Chapter 14
Jared
I hadn’t texted her back.
That was a choice, made and remade across the length of a day that had no good reason to feel as long as it did.
She had sent five words—he’s gone for two nights—and I had read them in the back of a cab and felt something shift in my chest that had nothing to do with operational opportunity and everything to do with the fact that I was apparently no longer capable of receiving information about her without my body having an opinion about it before my mind could weigh in.
I had not texted back.
I had spent the afternoon at Khaos Inc. reviewing the Morozov financial intercepts with the focused attention of a man who was absolutely not thinking about anything else.
I had called Nikos with a status update that was professional and accurate and contained no information about where I had or hadn’t been the previous night.
I had eaten something at some point. I had told myself, with considerable firmness, that two nights of Ivan’s absence was not an invitation and that showing up uninvited at a house I had no legitimate reason to be in was not a thing I was going to do.
I was on her balcony at eleven forty-three.
The mechanism on the door caught on the second try tonight. I stepped through into the dark and pulled it closed behind me and stood still while my eyes adjusted and the silence of the room settled around me.
She was asleep.
On her side, facing the window, one hand tucked under her cheek in a gesture that had nothing polished or managed about it—just a woman sleeping, entirely unguarded, the composure she wore through every waking hour completely absent.
The city light came through the gap in the curtains and lay across the bed in a pale stripe and I stood in the dark at the edge of it and looked at her and thought several things I had no business thinking.
I should leave. That was the correct assessment.
I had not been invited tonight. She didn’t know I was here.
The professional version of me, the one that had functioned without incident for eleven years, had a clear position on what I should do, which was step back through the balcony door and go home and send a text in the morning like a man with appropriate boundaries.
The professional version of me was losing ground at an alarming rate.
I hadn’t come for the job tonight. That was the thing I needed to sit with.
The fact of it, clean and inconvenient. The job would have had me at Nikos’s desk reviewing intercepts, not standing in the dark watching a woman sleep because the thought of two unoccupied nights in her vicinity had made focusing on anything else a theoretical exercise.
I had come because I had wanted to. Because the alternative, the apartment, the silence, the particular quality of a space that had never felt empty before and now did, was something I was no longer willing to choose when I had a choice.
I crossed the room.
My imagination had become increasingly difficult to control where Polina was concerned.
The light through the blinds striped her skin in silver and shadow. For a moment she looked less like Polina Morozov and more like Hecate, something untouchable and dangerous and entirely capable of ruining my judgment.
Not performative, but primal. No armor. No apology. No space between us.
I gently pulled the blanket down until it revealed her statuesque frame. She was tall, and petite, not unlike Sif, Erik’s woman, but where she was willowy, Polina was all curves. My fingers dusted the silk skin of her legs, down to her ankles.
A soft moan and a fluttering of eyes.
“Keep them shut.” I commanded.
Beneath the sheer negligée, her nipples hardened. Her body recognized my voice before her mind fully caught up.
I continued dusting my fingers along her skin, watching. Loving the frisson of excitement my trail left in its wake. “On your back.”
Obediently she rolled onto her back, the light catching and making her skin iridescent in the moonlight.
Beautiful. Kneeling on the edge of the bed, I tugged the bodice of her negligee until it tore.
The two sides fluttered open with my release and her breasts were free.
Even in the almost darkness, the pulse at her throat was beating a frenzied beat.
The pulse told me more than words would have. She wasn’t afraid. She wanted this.
“Spread your legs.”
Her glistening center was on proud display, her plump swollen lips begging for attention.
I climbed between her legs and blew gently across the hot skin. She shivered and arched her back with invitation. Desperate for attention, but I controlled this and she would only get it when I decided.
I flicked my wrist, spanking her silky entrance.
“Ahh.” Her gasp was almost a moan.
“Play with those nipples Hecate. Show me how much you love this.”
Her lips tugged into a playful pout, so unlike her. It was adorable.
A genuine reaction. Unfiltered.
That was what I noticed. And what I wished I could stop noticing.
This shouldn’t matter.
Why did it matter?
I blew cool air over her slick lips once again before I spanked them.
