Alexei was slimmer than me, his slighter frame didn’t fill the doorway. I slid past him and checked my bedroom door.
It was already locked.If he didn’t come to kill me...
I turned back to where Alexei stood. He had shifted too, tracking me as I padded naked and wet around my room.
Fuck, I was already hard. But there was something else pulsing through me too, something more than the pent-up lust that made me feel slightly unhinged. My heart thumped like I’d banged a gram of charlie up my nose, my veins vibrating, a current thrumming between us.
Growling, I balled my hands into fists. The fuck was happening to me? This was some fated-mates bullshit I didn’t have time for. I couldn’t fuckingbreathe—
Alexei ghosted across the room. He backed me against the locked door, his arm at my throat, but it wasn’t threatening, and because I was a sick bastard, the pressure to my windpipe was soothing, pushing the angst in my chest back where it belonged in the deep, dark pit of my gut. “You are okay, Cam.”
I slow-blinked, drowning in his steely gaze and ridiculously long lashes. Honestly, they went on for days and I couldn’t believe I’d only just noticed.
“Cam.”
“Hmm?”
Alexei ran a fingertip down my bare chest.
I shivered, and every welt and bruise on my body throbbed. “No one says my name as much as you do.”
“It is a nice name. I like how it sounds when I say it.”
So do I.
Alexei’s trailing fingertip became his whole palm, rubbing over my chest in a soft, hypnotic circle. His gaze was piercing, flaying me open, and I couldn’t stand it.
But I couldn’t break it either. Iwantedthis, goddamn it. I’d fucking yearned for it in the long days that had passed since I’d last seen him. The way he looked at me was everything, and I almost didn’t notice his hand descending down my body.
Then his long fingers wrapped around my hard dick and my hips bucked forward, a violent jolt that snapped me back to reality. “Fuck.”
“Shh.” Alexei’s other hand took its place, splayed over my stampeding heart. “Let it go.”
How did he fucking know? Did I have every demon in my messed-up soul tattooed on my head?
Whatever it was, I was powerless to his whispered instruction. My head fell back against the door with a dull thud and I gave myself over to his magic hand.
Alexei stroked my cock, squeezing and twisting a slow rhythm that matched the final act of how I’d fucked him in his sterile penthouse. Revenge, maybe?
It was sweet enough.
I closed my eyes, lost to the push and pull of pleasure sluicing through me. I’d believed him when he’d proclaimed not to be my would-be assassin, and I believed him still, but if he killed me now, I’d die happy.
The constriction in my chest began to ease. A headache I hadn’t known I had melted away. His arm returned to my throat, forcing air from my lungs, and I loved it, tipping my head back, craving more.
Alexei hissed, low and dangerous, but somehow kind too. Or maybe that was my fucked-up mind. Whatever. His attention was the cure I needed right now.
Perhaps it was everything I’d needed all along.
9
Alexei
I couldn’t say what had drawn me back to the Rebel Kings’ compound. Only that I had no regrets. If someone was trying to kill Cam O’Brian, it was inexplicably of great importance to me that he knew how vulnerable he was in the place he felt safest.
That he felt safe withmewas an anomaly I hadn’t prepared for.
I pleasured him with my hand, ignoring the desire burning me up inside, lost in him and every low-pitched sound he made. Cam was a grumbling beast of a man, but like this, at the mercy of my touch, he was something else. Something softer and more fragile than perhaps he knew.
