“Am I ready?” I find myself asking, hating the note of desperation in my voice. “For next week?”
“I’ll make sure you’re ready,” Marco promises, his voice so sincere I almost believe him.
“I just… don’t know how you’ve survived five years of this.” I can’t hide the way my voice cracks. “Fiveyears, Marco. I just… don’t understand.”
His hand stills. Then he whispers, “Sometimes, I don’t know either.”
The admission hangs between us. He’s silent for a long moment.
Then he says in a quiet voice, “I suppose it’s the tiny things that have kept me going. The way morning light hits the arena walls before the crowds arrive. How my housemaid hums to herself while she works in the kitchen, and I know I’ve made someone’s day easier just by existing.” His thumb brushes against my temple. “That when I stare up at the stars, my family are out there, looking up at the same ones, desperate for me to return to them. I just hold on to the knowledge that one day I’ll be home, and this will all be a half-forgotten dream. Until then, I just have to find the tiny pleasures in life.”
I turn my head to look at him. “Tiny pleasures.”
“Something like that.” His dark eyes search my face. “Finding beauty in ugly places. Holding on to hope when everything else is stripped away.”
My heart pounds as I shift, turning fully to face him. His thighs come together, creating a cradle for me to settle into. I’m sitting in his lap now, our faces inches apart.
“And this?” One hand fists his shirt, and with the other I reach up, touch his face with trembling fingers. “Am I a tiny pleasure?”
His breath catches. For a long moment he just stares at me, something blazing in his eyes.
“No,” he whispers finally. “You’re a wildfire.”
A ripple passes between us. Nothing gentle, nothing sweet—something fierce and consuming that threatens to burn everything down around us.
His hand cups my jaw, thumb tracing the line of my cheekbone. I lean into the touch, suddenly starved for it.
“Robin.” There’s something about the way he says my name. Like a prayer, like a curse. My pulse is in my wrist, my throat.
I don’t know who moves first. Maybe we both do. Maybe gravity pulls us together, inevitable as the tide.
His mouth crashes against mine with desperate hunger. Not the careful, exploring kiss of first attraction—this is collision. Wreckage. Five years of isolation and pain poured into this single point of contact.
I taste salt. Sweat, maybe tears. His or mine, I can’t tell. Don’t care.
My teeth catch his lower lip. He growls low in his throat, a sound I feel more than hear. His hands tangle in my hair, grip hard enough to sting. I arch into it, sparks racing through me to pool hot in my belly.
This isn’t tender. This is two people drowning, clawing at each other for air.
His tongue sweeps into my mouth, claims it. I bite down gently, feel him shudder beneath me. His grip tightens, pulls my head back to expose my throat. For a wild second I think he might bite me there, mark me.
Instead, he breathes against my neck, harsh and ragged.
“You,” he says, simply. “You.”
I silence him with another kiss, deeper this time. We pour five years of his loneliness into it, my weeks of terror and confusion and want. My hands find the hem of his shirt, slide underneath to map the heated skin beneath.
His body presses against mine, and suddenly I can feel everything. The hard length of his erection pushing against my thigh through the thin fabric of his training clothes. The way his breath hitches when I shift my weight.
Want floods through me, violent and all-consuming. Fuck, I want him so much. I want him broken open, all that control stripped away until he’s nothing but heat and hunger and mine. I want him on his knees, begging for me. To hear him cry out my name as I push inside him. I want him ruined. But the way he’s looking at me right now? I’m the one who’s already lost.
I shift back on his thighs, and my hand is already moving—down his chest, his stomach. My fingers find his cock through the fabric, and he gasps.
He’s hard. So hard.
I rub over his length. Once, twice. Fuck, he’s so big.
But Marco’s hand snaps out, catches my wrist before I can free his cock and properly attend to it. His grip is firm but not painful, and when I look up at him, his eyes are so wide, I can see my flushed face reflected back at me.
