“Fuck,” I breathe.
She clutches my shoulders, forehead dropping briefly to mine as she adjusts to the stretch. My hands slide over her back, under the shirt, holding her steady while she breathes through it.
When she finally moves, it is unsteady and gorgeous and enough to tear every coherent thought out of my head.
Her hips rise, then fall again.
Once. Twice. The chair creaks. The sea keeps moving outside. The shirt slips farther off her body until it’s barely clinging to one arm, and my ring burns in my pocket like a live thing.
Do not think about it.
So, I don’t. I think about her instead.
About how she looks riding me in my shirt in the moonlight like something dreamed up by a man too exhausted to tell fantasy from fate.
I grip her hips harder and lift into her, setting a rhythm that makes her gasp and hold on tighter. Her moans are real in this quiet room. Nothing polished. Nothing performed. Just breath and need and my name in her mouth when I hit deep.
“That’s it,” I murmur. “Take me.”
She does.
God, she does.
Soon there is no more teasing in it. Just urgency. Her moving on me, me driving up into her, our mouths finding each other between breaths while the chair rocks dangerously and every sound she makes pushes me closer to the edge.
I slide one hand between us and find her clit slick and swollen.
She cries out against my mouth.
“That’s my girl,” I say before I can stop myself.
Her whole body tightens. She comes hard in my lap, shaking, mouth open on my shoulder as I keep her there, rubbing her through it until she’s trembling and oversensitive and impossible not to follow.
One more desperate thrust. Another.
Then I come too, deep inside her, my head falling back against the chair while release tears through me hard enough to leave me lightheaded.
For a long moment afterward, she stays where she is, collapsed against my chest, both of us breathing too hard to speak.
I can feel the ring in my pocket.
Heavy. Silent. Waiting.
Her fingers slide lazily over my throat. “You’re very distracting,” she murmurs.
I rest my hand at the back of her neck and look out at the dark ocean beyond the glass.
If only that were the problem.
28
ALEKSEI
I saw the ring.
He thought he hid it in time. He didn’t.
Not clearly, not enough for me to know what it was doing in his hand or why he looked at it the way he did, but I saw the glint of gold before it disappeared into his pocket. I saw the shift in his face. The brief, strange stillness before he pulled me into his lap and made me forget my own name for a while.
