The sight of him—coming apart under me, face open in a way I’d never seen it, every defense stripped away—pushed me over the edge. My hips stuttered. My rhythm fractured.
My cock pulsed deep inside him, and the orgasm rolled through me like weather, intense enough to blank my vision for a second, white-hot and consuming.
The knot swelled at the base of my cock, locking us together, and the feeling of it—the stretch, the fullness, the impossible intimacy of being physically bound to him—drew a sound from my throat I didn’t recognize as my own.
I pressed my forehead to his temple. Our breathing synced, ragged and slow. His body pulsed around my cock, aftershocks working through him in visible waves, and the knot held us together, thick and insistent, the biological imperative of the rut finding its conclusion in the most literal way possible.
The heat behind my eyes began to ease. Not all at once—in increments, like a fever breaking. The white-hot pressure receded, leaving behind something warmer, slower, the clarity that came after the storm had passed.
I could feel my heartbeat in my cock, each pulse sending a dull throb through the knot, and Jai’s body answered each one, clenching gently around me.
He was boneless beneath me. One arm thrown above his head, the other resting on my shoulder, fingers loose now where they’d been digging in minutes before.
His chest rose and fell in the steady rhythm of someone who’d been thoroughly, completely fucked, and the expression on his face—soft in a way I’d never seen it, almost peaceful—did something to my chest I wasn’t prepared to name.
We stayed knotted. The biology of it demanded patience—five minutes, maybe ten, before the swelling receded enough to pull out without causing discomfort.
I used the time to catalog the details I’d missed in the frenzy: the sweat dampening his hairline, the flush spread across his chest, the small, satisfied sound he made when I shifted my weight and the knot tugged inside him.
The city glowed beyond the glass. Gold and grey, indifferent to whatever happened forty floors above its streets. The rut’s heat had banked to something manageable, a low ember rather than a conflagration, and the particular clarity that followed—sharp, clean, the world rendered in higher definition than it had any right to be—settled over the room like something with mass.
Jai’s hand found my face. His thumb traced the line of my jaw, slow and deliberate, and when he spoke, his voice was rough but steady. “Soon,” he said. “You can bite me soon.”
I turned my head and pressed a kiss to his palm. Didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. The promise hung between us, patientand certain, and for once in my life, I was content to let a thing exist without immediately claiming it.
The knot held. His body held mine. The city kept its distance.
For now, it was enough.
Chapter Twelve
~ Jai ~
The coffee had moved. Again. Three days in the penthouse and Braham had already rearranged the kitchen cabinet—my kitchen cabinet, the one I’d been using for exactly seventy-two hours—because apparently the logical location for coffee wasn’t where I’d put it, but where he’d decided it should go.
I reached for the bag on the higher shelf, the one he’d relocated without asking, and the small, infuriating correctness of it made my jaw tighten.
Grace was on the island in her bouncy seat, working her entire fist toward her mouth with the focused ambition of a tiny scientist who had identified a problem and was determined to solve it through oral exploration.
Her eyes tracked the movement of her own hand with the grave concentration of someone mapping a complex chemical reaction. The toy bar above her swung gently, red circle, blue square, yellow triangle, all of them currently beneath her notice. The fist was the priority. Everything else was scenery.
The eastern light had leveled out. The famous twenty-minute golden hour—the one that turned Mt. Hood into a threat and the penthouse floors into something that looked bottled—was over. Now the light was cleaner, harder, a flat white-gold that caught the dark walnut and turned it the color of good scotch.
The air smelled like cedar and aged liquor infused with cherry blossoms worked into every surface. Below the glass, forty floors down, Portland hummed. A low, constant murmur, the sound of a city too busy to look up.
My laptop was open on the island. The manuscript glared at me. Chapter nine. The cursor had stopped blinking, whichmeant I’d been staring at the same paragraph long enough that the software had given up on me.
The problem was transparent and embarrassing. Drew and Eli—my two leads, who were supposed to be circling each other with professional wariness and carefully maintained boundaries—had instead fallen into something that read like a love letter written by someone with no capacity for subtlety. They were in love.
Transparently, mortifyingly in love.
The dialogue had teeth marks. The descriptions had fingerprints. Petra, my editor, who had once reduced a marketing director to tears over a semicolon, was going to read this and know exactly what had happened to me. I’d typed the same word four times in a row.Certain. Certain. Certain. Certain.
I deleted it.
Again.
The problem underneath the problem was the sound. The specific, low, rough sound Braham had made three nights ago when I’d pulled him closer—a noise that lived somewhere between a groan and a growl, something giving way—which kept surfacing mid-sentence like a pop-up ad for a product I was already addicted to.
