Page 45 of The Dangerous Dance

I look at him. At the open shirt and the dark hair and the mouth still slick from me, and the very deliberate evidence of him through the front of his trousers.

I reach for his belt.

He catches my wrist. Not stopping, just pausing. "You do not have to."

"I want to."

He looks at me.

"I want to," I say again. I want this to be a thing I gave you. Not a thing you did for me. I do not say that out loud. He sees it. He releases my wrist.

I slide off the couch and onto the floor in front of him, on my knees, the way he was a moment ago. The carpet is rough under my bare knees. I do not mind.

I open his belt. The leather is warm from his body. Button. Zipper. He helps me push his trousers and his boxers down to his thighs, and his cock is hard against his stomach, dark and thick and flushed, and I look at it for a moment before I touch it because I want to look.

He lets me look.

I wrap my hand around the base of him. He is hot in my hand and heavier than I expected. I move my hand once, slow, root to tip, and a bead of precome wells at the head. His breath goes out of him in a way that is half breath and half something else.

"Nadia."

I lean down and lick him from the base to the tip.

His hand comes to the back of my head. Careful, not pressing. Just resting.

I take him in my mouth.

He is warm and salt. I hold him on my tongue for a moment before I start to move. When I do start to move I take him slow, deeper each pass, my hand following at the base of him where my mouth cannot reach. He says my name. Quietly, into the air above me. Then again, when I take him deeper than he expected, the word coming out broken in a way I have not heard from him.

I look up at him.

He is watching me. His other hand has gripped the edge of the couch cushion beside him. The cords stand in his forearm. His shirt is still open and his trousers are at his thighs and I am on the floor with my mouth on him and he is looking at me like a man who has decided to let himself be exactly where he is.

I work him with my mouth and my hand together. I find what makes his hips lift the small amount they lift. I find what makes his breath catch. He does not press my head. The hand at the back of my skull stays only as weight, only as connection, even when his thighs go tight under my free hand and his stomach pulls in and I know he is close.

"Nadia," he says. The third time. A warning.

I do not move.

He comes in my mouth with his hand still careful at the back of my head, and I take it, and swallow, and stay where I am until he has finished. The taste is salt and bitter and him. His thighs are shaking under my palms. I keep my mouth on him through the aftershocks, gentle, the way he was gentle with me.

When I lift my head he has his eyes closed and his head tipped back against the couch.

I sit back on my heels and look at him.

He opens his eyes. Finds me on the floor. The look on his face is not one I have catalogued before and which I will be working out for a long time, and underneath it, plain, the specific weight of trust in the fact that he let himself fall apart in my mouth while his hand stayed gentle.

He reaches down and pulls me up.

I let him. He pulls me up onto the couch and into his lap and his arms close around me and he holds me against his chest with both arms and his breathing is not yet steady. He presses his mouth to my temple.

"You are going to make this very complicated," he says.

"I know."

"I am not asking you to fix it."

"I know that too."