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“Oh,” I gasp out, my voice shaking.

His face, after all, isn’t the only thing that catches my attention. There’s also his hard cock, jutting in a daunting outline trapped within his trousers. And then there’s the way all the harsh, severe lines of his face soften and round when he laughs at me, when I ask, “Can I touch you, too?”

I’d admonish him for making fun of me, if it felt like he was. But no, even Leonid’s laughter sounds pained and pinched with the want he wears plainly across his face.

“Will you sit up for me?”

“What, no ‘please’, Ms. Gallagher?” he quips darkly, though he obeys.

I don’t know what the actual hell’s gotten into me—who it is I’ve transformed into—that I sink to my knees between his legs, and look up at him as I murmur, cloyingly sweet, “Please?”

“Oh, Jesus.” His head thunks against the back of the couch with a tortured moan.

Whatever it is, I decide, I like it.

In fact, it lends some much-needed backbone to my flimsy pride.

I know how it must seem that I don’t have piles of experience on my sexual resumé. But neither am I some naïve little girl who doesn’t know how to please herself, what she likes, or even how to ask for it. At thirty, I just haven’t found many people I’ve wanted to ask. And really, is it so bad to have standards for myself? To prefer to be alone instead of lowering them out of sheer loneliness? I haven’t thought so in a long time.

On my knees in front of Leonid’s reverent gaze, I wonder if I’ve just been playing it safe.

It occurs to me that maybe it helps him to envision me as the neglected damsel in need of praise. With the circumstances under which we met, it’s understandable for Leonid to have concluded a shaky foundation in my own identity. Besides, I enjoy his extolling. This reassurance and adamant celebration of my person he doles out generously. It undoes me, to hear him—with his sexy, aristocratic face, and a painstakingly chiseled body I unveil as I make quick work of the buttons of his shirt—rhapsodize about the way I look and feel and taste. No one has ever looked at me the way Leonid Yuri does.

I may not know what the hell to do with any of it but bask in its warmth, but that feels pretty damn great to me. It is still like laying in the grass on a sunny day by the lake after an unforgiving winter.

When Leonid murmurs, his voice husky with desire, “You can do whatever you want to me,” it’s an invitation. “Just get back out of your head.”

Metal clinks and shatters the charged silence as I work the buckle of his belt free. My fingers brush his abdomen, drawing down his zipper, and his abdomen contracts beneath my knuckles. God, he’s so reactive. He wants me so badly. Leonid lifts his hips to help me along, cooperative and doting, even with all that primal hunger in his eyes.

My pussy is so swollen it feels like a fist clenched between my thighs.

His cock juts out, curving proudly up against his taut stomach. It’s rigid and ruddy, the broad mushroom head of it glistening with pre-come that pools at the tip. There isn’t a thought in my head—at least not beyond oh God, oh God, oh my fucking God—as I use my thumb to smear it around, until his shaft is glistening for me.

“Fuck,” Leonid hisses, his good hand fisting in the cushion beside him.

My head bends over him, and I draw that fist into my hair. Before my lips meet his cock, the sound he makes is unholy—guttural and whining, making my very bones rattle with need. I work him in slowly, hands and mouth working in tandem; my mouth sinks down the head, and both fists wrap at the root for my lips to meet them.

And he just lets me.

The ridges of his torso are stiff with tension. A glorious dead giveaway that it costs him to keep still, to let me have my fun. If my mouth weren’t stretched so fully around his considerable girth, I might’ve smiled about it, inexplicably fond of this man who’s plenty contrary himself.

Instead, I hollow my cheeks. I suck him hard, meaning business, just like I like to kiss him.

It spurs me on when his hand fists dark tendrils in a desperate fist and helplessly holds the tip of my nose to his pelvis when I begin to rear back. My saliva pools and soaks his sac, dunking my chin in the mess while he groans, sounding pained, over the constriction of my throat.

What gets to me worst is the moment he catches himself and that same hand falls to the wayside like he’s touched a scalding-hot stove. “Fuck—Shit—Meera,” he pants, and screws his eyes shut like the sight of me looking up at him is too much for him to bear.

I empathize.

I feel similarly about the flushed, ruined need contorting his face now. There’s something even more vulnerable about it than the wounded, drugged-up man who’d asked me to kiss his lips instead of his hand.

My lips leave his cock with an obscene pop!

“Harder,” I insist, my throat wrecked. “Grab my hair harder.”

Grey irises are closer to black with the state of his pupils. Leonid’s grip tightens in my hair, fingers tangling deeper, closer to the scalp, and the sharp sting at my roots makes me rut against my own ankle just for some friction. I mouth at the underside of his cock, and moan right into the vein my tongue is busy caressing.

His entire body shudders.