“Ohh,” she cried out. A slight buck of the hips to show me what she wanted.
“Ah, ah, ah, naughty girl. Stay still and receive what I give you.”
This time I slid a finger inside. Her walls squeezed my digit tightly. It was a signal. One she didn’t give intentionally but one I knew. What I was doing, she wanted. Leaning down, I flicked my tongue over her hardened nub. Polina moaned quietly but kept still and didn’t chase her need.
“That’s my good girl,” I crooned encouragingly.
I added another finger, while I nipped and sucked on her swollen clitoris. Polina’s thighs quivered. Her struggle to keep herself under control, real.
Time for a new angle. I gripped her thighs and turned her onto her tummy and sliding her back to the edge, I pressed her mid back and her chest, shoulders and head dropped obediently to the bed.
“Stay.”
I toed off my shoes. Dropped my trousers and stepped out of those and my boxer briefs.
The blazer and shirt were next. Awareness lifted the hairs on my arms. Her heavy breathing an elixir for my libido.
She was so sexy like this, her pale skin, too pale.
I picked up my pants and slid the belt from the loops.
Folding it I cracked it, just once, but it sounded like a gun going off.
Fuck. I hope I didn’t alert her guards. We both held our breath for a moment. Waiting. Nothing. If that didn’t alert them, then this wouldn’t either. I cracked the belt against her ass.
“Yass,” she hissed.
Nine more strokes I delivered, changing her pale skin to a dusty pink.
I’d played with many women, but no one else did I love leaving my marks on like I did with this woman.
Dropping the leather, I thrust my hips, sinking into her until I was fully seated.
It was my turn to moan. She felt like heaven. Gripping her hips I pulled back and slammed back in. She rolled her shoulders as a guttural moan escaped from between her lovely lips.
“Remember, Polina, no orgasms until I say so.”
She didn’t respond. But she didn’t need to. The rule would be enforced, and she already knew the consequences of disobeying me. I thrust in deep and held myself there feeling her tight sheath embracing my hard cock.
I couldn’t get enough of being inside of her and this, well this was new.
Gripping her hips in my hands, I held her in place while I took her hard and fast. She clawed and gripped her blankets as she worked to not have a release. But her breath was becoming more ragged with each thrust and she was reaching the edge of a cliff there was no coming back from.
I pulled out and smacked her ass. I flipped her onto her back and pulled her knees on top of my shoulders. Gripping her thighs I fucked her hard and fast giving everything I had for her pleasure.
“Please,” she begged. “Please, Master Loki, may I come?”
“Not until I tell you.”
The truth was, I was close as well. And it was in these seconds of maintaining control that everything came into a moment of awareness.
The sweat on my back, the glistening on her thighs.
My ragged breathing, her moaning staccatos, and I knew that I would never forget the incredible sounds Polina made when she was being pleasured.
“Please!”
“Hold.”
Her head thrashed from side to side as she worked her control. And finally when even I could no longer hold back.
“Now!” I commanded. Her internal walls spasmed around me as I milked my load deep inside of her.
For a while neither of us said anything. The room was quiet except for the sound of our breathing slowly finding its way back to normal.
I lay beside her, staring at the ceiling, feeling the weight of what had just happened settle somewhere deeper than I wanted to examine. This should have felt simpler than it did.
It didn’t.
She was facing away from me when I came back to myself, her breathing still slightly uneven, her hair spread across the rumpled blankets in a way that made something in my chest do what it had been doing for weeks now—that specific movement, that shift, the thing I had stopped pretending was anything other than what it was.
I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and let the quiet of the house settle around us.
“You didn’t text back,” she said. Not an accusation. Just a fact, offered into the dark.
“No.”
“But you came anyway.”
“Yes.”
A beat. I could feel her thinking—the particular quality of her silences when she was assimilating something rather than waiting.
“Why?” she asked.
I turned my head to look at her. She had rolled onto her back and was looking at the ceiling too, her profile pale in the city light, her expression the one she wore when she was being careful not to show what she was feeling.
“Because I wanted to,” I said. “Not for any other reason.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “That’s the most straightforward thing you’ve said to me.”
“I’m aware.”