Page 23 of Protected By the BRATVA Grump

He comes down over me on the sofa and I feel the blunt press of him where I'm soaked and swollen.

"Look at me," he says.

I do.

He pushes in slowly, watching my face the whole way, and the stretch of it makes my mouth fall open. He stops halfway, lets me adjust, then sinks the rest of the way home with a low, wrecked sound.

"Fuck," he breathes. "You take me so well."

He starts to move, and it's deep and steady and unbearably good, one hand braced by my head and the other under my thigh, holding my leg high. The sofa complains. I don't care. I hook my ankle over the back of his thigh and pull him harder into me until he groans against my temple.

"Say it," I gasp.

"Mine." His hips snap. "Mine, Delilah. Every part of you." He gets a hand under my shoulder and drags me down onto him and I feel it in my teeth. "Nobody gets near you. Nobody comes anywhere near you."

"I know."

"You'll never have to worry about anything again as long as you're breathing. I'll take care of all of it."

There's a whole conversation buried in that. I can feel the edges of it. Everything he has done and everything he isn't going to tell me..

His rhythm turns rougher. He gets his thumb between us and circles my clit, and I go tight around him almost immediately, my whole body pulling in on itself.

"That's it. Yes, Delilah. Give it to me."

I shatter, and it takes him with me. He drives in deep and holds, and I feel the pulse of him inside me, the hot spill of it, his mouth pressed to my shoulder and my name repeated against my skin like a prayer he doesn't know he's saying.

He eventually shifts us so I'm lying on his chest with his arm around my back and my ear over his heart, and the apartment ticks and settles around us.

"The chicken is ruined," I say.

"The chicken was ruined at seven."

I laugh into his sternum, and he presses his mouth to the top of my head and keeps it there.

"Delilah."

"Mm."

His fingers move slowly through my hair. Outside, the fog has swallowed the streetlight opposite so completely that the window has gone the color of milk.

"I'm not going anywhere," he says.

He doesn't say the rest of it, and he doesn't have to. It lands close enough that my eyes sting and I have to press my face into his chest until it passes.

"Good," I tell him. "Because you're making dinner."

Jasper

The yard opens at five and I'm on the weighbridge by ten past with a clipboard of night tickets and my breath showing in front of me.

Mist off the water sits low over the containers at the eastern fence, and the gulls are already up on the roofline of the long shed, waiting for somebody to drop something worth having. The floodlights are on the timer that switches them off at half five whether anyone is finished or not, which is a small thing that has been irritating me for two years. Paulo comes through the gate with the first of the trucks and lifts two fingers off the wheel. The whole place starts moving the way it does every morning, slowly and then all at once.

Mechislav is in the office above the loading floor with the window open, he has the manifests laid out across the desk in the order I asked for.

"Eleven loads," he says. "Weights are inside a hundred pounds on all of them."

"And the Fenwick route?"