His mouth finds my breast and rational thought dissolves. He takes his time—tongue and teeth and careful attention, learning what makes me gasp, what makes my back arch off the mattress.
When he finds the right pressure, the right rhythm, I have to turn my face into the pillow to muffle the sound.
The awareness of his family one floor below should dampen this. It doesn't. It sharpens everything.
My hands find his hair, fingers tightening. He allows it for exactly as long as he decides to—then catches both my wrists and pins them above my head with one hand, forearm crossing both of mine.
"My pace," he says against my skin, mouth moving to my ribs, my stomach. "My rules. You take what I give you, when I give it. Not before."
Pinned and waiting, something fundamental shifts in me. Every anxious calculation I've been running since Prague goes quiet. There's nothing to manage here, nothing to strategize. Just his hands, his mouth, and the slow unraveling he's engineering with absolute precision.
I stop bracing and simply feel.
He works his way lower, mouth tracing a slow, deliberate path down my stomach, pausing at my hip bone long enough to make my breath stutter. He draws my underwear down with the same unhurried patience he's applied to everything else—taking his time, letting the anticipation build until my thighs are trembling before he's even touched me there. His hands slide under me and grip, positioning me exactly where he wants me.
When he finally settles between them, he looks up at me—expression stripped of everything except hunger and intention.
"I'm going to taste you now." His breath is warm against my inner thigh. "And you're going to stay quiet. Can you do that?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Good girl."
The praise hits me like a physical thing—warmth spreading through my chest even as his mouth finds me, and then I stop cataloguing reactions because there's nothing left in my mind but sensation.
He takes his time, unhurried and devastating, learning me the way he'd learn a problem worth solving. Tongue and pressure and the occasional scrape of teeth that makes my hips jerk against his hold. He reads every response, adjusts without hesitation, drives me higher and then eases back just before the edge until I'm trembling and desperate and entirely his.
When I start to break—a sound escaping that would carry—his hand comes up and covers my mouth. Firm, deliberate.
"Quiet," he murmurs against me, and the vibration alone nearly finishes it.
He takes me over the edge with his mouth and fingers working together, holding me down while my body shakes apart, muffling every sound I can't contain.
He doesn't stop when I come—draws it out, relentless, wringing every aftershock until I'm pulling at his hair because the pleasure has crossed into something overwhelming and I can't take any more without screaming.
He pulls back slowly, presses a single deliberate kiss to my inner thigh, and looks up the length of my body with an expression that is pure male satisfaction. "Beautiful. But we're not done."
My chest is still heaving when he stands and strips—shirt first, careful around the bandaged burns, then jeans, then everything else. He's all scar tissue and controlled power, bruised from the work that nearly killed him, and looking at me like I'm the only thing in this room.
"Do you need a minute?"
"No." I reach for him. "I need you."
"Then you'll have me." He comes back down over me, settles his weight between my thighs, braces on his forearms. "Slowly. I'm not small, and you're still shaking."
He pushes inside me by increments, watching my face the entire time—cataloguing every flicker of expression the way he'd catalogue a threat assessment, that same focus turned entirely on my pleasure. The stretch is significant, the pace torturously controlled, and his breathing goes ragged with the effort of holding back.
Every muscle in his body is locked against the urge to take.
"Okay?" he asks when he's seated fully, jaw tight.
"Yes." More than. Completely.
"Look at me," he says. "Keep your eyes on me."
He starts to move—still measured, still deliberate, building the rhythm from the ground up. I watch his face and see what it costs him. The tight set of his mouth. The way his eyes want to close and he won't let them. Control as an act of will, maintained for my benefit, and the knowledge of it winds something impossibly tighter inside me.
"Remy—"
