She obeys, pinching and rolling, her back arching to press her breasts more firmly into her own hands. The sight of her spread beneath me, flushed and wanton, pleasuring herself while I fuck her slow and deep, nearly ends me right there.
"Kon, I can't... I'm going to?—"
"Let go." I pound into her now, abandoning finesse for raw need, chasing her release with my own. "Come for me, ??????. Come on my cock. Let me feel you."
Her orgasm crashes through her, her body clenching around me in rhythmic pulses that drag me over the edge with her. I bury myself to the hilt as my release rips through me, spilling hot and deep inside her, marking her, claiming her, filling her with everything I have. Her back arches off the chaise, her fingers still twisted around her nipples, my name torn from her throat like it's the only word she knows.
I collapse over her, catching my weight on my forearms, my forehead pressed against hers as we both gasp for breath. Our hearts pound against each other through sweat-slicked skin.
The city hums far below, a distant reminder of the world beyond this rooftop sanctuary. Her fingers trace lazy patterns across my back, following the lines of ink and scar tissue, and I sense the questions building behind her silence.
"Later," I murmur against her hair, breathing in the scent of her sweat and my soap and something that's purely us. "I promise. Everything."
"I'm going to hold you to that."
"I know you will."
She laughs softly, the vibration traveling through my chest and settling somewhere warm and unfamiliar. I press a kiss to her forehead, then her nose, then her lips, soft and sweet and nothing like the hungry devouring of before.
I could stay here forever. In this garden. With this woman. With the sun on my skin and roses perfuming the air and the weight of something I never thought I'd feel pressing against my ribs.
But the world doesn't stop for moments like this. It never does.
Eventually, she stirs beneath me. "I should probably..." She gestures vaguely toward the stairs.
"Shower. Rest." I roll to the side, letting her up while keeping one hand on her hip like I can't bear to break contact completely. "I have calls to make."
"Of course you do." She sits up, gorgeous and disheveled and thoroughly fucked, a rose petal caught in her tangled hair. She reaches for my shirt where it lies abandoned. "Mind if I borrow this?"
"It looks better on you anyway."
She shrugs into the fabric, my shirt hanging to her mid-thigh, and I watch her button it with a possessive satisfaction that borders on primal. She's wearing my clothes. She smells like me. She's mine in ways I didn't know I wanted until this very moment.
She pauses at the door to the stairs, glancing back at me over her shoulder with a smile that's pure trouble. The sunlight catches her face, illuminating the flush on her cheeks and the swollen curve of her lips.
"Kon?"
"Da?"
"Sex for secrets. That was the deal." Her grin widens, mischief dancing in those blue eyes. "You might want to start thinking about what questions you want answered."
Then she disappears down the stairs, snagging the railing for balance on legs that are clearly still unsteady, leaving me alone in my garden with the lingering scent of her on my skin.
I look down at my hands. At the scratches her nails left across the tops of my shoulders and ones I can feel sting along my back.
I hope they scar. They'll match the marks this woman has left on my heart.
Eight
Onyx
Rule number one of investigative journalism: never become part of the story.
Well, I broke that rule on a rooftop chaise nearly twenty-four hours ago.
Monday morning light filters through windows I don't remember closing, casting gray stripes across the exposed brick ceiling of my room. The pillow smells like cedar and smoke and him because I fell asleep in his shirt, and that pisses me off almost as much as the fact that I buried my face in the collar before I drifted off. I walked away before anything soft could happen. Before the post-sex haze could trick me into staying, into curling against that furnace of a body and pretending this is something it's not.
I sit up and every muscle in my body files a formal complaint.
