Page 67 of Duty Preserved

“When have I ever left you halfway through anything?”

I rolled to face him. His mouth found mine in the dark. I pushed at his waistband and he pushed at mine. Free of everything between us, I settled over his hips and took him inside me. The sound I made was too loud, so his hand came up over my mouth.

I bit the heel of his palm. He sucked in a breath through his teeth.

His other hand came up and gripped the back of my head, pressing the first one harder against my mouth. An absolute seal. He pulled my face down to his so he could whisper while staring me directly in the eyes.

“You have lost your noise privileges, babe. You have to ride in silence now.”

I couldn’t help but let out a suppressed squeal of delight against his hand. In response, he bucked his hips up harder.

He recognized from my whimper that his bucking underneath me was not likely to keep more noise from happening. I could tell because he was grinning devilishly.

We moved together, his hands still locked on my head, one sealed over my mouth and the other gripping the back of my skull. He pressed down, holding me pinned between the weight of his hands and the upward drive of his hips. We were almost silent except for the bed shifting under us, which we both ignored because stopping wasn’t an option. I braced against his chest and let him set the pace, each thrust pushing the air out of me in short, muffled bursts into his palm.

I came with his hand still loosely covering my mouth and my fingers digging into his pecs. He followed seconds later, a hard shudder running through him that I felt in my own bones.

We lay there for a moment. He removed his hands and cradled my face as we managed several slow kisses while still slightly breathless.

“Now I really do have to be going,” he said.

This time, he meant it. He eased out from under me, found his clothes in the dark by touch, and dressed without turning on a light. I lay on my side and watched the shape of him move through the room.

He came back to the bed, leaned down and kissed my forehead.

“See you at breakfast,” he said.

“See you there.”

He left out the door, and I was back to being alone.

I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. The scent of him was still on the sheets, still on my skin. I’d come to love that—how it lingered long after he was gone.

The Citadel team was leaving in two weeks. Maybe three, if the work ran long. That was the number underneath everything, ticking whether I looked at it or not.

How long after that would his scent linger?

This past week had been stolen time. We were both busy during his training schedule. The animals didn’t care what my personal life looked like. What we had was this. Predawn and after-dark forays, but nothing in between that wasn’t professionalism maintained for the sake of the camp.

We hadn’t talked about what happened after. Not once. I hadn’t raised it because I already knew the answer. Donovan wasn’t a long-distance man. He was a man who lived in the physical world. Months of absence were a slow death for that kind of presence.

And even if he wanted to try—even if he said the words and meant them—it was only a matter of time before he figured out what Gregory had figured out. That I was good at one thing. That the rest of me wasn’t enough to keep a man like him interested once the novelty wore off.

You know how this ends.

There was nothing to be done about it. I just had to enjoy it while it lasted.

A knock at my door pulled me out of the bed and into clothes in under a minute. I was still pulling a shirt over my head when I opened it.

Zayn stood on the other side, dressed for patrol, his radio clipped to his belt.

“The collared male lion,” he said. “The one with the buffalo gash.”

My hands stopped on the hem of my shirt. “What about him?”

“The overnight patrol found him. He’s separated from the pride. Just lying there. He looks bad.”

“How bad?”