“He feared your ability and respected your value. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“I suppose not, but he had no loyalty to me after six years.” She blinks. “He had no loyalty to anyone except himself.”
I nod in agreement, and neither of us speaks for a while. The lights are low, and the window shows nothing but black water and scattered lights from the Keys below. Aurora is sitting close enough for me to smell her shampoo.
“You said dependence scares you more than danger.” I turn toward her. “What scares you about this?”
“This, meaning sitting on a private jet with the person who killed my boss?”
“This, meaning sitting next to me and thinking about the thing you said you’d never trust.” I stop talking because I’m getting way to close to mentioning love, and that isn’t what this is about. We can respect each other’s abilities and have a mutual attraction without it having to be anything emotionally complex.
She doesn’t answer immediately. She looks at me, and the look isn’t guarded or calculating. It’s the same look she gave me in the service corridor when I stopped six inches from her face and waited. Open. Assessing. Deciding.
“You scare me because you strip away all feeling of being in control naturally, not because you’re forcing it.” She lowers her voice. “Every other powerful man I’ve known made me smaller. You make me pay closer attention to myself, and that’s worse because it means I can’t blame you for what I’m choosing.”
I don’t plan what happens next, but I don’t pretend it’s accidental either. I reach for her, and she comes to me. The first kiss is slow. I cup the back of her neck and pull her mouth to mine as she grips my shirt at the chest to hold on. She tastes like bottled water and something warmer underneath, like clove or cinnamon, maybe from gum earlier. I kiss her until neither of us is breathing steadily.
She breaks the kiss long enough to glance toward the forward cabin. Viktor’s seat is reclined, and his reading light is off. Whether he’s sleeping or deliberately not watching, the result is the same. He’s ten feet away, and there’s no door between us.
“He’s not asleep,” I murmur.
“I know.” I expect the awareness to stop her, but it doesn’t.
“You’ll just have to be quiet.” She pulls me back and kisses me harder.
The deliberateness of knowing Viktor is awake, the cabin is open, and everything about this is reckless but choosing it anyway is hotter than the kiss itself. I should stop this. We’re on a forty-minute flight, in a cabin with no partition between us and my most trusted operative, heading toward a property where I’m supposed to be keeping her safe. Every rational argument against this is valid and completely irrelevant because Aurora’s hands are on my belt, and she isn’t hesitating.
She undoes the buckle and opens my pants while I push her blouse up over her ribs. Her skin is warm under my palms, and she arches into my touch when I run my hands up her sides. I unclasp her bra with one hand, and she shrugs it down her arms without breaking the kiss. Her breasts press against my chest, and the contact of bare skin against my shirt makes me grip the back of her neck harder.
I pull her onto my lap. She straddles me in the wide leather seat, with her knees braced on either side of my hips, and the shift in position presses her pussy against my cock. I’m already hard, and the contact pulls a low sound from my throat that I don’t bother suppressing. Let Viktor hear it. I don’t care.
“You aren’t being quiet,” she whispers against my ear before biting my earlobe.
She grins at me while rolling her hips once, deliberately, and the friction through her jeans makes me grip her waist with both hands. I should slow this down. I should be the one withdiscipline. Instead, I reach between us and unbutton her jeans. She lifts up just enough for me to work them down her hips, and I push her underwear aside because neither of us has the patience to undress fully in an airplane seat.
I slide my fingers along her slit, and she’s slick and hot against my hand. She exhales sharply through her teeth when I press two fingers inside her and curl them forward. Gripping the headrest behind me with one hand and my shoulder with the other, she tightens her thighs against my hips as I work her slowly.
She parts her lips, and her breath comes in short bursts that tell me she’s still managing herself even now, still measuring how much to let go. I want all of it. I want her to stop calculating and let me feel the version of her that exists underneath the composure.
“Stop thinking,” I say against her mouth.
“I can’t.” She rocks against my hand, and her grip tightens on my shoulder hard enough to hurt through my shirt. “I’ve been thinking every second since long before you brought me to that penthouse, and I can’t turn it off.”
“Then think about this.” I curl my fingers deeper, making her back arch, and press harder. She bites her lip hard, and the sound she makes is half gasp, half surrender. I push in deeper, slower this time, and circle my thumb over her clit while my fingers move inside her. She rolls her hips forward against my hand, chasing the pressure, and I give her more of it until her breathing loses its rhythm and she curses softly, clearly losing control.
“Adrian.” She says my name like a warning that she’s close, and I pull my fingers out before she finishes.
She looks at me with an expression between frustration and need. I bring my wet fingers to my mouth and taste her, holding her stare while I do it. The sound she makes is quiet but unmistakable.
She reaches for my cock immediately, wrapping her fingers around the shaft and stroking once from base to tip, before guiding me to her entrance. I grip her hips as she sinks down onto me, and the feeling of her pussy around me, slick and impossibly slow, makes me drop my head back against the seat. She’s wet enough that I slide in without resistance, but she takes me inch by inch, and the control she maintains over the pace is maddening because I want to thrust up and bury myself completely.
She sits fully in my lap with me buried inside her, and neither of us moves for a few seconds. The engine hum fills the silence. The cabin lights are low enough that I can only see her in profile and shadow, and the darkness makes everything more immediate because I’m feeling instead of observing. Her pulse beats through her inner walls, rapid and strong, and the intimacy of that sensation, feeling her heartbeat from inside her body, is almost enough to make me come right then.
She starts to move in slow, rolling motions that use the seat for leverage, and each downstroke takes me deeper. I hold her hips and match her rhythm, thrusting up when she presses down. We move together without negotiation, reading signals I didn’t know I was sending, and it’s clearly the same for her. She tightens her inner walls around me on each upstroke and relaxes on each downstroke. The rhythmic grip of her pussy around my cock is pulling me toward the edge faster than I want to go.
“Adrian.” She says my name against my neck, and the sound of it stripped of every barrier she’s built between herself and every man she’s ever known makes my cock spasm almost painfully as I fight against release.
I pull her closer and thrust harder. She wraps both arms around my neck and matches my pace. The urgency escalates until the seat is creaking beneath us and her breath is ragged against my ear. I reach between us and press my thumb against her clit, circling in time with each thrust, and her pussy starts to tighten around me.
