His hands found my waist—large, warm, fingers pressing into the dip above my hip bones with a grip that was firm and certain and exactly what I wanted.
I decided, with the absolute conviction of a man who had just stopped pretending, that my lip was fine. My lip had never been better. My lip was a concept invented by people who had never been kissed by Braham Wolfe in a timber bedroom with a fireburning low and a bed the size of a small country waiting behind them.
I got my fingers into the front of his shirt. Crisp cotton, probably cost more than my monthly grocery budget, and I pulled. Hard. The kind of pull that said I was done with careful and interested exclusively in what happened next.
He walked me backward toward the bed. Not fast. Unhurried. The particular pace of a man who had been thinking about this since the moment I walked out of the study, since the kitchen, since the elevator doors closed behind us in a parking garage full of blood and broken men, and who had decided that the middle was worth savoring.
His steps were measured.
Mine were less so.
My back hit the edge of the mattress and the charcoal linen was soft against my palms, and Braham’s mouth was on my throat and his hands were working my jacket off my shoulders with the focused attention of someone dismantling something that had outlived its usefulness.
He was careful with the bandaging. His fingers traced the edge of the gauze where it met skin, checking the tape, adjusting his grip to avoid pressure on the wound underneath.
The consideration lived in the set of his jaw—the tension of a man who was holding himself back from something his body wanted to do—and I appreciated it with every functioning nerve ending I possessed and refused to acknowledge it out loud because acknowledging it would ruin the moment, and the moment was too good to ruin.
His shirt came off next. One-handed, the buttons giving way under his fingers with the ease of someone who had done this ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more.
The firelight caught him full-on then: all that muscle, corded and defined, the sparse dusting of hair across his chest taperingto a line that disappeared into his waistband, the gash across his shoulder from the garage already closing—pink and angry and half-healed in the span of hours that would have left me bedridden for a week.
“It is genuinely unfair to look like that,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I’d intended, the split lip making the consonants sound wrong, and the words landed somewhere between observation and complaint.
“You’re one to talk.” Braham’s hand ran flat down my stomach, palm warm against skin, fingers tracing the ridges of muscle that my Army Ranger years had left behind and my writing career had not quite managed to erase.
His thumb hooked under the waistband of my jeans, and whatever I’d been planning to say next evaporated into the silence of a man who had just been rendered temporarily stupid by competent hands.
He got me down against the linen. The sheets were cool against my back, the contrast with Braham’s warmth sharp enough to register as its own kind of sensation, and then his mouth was on my throat—slow, deliberate, the drag of his beard against my skin sending a current straight down to my toes—and his hands were working my jeans open with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that clothing was an obstacle he was no longer interested in tolerating.
He took his time. I had expected fast. I had expected hungry. What I got was Braham Wolfe with his mouth on my chest, his tongue circling one nipple and then the other with the kind of attention that suggested he had been thinking about this specific activity for considerably longer than was polite, and when his teeth grazed the sensitive peak and my back arched off the mattress and my fingers dug into his shoulders hard enough to leave marks, the sound that came out of me was cutting andbreathless and filthy in a way that would have embarrassed me if I’d had any embarrassment left, which I didn’t.
He took it as encouragement. Because of course he did. The man had built an entire business empire on reading subtext, and the subtext of me clawing at his shoulders while he wrecked my chest was not particularly subtle.
He worked down, his mouth dragging a wet line from my sternum, over the compression wrap, to my navel, his beard scraping a path that left my skin humming, and then lower.
His hands were on my hips, fingers pressing into the bone, holding me still while his mouth found the inside of my thigh with the kind of focus that made the timber ceiling swim in and out of focus above me.
I stared at the beams and thought, with the clarity of someone whose brain was determined to function even when the rest of him was thoroughly compromised, that I was going to write absolutely none of this into my manuscript.
Petra would read it and know immediately, and the knowing would live in her editor’s notes forever, and I would have to change my name and move to Argentina.
Then Braham’s mouth was on my cock, warm and wet and thorough, and I stopped thinking about the manuscript entirely. My hand found the back of his head—not pushing, just there, fingers threading through his hair, holding on.
The sound he made around me vibrated through every nerve ending I possessed and turned my spine to something that existed exclusively to conduct sensation from point A to point B.
I stopped trying to stay quiet. The timber walls were thick. The nearest pack member was fifty yards and several thousand trees away. The fire popped and the sheets rustled and the wet, rhythmic sound of Braham’s mouth working me filled the room alongside the low, broken noises I was making that I would categorically deny ever producing if anyone asked.
He pulled back before I finished. One moment his mouth was on me, warm and relentless, and the next he was sitting back on his heels between my legs with his hair messed from my hands and his gold eyes dark and satisfied in a way that made my chest do something complicated.
“That’s rude,” I said.
“I know.” The satisfaction in his voice was specific and deliberate and the kind of thing that would have made me want to punch him if I hadn’t wanted him inside me more.
He reached for the nightstand. The drawer slid open, and the bottle that emerged was familiar in the way things become familiar when you’ve spent enough time in a man’s bedroom to know where he keeps his lube, which was not a sentence I had planned to construct in my lifetime but here we were.
He poured it warm over his fingers, and the first press was careful—one finger, working slow, his eyes on my face the whole time with that focused attention that made the air between us feel charged.
When he found the angle—that specific spot that made my whole body arch off the mattress like I’d been plugged into a wall socket—the sound that came out of me was loud and desperate and the kind of thing that would have embarrassed me if I’d had any pride left, which I didn’t.
