One hand slides up her ribcage to her breast—filling my palm with it, squeezing, feeling her gasp and push back against me—and the other finds her jaw, tilting her head back, my fingers pressing into her mouth, and she takes them without hesitation, her tongue warm and her lips closing around them, and the sensation of it combined with the tight heat of her around my cock is something I am going to be thinking about for a very long time.
I set a rhythm. Deep, measured strokes, the full length of me, and I watch her—her reflection in the dark glass, the steam of her breath, the outline of my hand at her breast—and I feel her adjusting to me, opening further, the tension in her shoulders releasing as her body accepts what I'm giving her.
Her skin is warm and flushed under my palm. The sounds she makes around my fingers are muffled and desperate. The slick heat of her grips me with every stroke and I tighten my hand at her breast and drive deeper and feel her shudder.
I increase the pace.
Her palms drag down the glass slightly. Her reflection shows me her face—eyes closed, lips around my fingers, entirely surrendered—and I drive harder and wait for her to ask me to stop because surely she will, surely this is the edge of what she can take.
Her hand disappears between her thighs.
I feel her fingers working against her clit—feel it in the way she clenches suddenly around me, tighter and more urgent—and I understand that she is not going to ask me to stop.
“Harder,” she says, around my fingers. Muffled, fierce, entirely certain.
I give her harder.
The pace becomes something relentless—the glass fogging around the outline of her hands, the sounds of us filling the office, her fingers working herself while I drive into her from behind—and I feel her next orgasm building, feel it in the desperate clenching of her around me, and I squeeze her breast harder and press my fingers deeper into her mouth.
“Fuck-fuck-fu-u-uck!” she cries past them.
The clench of her around me makes me come hard. It pulls my own release from me like something structural giving way—a full body obliteration moving from the base of my spine outward in long devastating waves, my hips driving forward through it, her name in my throat. When it’s over I press my forehead to the back of her neck.
We breathe.
I hand her my jacket.
She puts it on—it swamps her completely, the shoulders dropping, the hem at mid-thigh—and I turn her toward the window and stand behind her and we look out at London together.
The rain has stopped. The city glitters—the Thames dark in the middle distance, Canary Wharf's towers reflected in it. Down there, somewhere, is the pavement where she bled and I caught her.
I wrap my arms around her.
“I'm going to keep you safe,” I say. Quietly. Certainly. “Whatever it takes. All of you. Always.”
She is quiet for a moment.
Then: “I know,” she says.
Her hand finds mine and holds it, and the city hums below us.
CHAPTER 20
Scars tell us what we survived
IVY
After a night of fractured sleep, I wake before the sun does.
Alistair isn't there. He never is—he gets up at some ungodly hour to work out or run an empire, and by the time I'm vertical he's usually been functional for hours.
I lie in the dim blue light and think about Brumilde. She was still in theatre when we left the hospital. Alistair had a call on the way home and didn't tell me anything concrete.
I try to go back to sleep, but it doesn't take.
The coffee machine in our wing has three steam wands and I don't have the faintest idea how to use it, so I pad downstairs. My feet make no sound on the runners and the grey light makes everything—the paintings, the vase of whatever Isobel's gardener has selected this week—look theatrical. I pass portraits of stern-faced ancestors who would wonder what someone like me was doing in a fancy house like this.
There is someone already in the kitchen. She is maybe twenty-five, small and dark-haired, in a neat black uniform with a small enamel pin of a daisy on her collar. She is arranging a silver tray.
