The words hit me. I search his face for any sign of doubt, any hint that this might be temporary.
I find nothing but certainty.
“What did you do?”
“What was necessary.” His thumb traces my cheekbone, the touch achingly familiar. “I will tell you everything. But not here. Not in this place.”
He takes my hand—fingers lacing through mine tight enough to hurt—and leads me toward the jet. I follow without hesitation, because following him is what I was made for, and now it is also what I choose.
The interior of the jet is warm.
That is what I notice first—the heat that envelops me the moment I step through the door, so different from the frozen landscape I have inhabited for three months. The cabin is appointed in cream leather and dark wood, the kind of luxury I had almost forgotten existed.
Ivan dismisses the crew to the cockpit with a sharp gesture. The partition closes behind them. The lock clicks.
We are alone.
He turns to me.
“Show me you are real,” he says.
The words are a command, but underneath them I hear a plea.
I cross the cabin in two strides and kiss him.
This time there is no hesitation. No slow buildup. I kiss him with everything I have been holding back for three months—the loneliness, the fear, the desperate need for his touch that no amount of compartmentalization could fully suppress.
His hands are on my jacket, pulling at the zipper, shoving the fabric off my shoulders. I return the favor, working at the buttons of his coat, his shirt, anything that stands between my skin and his.
“Too many clothes,” I growl against his mouth.
“Then remove them.”
His shirt tears when I pull it open, buttons scattering across the cabin floor. I do not care. I need to see him. I need to verify with my hands what my eyes are telling me.
His chest is warm under my palms. I trace the lines of muscle, the ridges of his ribs. He is thinner than he was three months ago. The separation cost him too.
“Maksim.” His voice is strained, his hands working at my belt with an urgency that matches my own. “I need to be inside you. Now.”
The words send heat flooding through me.
In the cabin, in the motel, I was the one who took him. I was the one who pinned him down and claimed him. But now there is something different in his eyes. Something that says he has spent three months dreaming of this, and he is done waiting.
“Then take me.”
He shoves my pants down and spins me around, bending me over the arm of the leather couch. The position is vulnerable,exposed. His hand presses between my shoulder blades, holding me in place, and I feel the hard ridge of his cock against my ass through the fabric of his trousers.
“I dreamed about this,” he says, his voice rough as he strips off his remaining clothes. “Every night in that empty penthouse. Dreamed about having you like this. Taking you. Making you mine again.”
I hear the sound of a buckle, the rustle of fabric, and then the wet sound of him slicking his fingers.
He presses into me—two fingers at once, stretching me open with an impatience that borders on rough.
I groan into the leather, pushing back against his hand, wanting more even as the burn of it makes me gasp.
“You can take it,” he says. His voice is dark. Commanding. The voice of a man who owns the room and everything in it. “You were made for this. Made for me.”
He works me open fast, adding a third finger and twisting until he finds the spot that makes my whole body jerk. I cry out, my hands fisting in the leather cushion, my cock hard and leaking against my stomach.
