Chapter 26 #2
I glance around anyway, because apparently, I’m determined to preserve some illusion of caution. The cabin is sealed in soft light and engine noise, the windows turned into black mirrors now that we’re high enough to leave the city behind.
Private. The way he says it makes the air feel different.
He crouches slightly so we’re eye level, one hand resting on my knee. Not moving. Just there, warm and heavy.
“You don’t have to be apprehensive with me,” he says.
I laugh once, low and shaky. “That is a wild thing to say after everything.”
His thumb strokes once over my knee. “Fair.” The honesty of that nearly undoes me more than the touch.
I look at him. He’s calmer up here. Or maybe just more certain. The hard edges are still there, but something about the cabin, the isolation, the fact that there’s nowhere to go, seems to suit him.
Or maybe it just suits us.
He brushes my hair back from my face, fingertips grazing my cheek. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”
The same line again. The same impossible choice.
I should say yes. I should ask for space, for sleep, for a normal conversation where no one is half-undressed or looming or giving me that look. Instead, I shake my head once.
His eyes darken immediately. Then he kisses me. Slowly this time.
No rush. No frenzy. Just his mouth moving over mine with a patience that somehow feels more dangerous than hunger.
I melt into it despite myself, my hand fisting in the front of his shirt as he deepens the kiss a fraction at a time until I’m breathing him in, kissing him back, forgetting the arguments I had prepared.
He shifts, guiding my legs apart just enough to step between them. The cabin seat suddenly feels much too small and much too intimate. His hand slides from my knee higher, over my thigh, not teasing now, not pretending.
I make a small sound into his mouth.
He swallows it with a quiet groan. “Still tense?” he murmurs against my lips.
“Yes.”
“Liar.” His hand slips under my skirt.
I gasp.
He keeps kissing me while his fingers move over the inside of my thigh, higher, higher, until he finds the edge of my panties. I grip his shoulders, pulse skidding, one part of me still stunned that this is happening on a private jet and the rest too turned on to care.
“It’s private,” he says again, voice low against my mouth. “No one is coming back here.”
That should not be as comforting as it is.
His fingers slide beneath the fabric and find me already wet.
He exhales through his nose, almost a laugh, almost something rougher. “There you are.”
My head falls back against the seat. “Aleksei—”
“I know.” He strokes me slowly at first, just enough to make me squirm, just enough to let me feel how slick I already am for him. Then he circles my clit with deliberate pressure, and the whole cabin seems to tilt.
“Oh my God.”
His mouth moves to my throat, kissing there while his fingers keep working, steady and cruel and perfect. My legs try to close around his hand; he presses his body between them and doesn’t let me.
“You get wet so fast for me,” he murmurs.
“That’s your fault.”
“Yes.” The satisfaction in his voice makes me want to slap him and kiss him at the same time.
He slips two fingers inside me, slow and deep, curling them at once, and I jerk against the seat with a broken moan.
“That’s it,” he says softly. “Let me take care of you.”
The words should feel condescending. Instead, they go straight through me.
I clutch at him harder, trying and failing to stay quiet as he works me open with those long, devastating fingers, his thumb on my clit, his mouth at my neck, my jaw, the corner of my mouth whenever I start to lose myself too visibly.
He’s so calm about it. That’s what gets me.
Like he could make me come on a private jet at thirty thousand feet and still look perfectly in control while doing it.
Meanwhile I’m unraveling by the second. “Aleksei,” I whisper, half plea, half warning.
He looks at me. “You’re close.” He leans in and kisses me again, harder now, while his hand moves faster. The pressure builds, heat coiling tight and bright in my stomach, every nerve pulling toward the same point.
“I can feel it,” he says against my lips. “Come for me.”
My body heeds his command. Pleasure crashes through me hard enough to make me bite back a cry against his shoulder. I shake around his fingers, my whole body tightening, then letting go in waves that feel endless in the enclosed warmth of the cabin.
He doesn’t stop immediately.
