I try to tell him I’m close, but it comes out as a broken moan instead.
He smiles against my mouth. “I know.”
At the sound of his words, the pressure crests and breaks. I come hard in his lap, body convulsing around him, my forehead dropping to his shoulder as every muscle in me tightens. He keeps moving through it, chasing his own release now, rough and deep and almost desperate.
The sounds he makes are different when he’s close. Lower. More wrecked. Real in a way that makes my body clench all over again.
“Fuck,” he says into my hair. “I’m?—”
Then he’s coming too, thrusting up once, twice, hard enough to make me gasp, his whole body tensing under my hands as release tears through him. He buries his face in my neck with a low groan that sounds dragged from somewhere he doesn’t let many people see.
For a long moment afterward, neither of us moves.
I’m sprawled on top of him, breathless and weak, his arms wrapped around me as the plane cuts through black sky.
Eventually he kisses the side of my throat and says, voice rough and amused, “You realize this is not how most people spend a flight.”
I let out a tired laugh against his shoulder. “You started it.”
“No,” he says. “This one was all you.”
For one stunned, breathless moment, I just stay there in his lap, trying to process the fact that I’m the one who did that to him.
Aleksei Vasiliev.The man who terrifies boardrooms. The man who commands rooms with a glance. The man with scars and secrets and people who move when he says move.
And I just took him apart.
The realization hits low and hot, almost as intoxicating as the sex itself. Not because I won something. Not because I conquered him. But because for those few minutes, he let go with me. He gave me that. All that control, all that power, and still he let himself come undone in my hands.
It makes me feel dizzy. Powerful. Desired in a way I’ve never been before.
I lift my head and look at him, and something in his face tells me he knows exactly what I’m feeling.
His mouth curves, tired and wicked. “Careful,” he murmurs. “You’re starting to look pleased with yourself.”
I can’t help it. I smile. “Maybe I am.”
His hand slides up my back, slow and possessive. “You should be.”
27
ALEKSEI
By the timethe jet touches down in Cancún, the sun is already cutting the horizon in half.
Gold on water. White heat even this early. Palm trees moving in the wind like they know exactly how obscene this place is.
Zatanna sleeps through most of the descent.
She’s curled into the leather seat with my jacket under her head, hair a dark spill over one cheek, one hand tucked near her mouth. After everything, after the flight, after the sheer emotional violence of the last forty-eight hours, she’s out cold.
I watch her longer than I should.
The cabin lights come on softly. She stirs, blinks, and looks out the window like she’s not sure whether she’s still dreaming.
Then she sits up. “Oh my God.”
The words are quiet. Reverent. A little wrecked.
