wine layered with the sweetness you’d promised. He chewed thoughtfully, then flashed the smile that made you weak in the knees, before snatching you up and twisting to deposit you onto the counter top so you sat level with his chest.
“Let me guess, one grape for each month. Something about luck?”
“It’s a tradition,” you explained, “in Spain and Portugal. At the stroke of midnight, you eat twelve grapes—one for every chime, one for each month to come. If you finish before the last bell tolls, your year’s supposed to be lucky.”
He smiled, fox-quick and sharp. “Do I need luck when I have you?”
He leaned in to kiss your sticky fingertips, and then your lips, making the skin at the base of your neck go hot.
"You could always use a little luck," you murmured against his mouth. "The kind you don’t have to negotiate for or win in a game of psychological stand off."
He laughed, a low rumble in his chest. "Every kind of luck I have, no matter where it comes from, I want with you.”
His mouth caught yours before you could answer, and you felt the force of him—the desperate need that lived in his blood like a fever—spilling over. He palmed the back of your skull, cradling it, and kissed you so thoroughly your teeth ached. You yielded, always, to his appetite for you. You tasted the wine and the orange bitters, the zest you’d pressed into his mouth, tongue tangling with yours, the kiss deepening until you lost the line between indulgence and necessity. You tried to gasp but he took even that, drawing you further in.
He broke off only to trail his lips along your jaw, your neck, branding you there with slow, open-mouthed kisses. His hands slipped down your thighs, and you shifted—hurriedly and without any grace whatsoever—to shimmy out of your leggings and underwear. He was quick to assist, peeling the last of the fabric down and away with the deftness and intent that made him so formidable everywhere else. Bare now from the waist down, the tile was cold under your thighs but the rest of you ran hot, all because of him. His hands, his mouth, the sight of him kneeling—James Buchanan Barnes, legendarily in charge of the world and all the dangerous things in it—on his knees for you in the warmest light of your kitchen, it would never cease to undo you.
He pressed your knees apart, staking a claim. The heat of his breath over your inner thighs threatened to undo you before he’d set to task, and when he did—when his tongue licked a slow, deliberate stripe up your center—you could only tip your head back and bite your lower lip to keep from crying out.
He liked that. Liked what he did to you, liked to put his mouth on you until you couldn’t taste anything but the aftermath of his addiction to your skin. His hands anchored you, strong and unyielding, the same hands that had brokered back-channel deals and cracked skulls keeping you safe and still on the polished marble. He ate you languidly at first, an artist appreciating his own work, then with a mounting hunger that made your pulse thrum behind your eyes.
You felt every drag and swirl, every calculated flick of his tongue, until pleasure crowded out reason and your world contracted to the size of his mouth, his hands, the rasp of his stubble on your thighs. You clutched at the marble edge with one hand, the other tangling helplessly in his hair, as the city’s most relentless wolf worshiped at the altar of your body.
He didn't stop, didn’t pause to check on you as if he knew exactly where you were in the process, expertly charting the ascent, coaxing you upward, upward, until your whole body answered in a shudder and you went off, sparks behind your eyes and warm syrup running in your veins. You jerked a little, maybe more than a little, but he simply adjusted, following you through the aftershocks until all you could do was melt into the countertop.
He rose then, so patient, dabbing the corner of his mouth with his thumb as if this were a wine tasting and he might be expected to give notes. He was rock hard and already moving to release his cock.
You watched him, kind of insensible, as he shed his belt and undid his trousers with the kind of mechanical precision that shouldn’t have been sexy but absolutely was. He reached for your hips, guiding you back to the delicious edge of the marble and bringing you flush to him, the head of his cock already leaking against your inner thigh.
He paused, his voice gone gravel and smoke. “I need to fuck you right here.” Not a question, not a request, just the inevitable truth of his desire.
You could only nod, your pulse thundering so loudly in your head that all you could do was wrap your legs around his waist and let him take what he wanted.