He works me through it, slower now, gentler, until I’m oversensitive and breathless and clinging to him like the earth might tilt if I let go.
Only then does he draw his hand away.
I’m still trying to gather myself when he lifts those fingers and, without breaking eye contact, licks them clean.
The sight is so filthy my body clenches all over again.
He notices. A slow smile touches his mouth. “Relaxed now?”
I stare at him, dazed, flushed, absolutely not answering that honestly.
He sits back in his own seat at last, composed again somehow, while I remain a ruined, boneless mess in mine.
I’m still trying to get my breath back when I look at him and realize he’s sitting there like he didn’t just make me come apart in a leather seat over the Atlantic.
Calm. Composed. Shirt collar open. One hand loose on the armrest, the other resting on his thigh like he doesn’t know exactly what that mouth and those fingers do to me.
I hate that expression. I want to ruin it.
So I unbuckle my seatbelt, push myself up on shaky legs, and cross the small space between us.
His eyes follow me the whole way. “What are you doing?” he asks, though he already knows.
Instead of answering, I lean down and kiss him.
He makes a low sound in his throat, surprised for half a second before his hand closes around the back of my neck and he kisses me back with equal force. But I don’t let him take over yet. I climb onto his lap, knees bracketing his hips, and kiss him until his breathing changes.
That gets his attention. That gets all of it.
His hands settle on my waist, steadying me, but he lets me lead for once. I kiss down his jaw, his throat, the open line of his shirt, and when I feel his body tense beneath me, satisfaction flares hot in my chest.
I want him wrecked too. I want him desperate.
I sit back just enough to look at him and then drag my hands down his chest, over his stomach, to the buckle of his belt.
One brow lifts. “Careful.”
I meet his eyes. “Why?”
His hands tighten fractionally on my hips. “Because you’ve already had your first time. Don’t push your luck and lose your nerve.”
The challenge in it goes straight through me.
I unfasten his belt. “That sounds like a dare.”
“It is.” He says it so calmly, but his eyes are dark as sin.
My fingers move to his trousers. I tug the zipper down slowly, watching his face the whole time. The control is still there, but only barely now. His jaw is too tight. His breathing too measured.
I slip my hand inside. He’s already hard again. Completely.
His eyes close for one brief second when I wrap my fingers around him. “Fuck,” he mutters.
I smile before I can stop myself. “That bad?”
His gaze snaps open. “Don’t get smug.”
I stroke him once, twice, marveling at the feel of him in my hand, at the way his whole body reacts to so little. I expected him to be more in control. I expected him to be impossible to shake. Instead, his hand slides up my spine, possessive and hot, and his mouth brushes my ear.
“Now who has complete control?” The words burn.
I pull him free fully, and the sight of him, heavy and hard against my palm, nearly unravels me all over again.
He watches me watch him and says, low and dangerous, “Keep staring like that and I’ll forget this is your idea.”
I kiss him instead. Deep. Messy. Urgent.
My body is already ahead of me, already moving on instinct and need. I push his shirt open farther, drag my nails lightly over his chest, and then reach between us to guide him.
He stills.
I look at him.
He looks back, all heat and restraint and something almost unbearably attentive. “You can stop,” he says quietly.
I shake my head. Then I lift my hips, push my panties aside, and lower myself onto him slowly.
The stretch is immediate, intense, almost shocking after the teasing and fingers and the way he fills me so completely. My breath catches. My hands fly to his shoulders. His grip on my waist turns bruising, but he does not move. Not one inch.
“That’s it,” he says, voice rough. “Take what you need.” The tenderness in that command nearly breaks me.
I sink down farther.
He lets me.
Every inch feels huge, hot, overwhelming. By the time I’m fully seated in his lap, I’m shaking again, forehead dropping to his shoulder while I try to breathe through the fullness of him.
“Aleksei…”
“I know.” His mouth presses to my temple, my cheek, the corner of my lips. “You’re doing so well.”
I laugh once, shaky and half-lost. “You’re not making it easier.”
“I’m not trying to.” That honesty is its own kind of sin.
