Page 101

“Patience.”

I pushed inside. Just one knuckle. Then two. He gasped, his hips lifting off the mattress to meet me. I added a second finger, stretching him methodically. His eyes were squeezed shut, his brow furrowed in concentration as he adjusted to the intrusion.

I twisted my wrist, curling my fingers to press against the sensitive inner wall, stretching him open.

“You’re tight,” I growled. “So tight.”

“I need you,” he choked out. “Stop teasing. Fill it.”

“Let me make room first.”

I added a third finger. He cried out a broken sound. I hit his prostate, curling my fingers, and he unraveled. His hands clutched the sheets, his head throwing back against the pillow.

“Leander, please!”

I removed my fingers and positioned myself between his thighs. I looked him in the eye.

“You stay with me,” I said. “No dissociation. No running. You stay right here.”

“I’m here,” he promised.

He cried out as I pushed inside, his back arching. I sank to the hilt, filling him completely. We fit in a perfect, seamless connection, like two gears finally locking into place.

I held still for a moment, letting him adjust to the fullness. The sensation was intense, his body gripping me tight.

Then I started to move. It wasn’t the frantic friction of the boiler room where we had dry-humped against the console. This was real. This was deep. I withdrew almost all the way and then drove back in, a slow stroke that claimed every inch of him.

“Leander,” he moaned, his nails digging into my shoulders. “Yes. God, yes.”

I ground into him, hitting that sweet spot with every thrust, making him sob with pleasure.

I leaned down, burying my face in his neck, and bit the bruise I had left there, renewing the claim.

“You don’t belong to the Director,” I growled against his skin. “You don’t belong to the fans.”

I thrust harder, snapping my hips.

“You belong to me.”

“Yes,” he sobbed, his legs tightening around my waist. “Yours. Just yours.”

Somewhere in the middle of it, the pain in my leg came back, quiet at first, then all at once, a hot line up the shin that made my rhythm stutter and my breath change. Felix caught the change before I could bury it. He planted his heels in the small of my back, tilted his hips up, and took the work into his own body, meeting me stroke for stroke so that all I had to do was be there.

“Stay,” he breathed, handing my own order back to me. “Right here.”

We moved together in the dark room, high above the city that wanted to eat us alive. We built the rhythm, faster and harder, sweat slicking our skin again.

He came first, shouting my name, his inner muscles clamping down on me in a milking spasm. The sensation pushed me over the edge. I cursed against his skin, a string of broken filth, burying myself as deep as I could go. I emptied myself inside him, pouring everything I had into the only person who mattered.

I collapsed on top of him. He held me and ran his hands down my back, soothing the tremors.

When the tremors changed into something with pain in it, he felt that too. He got a hand flat on my chest and steered us over onto our sides without letting me slip out of him, guiding the boot with his calf until the bad leg lay straight along the silk. We stayed like that, joined, his heartbeat arriving where our bodies met, slow, then slower. I softened inside him and neither of us moved to end it. Ending it was for people with somewhere else to be.

We lay there for a long time, tangled together, listening to the city hum below us.

Eventually Felix eased away from me and off the bed, and when I shifted to follow he put a hand flat on my sternum and pushed me back into the pillows.

“Stay,” he said again. It wasn’t the bedroom this time. It was the Captain’s voice, and I found I had no argument left in me.