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“You’re awfully quiet.”

“Just looking at you. I don’t get much chance to do that when we’re working.”

He drew me closer, and I laughed softly against his mouth.

I pushed him back toward the pillows and followed him onto the bed.

Having Duncan in my room instead of at the Factory or his workshop felt wonderfully comfortable, even if we only had a few hours before morning.

Duncan pushed the quilt down toward the foot of the bed and looked at me in the lamplight for so long that I finally covered my face with one hand.

He drew the hand away and kissed the center of my palm. “Friday went fast,” he said. “I’d like to take my time tonight.”

“You say that as though you have an agenda.”

“I do.” The humor left his face, and something warmer and far more serious took its place. “It starts with whatever you want.”

What I wanted, at that exact moment, was something he’d offered near the service doors and never delivered.

“I distinctly remember a conversation about my feet,” I said.

“I said I could help with two of those things.” He caught my ankle and drew my foot into his lap. “I never said I’d stop there.”

His thumbs found the arch and pressed in firm circles, and the sound I made was embarrassing enough that he grinned. I’d spent two days on concrete floors in ankle boots, and every ache gave way under his thumbs, one at a time, until I was boneless against the pillows. When he finished, he didn’t let go. He kissed the inside of my ankle, then the inside of my knee, and worked his way up my leg with his beard scraping my skin in a way that made me forget how tired I was.

By the time he reached my inner thigh, I’d stopped breathing evenly. He settled between my legs with his big hands spread wide on my thighs, looked up at me along the length of my body, and asked, “Is this all right?”

“I’d be very upset if you stopped.”

The laugh vibrated against my skin and turned into something much lower as his tongue slid through my pussy in one long stroke.

True to his word, he took his time. He started with unhurried strokes that had me twisting the sheet in both fists, and when he finally circled my clit, he did it with such patient, maddening precision that I gripped his hair and said, “Please, Duncan. Don’t stop.” He lifted his eyes to mine, blue and dark in the lamplight, with a look so absorbed that it seemed he’d been waiting all day to do exactly this, and that look pushed me over before I’d braced for it.

I came with a cry I couldn’t have held back for any amount of money, my heels dug into the mattress and my legs shaking against his shoulders. He stayed with me, easing his tongue until the last pulses eased, and only then lifted his head, beard glistening, looking so pleased with himself that I laughed through the aftershocks.

“Come here,” I said, tugging at his shoulders until he climbed up my body and kissed me. I tasted myself on his lips, and it made me want more of him instead of less. When I pushed against his chest, he went over onto his back without a word of argument, which was generous of him, considering how little of his weight I could have moved if he’d decided otherwise.

“My turn,” I said.

I kissed my way down his chest, over the ink that curled across his shoulder and down his arm and the dark hair that thickened as it ran toward his stomach, and I lingered because I could. He watched me with his head lifted from the pillow, his breathing already uneven. When I wrapped my hand around his cock, hard and hot against my palm, he let out a long, unsteady breath.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I know I don’t. I want to.” Then I took him into my mouth.

He made a low sound that I felt everywhere our bodies touched. I took him deeper, learning what made the muscles in his thighs go tight and what made him swear under his breath, and his hand settled in my curls, not guiding, only touching. He lifted his hips once and then went still, his fingers tightening for a moment.

I’d gotten him as far as swearing quietly at my ceiling when he said, in a voice gone rough and gravelly, “Turn around. I want my mouth on you while yours is on me.”

I’d been thinking the same thing. I swung one knee over his chest, facing his feet, and lowered myself until his hands gripped me and drew me down to his mouth.

With his tongue back on my clit and his cock in my mouth again, concentrating became a joke. For a while we found a rhythm, and for a while I lost it completely, because every time I steadied, he did something with his tongue that scattered my thoughts. I had to stop and rest my forehead against his leg, my hand still wrapped around him, and simply breathe. Beneath me, he groaned into my skin, and his hands tightened as though he meant to keep me exactly where I was.

I came again with him in my mouth, and it hit harder this time. I cried out around him and shook, and he steadied me through it until I finally pulled away, gasping.

He was breathing hard when I lifted my head. “If you do that again,” he said, “this will be over before I’m inside you.”

I took that as the compliment it was.