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Then I pulled off my T-shirt.

Jax stopped laughing.

I didn't reach for the lamp. I didn't fold my arms across myself or try to make my body smaller. I stayed above him in the warm light, soft and round and marked with silver lines, and let him see all of me.

He did.

He took his time looking, and there was nothing careless in it.

"Mírate," he whispered. "Look at you. Look at you, reina."

I lowered myself onto his cock.

I did it slowly, inch by inch, watching his face while I took him. His eye darkened, his mouth fell open, and his fingers tightened around the iron rails.

Every part of it was mine to decide. The depth, the pace, the moment I stopped and the moment I moved again.

So I went slowly.

I sank down until he was deep inside me, then stayed there without moving. My hands rested lightly on his chest, my hair falling around our faces while I felt the tremor move through his body.

"Oh, you're cruel," he breathed. "You're so cruel. I love it. Don't stop."

Then I began to move.

I kept the pace deliberately slow, never giving him enough time to settle into a rhythm. I would lift almost all the way off him and hold there until his breathing broke apart and he started begging, then lower myself again at the same maddening pace.

Every time he tried to raise his hips to meet me, I stopped.

Every time he forced himself to stay still, I gave him a little more.

Before long, he had lost any ability to keep quiet. Spanish and English ran together in a stream of praise, pleas, and profanity.

"Hermosa. Perfecta. Mi reina, mi reina. Look at you. You're so beautiful. You're so fucking beautiful. I'm going to die. I'm going to die in this bed and I don't care."

Then I realized I was talking too.

"Good," I murmured. "Stay still. That's it. You're doing so well."

The words came easily. I had heard versions of them before, spoken to me in this same bed by a large, gentle man with a rough voice, but saying them was different from hearing them.

I watched what they did to Jax.

His whole body reacted to every word. His breath caught, his stomach tightened, and he seemed to come apart a little more each time I praised him.

For the first time, I understood that praise could belong to me too. I could give it instead of only receiving it, and I liked how naturally it came.

He was getting close. I could feel it in the trembling through his body and hear it in the way his breathing had gone thin and uneven.

I bent low until my mouth was beside his ear.

"Let go of the headboard," I whispered.

His hands came away from the rails immediately. One arm wrapped around my back while the other slid into my hair. Even then, even half out of his mind with it, he was careful of his ribs as he pulled me down against him.

His mouth found my shoulder.

When he came, his teeth pressed into the muscle there without breaking the skin. He held on, shuddering beneath me, and the sound he made against my shoulder went through me so sharply that I followed almost at once.