"Don't treat me like glass."
"I don't want to hurt you."
"Then don't stop."
I kiss him harder. Press into him. Fingers in his hair, pulling, because I need him to understand that I am not fragile. I am not the girl on the cell floor. I am not a thing that happened to me. My rib catches. Sharp, bright, a hot wire along my left side. I ignore it because pain is a language I'm fluent in now, and this,thisis a dialect I'd rather speak.
His shirt goes first. My hands are on the buttons, clumsy and impatient. I get so frustrated he chuckles, helping me, before he finally shrugs out of it and tosses it somewhere behind the desk. Then it's mine.His. The one I stole. He pulls it over my head, the cool study air hitting my heated skin. His hungry gaze drops and?—
He stops.
His eyes focused on the bruise along my collarbone. Yellow-green now, spreading toward my shoulder. His mouth traces it lightly, his whole body going rigid under me, as a tremor runs through his chest that has nothing to do with want and everything to do with fury so compressed it could crack the marble floors.
I cup his face and pull his face up.
"Hey."
His eyes meet mine.
"This isn't about that. This is aboutthis."
Something breaks open behind his expression. Something gives way. And then his mouth is on my neck, my throat, the space below my ear that makes my breath stutter, and lower. Collarbone. Sternum. The curve of my breast. And when his mouth finds my nipple, I arch off his lap so hard I nearly crack my skull on the lamp.
"Fuck."
The sensation is. What the hell. Everything is sharper than I remember. Amplified. Like someone rewired my nerve endings while I wasn't looking and turned the dial past ten. His tongue against my nipple sends a current down my spine so intense my nails dig into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks, and the sound I make surprises us both.
His mouth stills.
"More," I manage. "Don't you dare stop."
He doesn't stop.
He lifts me onto the desk. Papers scatter, something falls off the edge and hits the floor, and I don't care and he doesn't care because his mouth is on my other breast now and the same thing happens. This insane sensitivity that turns a touch into a live wire. My back arches against files and folders and whatever intelligence report I'm crumpling beneath me.
Sorry to his paperwork. It died in service.
His palm slides up my inner thigh, and just for one second I hesitate, the ghost that's been squatting in the corner of my mind for ten days rearing its head.
Is this real? Am I choosing him or choosing the man who controls the air I breathe?
I look at him, his palm on my thigh, his eyes on my face. Not my body. My face. Watching me with an expression so open, so utterly stripped of pretense, that it's almost worse than the desire. More dangerous than anything he could do with those hands.
He offered to let me go. He opened the door. I'm on this desk because I walked back through it.
The ghost dissolves.
I pull him closer by his belt. The leather is warm. The buckle is cold. My fingers work it open.
His fingers find me, and my hips buck off the desk.
"Jesus Christ."
Everything is too much. Too sensitive. Like every nerve ending regenerated overnight and came back twice as responsive, and his fingers… God, his fingers. Slow, careful at first, reading my body the way he reads a room. Finding a rhythm that makes my vision blur.
"Look at me," he says.
I do. And the way he watches me, the way his eyes track every reaction while his fingers move, steady and devastating. This is not a man who takes. This is a man who studies. Who learns. Who gives you what you need before you've finished forming the sentence.