But you would give it to him anyway. Always.
He buried himself in you with one brutal, perfect thrust, and you choked on the delicious collision of pain and pleasure, clutching tight to his biceps as your back arched. He did not wait, nor did you want him to. The city did not pause for breath and neither did James Barnes. He fucked you like he needed air, needed to reconstitute his own strength in the heat and squeeze of your body. Every thrust was intention made manifest, the cadence not so much a rhythm as a relentless siege.
He watched your face as he fucked you—hungry for every wince, every flinch of pleasure, as if documenting your ruin for future reference. His hand rose to your jaw, tilting your face toward his, making sure you locked on his gaze, ice blue and burning. Even now, after all this time, you didn't know how to brace for the force of him when he was like this—when the animal raged up and broke through the man.
He kissed you, hard, swallowing every whimper and gasp the movement pushed out of you. When he broke away, his breath was ragged, his voice shattering against the cliff’s edge of self-control. "Touch me," he rasped.
You slid a trembling hand down his shirt, feeling the hot slick of sweat beating up along his chest, the hard muscle vibrating as he hammered into you. You found his pulse at the hollow of his throat, wild and frantic. You pressed there, and he shuddered, eyes fluttering closed before he caught himself. He blinked, surprised by the vulnerability, and you felt heat spike low and deep in your belly.
You arched against him, finding what purchase you could—his shoulder, the knot of muscle in his upper back, your heel braced against the base of his spine—and let him chase that wild edge. It came for you both in a violent crest, yanking you under and leaving you clawing for the surface, together. He held you there, his cock pulsing inside you as he spent himself, lips pressed to your jaw as if he’d die if he let go. You clung to him with your legs, your arms, every part of you greedy for the connection, and when he finally exhaled—long and ragged and so, so gentle—you felt him soften, felt his forehead tip against yours, felt his hands cradling your head, stroking your cheek with tenderness at total odds with the savagery of the moments before.
“Marry me,” you murmured against his lips.
He pulled his head back to look at you, face splitting into the half-grin, half-smirk you couldn’t deny that you loved to see on his achingly handsome face. “Yeah?” he asked, fingering the engagement ring you’d worn for well over a year.
His pursuit had been so fast, so undeniable, but though you had accepted his proposal, you had insisted the engagement be long, and he’d agreed, content as long as you wore his ring.
You nodded and drew him in for another kiss. This time, it was soft, slow—less a seduction and more a confirmation of all the things you had built together so far. He cradled your jaw with surprising delicacy, thumb stroking along your cheekbone.
When he lifted his head, the question was already brewing in the press of his brow, the set of his jaw. “When?”
“Soon,” you said, letting your lips brush his as you said it. “Let’s not let another winter pass.”
He leaned in, nipped at your jaw, and let out a low sound of approval. “Define ‘soon’ for me, Chef.”
“Spring,” you answered simply. You didn’t know you’d decided, but there it was, stone thrown into the water, making its ripples already. “I want spring.”
You felt his cock twitch inside you at the promise, and the realization that you’d finally narrowed a window, named it in a way that made it real. His hands locked around your round hips, a moment of affirmation, and he flexed again into the heat of you, melting any last lingering fear into muscle memory and sweat.
He murmured your name into the angle of your neck, and you felt the soft huff of his laugh, felt the lightness in him in delicious contrast to the weight of his body deliciously pressed into yours. You felt, in that overheated, post-coital haze, a kind of certainty that you suspected very few people ever got to feel in their whole lives. The kind that lived in the marrow, in the heart muscle.
You’d found your match. You’d found a gravity in him, a gravity that still made you feel like you could roam and soar. And though it had been burrowing in your soul for a long time, now you knew you were ready to make your vows, sure as you could ever be about anything in your life.
You were ready at last to be Mrs. James Barnes.
Sangria grapes inspired by this recipe, though I think there should be a bit of lemon zest added to the sugaring, clearly haha.
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