I lift my head and kiss him again, then start to move. Tentatively at first. A small roll of my hips. A careful rise and fall.
His eyes lock on mine the second he feels it, and the look in them is enough to make my pulse race. Hunger. Pride. Pure male satisfaction at the fact that I’m on top of him, taking him, learning him.
My hands brace on his shoulders and I move again, a little harder this time, the friction instantly sharper from this angle. I gasp against his mouth.
“There,” he says. “Again.”
I do it again. And again.
Soon there’s nothing tentative left. Just the slick slide of my body over his, the heat of his hands guiding my hips when I lose rhythm, the deep, helpless sounds I keep making every time I take him all the way in.
He’s holding on by threads now. I can feel it in the way his fingers dig into my skin, the way his head falls back for one second when I grind down just right.
“You feel…” He breaks off, jaw tight. “Jesus, Zatanna.”
I like hearing him lose words. I like it way too much.
So I kiss his throat and move faster. That breaks whatever was left of his patience.
His mouth crashes into mine, his hands taking over my hips completely now, driving me down on him in hard, controlled thrusts that turn my thoughts to static. The seat creaks beneath us. The cabin feels too warm, too small, too full of him.
I moan into his mouth, hands in his hair, and he answers with a rough groan that tells me he’s not nearly as composed as he looks.
“You wanted to know how far you’d go,” he says against my lips.
I’m barely following the words. “What?”
The corner of his mouth lifts in a savage almost-smile. “Now I know.”
Then he thrusts up hard enough to make me cry out. Urgency takes over after that. No more teasing. No more patience.
All that’s left is just frantic kisses and his hands on my ass, my hips, my back, pulling me down, lifting me up, making me ride him exactly the way he wants while the plane hums around us and the whole world seems to narrow to this seat, this body, this impossible man.
I can feel my orgasm building fast again, hotter this time, almost painful in its intensity.
He feels it, too. His hand slides between us and finds my clit, thumb circling in fast, ruthless strokes while he fucks up into me.
“There,” he says, voice dark with concentration. “Let go.”
I try to tell him I’m close, but it comes out as a broken moan instead.
He smiles against my mouth. “I know.”
At the sound of his words, the pressure crests and breaks. I come hard in his lap, body convulsing around him, my forehead dropping to his shoulder as every muscle in me tightens. He keeps moving through it, chasing his own release now, rough and deep and almost desperate.
The sounds he makes are different when he’s close. Lower. More wrecked. Real in a way that makes my body clench all over again.
“Fuck,” he says into my hair. “I’m—”
Then he’s coming too, thrusting up once, twice, hard enough to make me gasp, his whole body tensing under my hands as release tears through him. He buries his face in my neck with a low groan that sounds dragged from somewhere he doesn’t let many people see.
For a long moment afterward, neither of us moves.
I’m sprawled on top of him, breathless and weak, his arms wrapped around me as the plane cuts through black sky.
Eventually he kisses the side of my throat and says, voice rough and amused, “You realize this is not how most people spend a flight.”
I let out a tired laugh against his shoulder. “You started it.”
“No,” he says. “This one was all you.”
For one stunned, breathless moment, I just stay there in his lap, trying to process the fact that I’m the one who did that to him.
Aleksei Vasiliev. The man who terrifies boardrooms. The man who commands rooms with a glance. The man with scars and secrets and people who move when he says move.
And I just took him apart.
The realization hits low and hot, almost as intoxicating as the sex itself. Not because I won something. Not because I conquered him. But because for those few minutes, he let go with me. He gave me that. All that control, all that power, and still he let himself come undone in my hands.
It makes me feel dizzy. Powerful. Desired in a way I’ve never been before.
I lift my head and look at him, and something in his face tells me he knows exactly what I’m feeling.
His mouth curves, tired and wicked. “Careful,” he murmurs. “You’re starting to look pleased with yourself.”
I can’t help it. I smile. “Maybe I am.”
His hand slides up my back, slow and possessive. “You should be.”