Chapter 12 #3
I roll her beneath me. She fights it, and she fights it properly, her body twisting, one hand shoving against my good shoulder, and the resistance is not performance.
She wants to win. I hold her down with my weight and my hips and the flat of my forearm across her collarbone, and the look she gives me from underneath could gut a man at twenty paces.
"Get off me," she says, and her voice is steady and her hips are grinding up against my cock.
"Make me." I shift my weight forward, pinning her wrists above her head with one hand, and her pupils blow wide. She could break the hold. I know it. She knows it. She stays.
My mouth moves down her throat, across the scar on her collarbone, lower.
I take her nipple between my lips and suck until her spine bows off the mattress, and the sound she makes is sharp and furious and gratifying in a way I intend to replicate as many times as this night allows.
I taste the salt of her skin and the trace of cold air from the Vienna streets, and underneath both is the scent of Vix's skin when she's aroused.
My cock recognizes it before my brain does, and the twitch of response draws a low, knowing sound from her that will keep me awake for weeks.
I release her wrists to move lower. She immediately tangles her fingers in my hair, fisting hard enough that my scalp burns, and the pain is a leash she's reminding me she holds.
I kiss down the flat plane of her stomach, over the scar along her ribs, and she knows where I'm going.
Her thighs open and her fist tightens, not to guide but to control.
The first stroke of my tongue along the length of her folds hits my system like a breach in operational discipline.
She is hot and slick and swollen, and the taste of her lands in my blood with the force of a narcotic, salt and musk and a sweetness I spent years trying to scrub from my palate and failing every time.
I flatten my tongue against her clit and she jerks hard, her hips lifting off the bed.
I pin her down with my forearm across her pelvis and do it again, slower, circling the swollen nerve bundle with measured pressure while my free hand slides up her inner thigh and two fingers press inside her.
She is tight and wet and clenching around my fingers before I've fully seated them. The responsive heat of her body draws a groan from my chest that vibrates against her flesh. I curl my fingers forward, find the spot I mapped in Moscow, and her whole body goes rigid.
"Roman." My name comes out broken, the consonants fracturing on a breath she can't control.
I relearn what undoes her, what still makes her breath catch, what still makes her swear in three languages, what still makes her go silent. Vix goes quiet when the sensation crosses from pleasure into something that threatens to dismantle her entirely.
I keep her there, at that threshold, my mouth working her clit in a rhythm calibrated to the tremors running through her thighs while my fingers move inside her in slow, curling strokes.
Her hips fight against the restraint of my arm.
The sounds she makes are small and desperate and shed of every defense she carries during daylight hours, and each one goes straight to my cock, which is hard enough to ache where it presses against the mattress.
She wrenches my head up by the hair. "Enough." Her voice is wrecked and commanding and furious. "I said enough."
She hauls me up her body by the shoulders.
I let her, and the letting is a choice, because what she does with the power when she gets it back is the thing I need to see.
She shoves me onto my back and swings over me, and the shift is immediate.
Her weight lands on my hips with her thighs bracketing mine, and her hand closes around my cock, positioning me with the same operational precision she brings to fieldwork.
She sinks down onto me in one controlled descent, taking me inch by inch, and the sensation narrows my vision to a single point.
She is impossibly tight and impossibly hot, her body clenching around me with a slick pressure that drags a sound from my chest I don't recognize.
She braces her hands on my chest, nails digging into the muscle, and I watch her face as she seats herself fully. Her lips part. Her eyes lose focus for an instant. The mask cracks, and underneath it is something raw and exposed, and my hands close on her hips hard enough to bruise.
Mine. The thought is immediate, possessive, and entirely accurate.
She moves first, a slow roll of her hips that changes the angle and tightens her around me until my jaw locks.
I thrust up to meet her and the impact makes her gasp, sharp and involuntary, and the competition is live.
She sets the pace. I break it. She bears down, clenching around me in a squeeze that makes my vision swim, and I lock onto her hips and drive up into her hard enough that her hands slip on my chest and she catches herself against my shoulders.
"Is that all you've got?" she says through her teeth, and the challenge is so perfectly calibrated to destroy me that I nearly laugh.
I sit up, one arm banding around her waist, the other hand fisting in her hair, and I draw her head back and put my mouth against her throat.
She arches into it, riding me with a grinding roll of her hips that creates friction in exactly the right place.
I can feel her clit pressing against my pelvis with every downstroke, and I angle my hips to give her more of it, and the sound she makes against the ceiling is worth every second I spent without her.
The rhythm builds until it stops being a negotiation and becomes something neither of us is steering.
She rakes her nails down my back and I bite the junction of her neck and shoulder until I feel her breath stutter, and the pain and the pleasure fuse into a single current that runs between us without distinguishing between who is giving and who is receiving.
I can feel her tightening, the rhythmic clench of her inner muscles building in frequency, and I slide my hand between us and press my thumb against her clit with circling pressure.
She shatters with her teeth sunk into my shoulder, the good one, and the pain of it is exquisite.
Her body locks around mine, thighs clamping, the slick walls of her clenching in waves that drag me deeper, and the wrecked sound she buries against my skin is something I will carry in the same locked file as Moscow and Budapest and every other moment that belongs only to us.
I feel every pulse of her orgasm along the length of my cock, the rhythmic squeeze that shreds the last of my control.
I drive up into her twice more, hard and deep, my arm locked around her waist, and the release detonates at the base of my spine and tears through me with a force that whites out everything.
I spill inside her with my forehead pressed to the curve of her shoulder, and the pleasure is devastating and leaves me hollowed out and wrecked in the same breath.
The silence afterward is dense. We stay tangled together, breathing hard.
The sweat is cooling on our skin and the shoulder is throbbing, and the flat is quiet except for the distant sound of a tram on the Neubaugürtel.
Vix's fingers trace idle patterns on my chest, and the touch is absent, automatic, the unconscious habit of Moscow, when the mission was over and the world narrowed to a shared bed and the sound of snow against glass.
"This changes nothing," she says. Her voice is hoarse.
"You said that."
"I'm saying it again." She turns away from me, onto her side, her back to my chest. The position is a contradiction, her body seeking proximity while her words enforce distance, and the contradiction is Vix distilled to a single gesture, and it lands somewhere behind my ribs.
I fit my arm around her waist. The movement is slow, giving her time to object. My palm rests against her belly, fingers spread. She doesn't push me away.
We lie in the dark of a rented flat in Vienna with the surveillance devices transmitting from the Committee safe house and the blood drying on my bandage and the adrenaline draining into the kind of exhaustion that follows violence and sex in equal measure.
Her breathing slows against my chest, and the rhythm shifts from controlled to unguarded, from waking to the edge of sleep.
She is letting me hold her. She would deny it in the morning, would call it proximity, adrenaline, biological response, anything but what it is.
I know what it is. I have known since Moscow, since before Moscow, since the first time Victoria Cross walked into an MI6 briefing room and took apart a senior analyst's assessment with three sentences and a financial graph, and I decided that this woman was either going to end my career or become the center of it, and I was willing to accept either outcome.
Her breathing deepens. Her hand finds mine against her stomach and her fingers thread through mine, and the hold tightens once before it relaxes into sleep.
I lie awake and listen to her breathe and let the sound of it replace every other sound I've used to fill the silence since Budapest. The walls she built between us are not gone.
They are standing, intact, defended, and she will reinforce them in the morning with the same efficiency she applies to everything else.
But there is a fracture in them now, hairline and new, and I can feel the warmth of what lives behind it against my palm where it rests on her skin.
I don't sleep. I keep watch. That, at least, is something I know how to do.