“Yes.”
I hold her hips and let her move at first. Up, down, circling, grinding when she finds the angle that makes her eyes go dark and unfocused. I watch her body take what it wants from mine, and that feeling from the jet comes back hard. She feels powerful like this. She knows she’s affecting me. I can see it in the way she looks at me, in the shaky confidence of her movements.
“Look at you,” I murmur.
She almost smiles. Then I take over.
My hands lock on her hips and drive her down harder, faster, making her gasp and cling to me while the bed thuds softly against the wall. I kiss her throat, her mouth, her breasts, then slide a hand between us and rub her clit until her whole body starts to tremble.
“Aleksei—”
“Come for me.”
She does, breaking over me with a cry she buries in my shoulder. I keep moving through it, lifting and dropping her until her body goes loose and oversensitive in my hands.
Then I roll her carefully onto her back again and thrust into her from above, one leg thrown over my arm, the angle deeper now, urgent in a different way. She’s wrecked already, which makes every stroke feel more intense, every sound more helpless.
I can’t last much longer.
Neither can she.
I kiss her hard, swallow her moan, and when she tightens around me again, it’s enough.
I come with a groan dragged straight out of my chest, thrusting deep and holding there while release tears through me. Her body answers with one last shudder, like the force of mine pulled another aftershock from her.
For a long moment neither of us moves.
Then I lower us both carefully, breathing hard, one hand spread over her belly, the other buried in her hair.
She turns her face toward me and says, very quietly, “That still doesn’t fix anything.”
“No,” I say.
But I kiss her forehead anyway. Because I am done pretending I want anything less than all of her.
36
ZATANNA
I am starving.
Not delicate, elegant hunger. Not I could eat a little something.
Actual, feral, pregnant hunger.
I push up on one elbow, squint toward the nightstand, then remember the jar on the dresser.
The tamarind strips. His mother’s weird pregnancy magic.
Aleksei is still catching his breath when I ease out from under his arm, pull on his shirt from the floor, and head toward the jar.
I reach for them.
“What are you doing?” Aleksei asks, voice rough with sleep and sex and irritation at being moved away from.
I pry the lid open. “Eating.”
He lifts his head enough to watch me shove one into my mouth. “Now?”
