14. Sienna
SIENNA
Seven Months Ago
We sit across from each other in the private cabin with champagne in our hands and too much awareness in the air between us.
The flight has evened out. The worst of the turbulence is gone. The low hum of the plane wraps around the room, soft and steady, and the lights are turned down enough that everything feels unreal. Expensive. Private. Removed from the rest of the world.
He looks completely at ease here. One ankle crossed over the other, jacket off now, shirt open at the throat, one big hand loose around the stem of his glass. He watches me over the rim of it with that same calm, dangerous attention that has had my nerves in knots for the whole flight.
I’m trying not to stare at his mouth.
I’m failing.
“Don’t you want to go back to your seat?” I ask, and the words come out lighter than I feel. A little cheeky. A little reckless. “Or did you just bully your way in here for the atmosphere?”
The corner of his mouth lifts. “I did pay for this.”
I laugh.
That’s the problem, really. He keeps making me laugh when I should be more careful.
“Of course you did.”
“Are you accusing me of generosity?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
His eyes stay on me. “Take your time.”
I sip the champagne just to have something to do with my hands.
It’s good. Cold. Dry. The bubbles go straight to my head, or maybe that’s just him. The room feels warmer than it should. My body feels strangely loose and alert at the same time, as if every nerve in me has decided to wake up together.
He’s looking at me like I’m the only thing in the room worth seeing.
I’ve never been looked at that way before.
Wanted, yes. Desired in pieces, maybe. Ethan wanted parts of me once, or the version of me he thought he could improve, reshape, make smaller and prettier and more convenient. Even when he touched me in the beginning, it always felt like something he was measuring. Assessing. Taking.
This is different. This man is looking at me like nothing about me needs fixing before he puts his hands on me.
The thought lands low in my body and stays there.
I should be careful. Instead, something in me breaks.
Maybe it’s the champagne. Maybe it’s exhaustion. Maybe it’s months of feeling ugly and abandoned and humiliated after Spain, after Ethan, after watching him slide into a new life with a blonde woman like I was a shirt he’d outgrown.
Or maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe I just want him.
I set down my glass.
He notices at once.
I don’t let myself think. If I think, I’ll stop. And I don’t want to stop.
I lean forward and kiss him.
For one half second, he goes very still. Then he puts his glass down, catches the back of my neck, and kisses me back so hard my breath leaves me.
It’s not polite. Not tentative. He kisses like a man who made up his mind the second I touched him and has no interest in pretending otherwise. His mouth opens over mine, deep and hungry and controlled in a way that somehow makes it worse. Better. My whole body lights up at once.
I make a small sound into his mouth and feel him smile against me.
Then he stands, reaches behind him, and locks the cabin door. The click of it goes straight through me. When he turns back, I’m already waiting for him.
God. What is wrong with me?
Nothing, some reckless part of me answers. Nothing at all.
He comes back to me slowly, watching my face, giving me every chance to panic or pull away. I don’t. I can’t. My body has already made the decision.
His hand slides into my hair and he kisses me again, slower this time, but only at first. Then I open for him and something changes.
The restraint is still there, but now it’s carrying heat under it, and I feel the full force of it in the way he takes his time with my mouth, in the way his thumb strokes under my jaw, in the way he keeps me exactly where he wants me without making me feel trapped.
I’ve never been kissed like this. Not by anyone.
I grew up learning not to expect care to come easily.
Not to depend on it when it did. An orphan learns certain things early.
How to read moods. How to stay useful. How to make herself easy enough to keep around.
Even later, even as an adult, some part of me was always waiting for warmth to be temporary.
But with him, for these few impossible minutes in the sky, I don’t feel temporary.
His devotion is in the attention. In the way he touches me like there’s nowhere else he needs to be. In the way he keeps looking at my face, as if what I feel matters as much as what he wants.
That does something dangerous to me.
I kiss him harder.
He groans low in his throat and lifts me into his lap without breaking the kiss.
I go willingly, my knees parting around him, one hand braced on his shoulder, the other in his hair.
The heat of him under me is immediate and overwhelming.
I can feel how hard he already is through his trousers, and the knowledge of it makes me gasp.
He takes that gasp and kisses me deeper.
“You have any idea,” he murmurs against my mouth, “what you’re doing to me?”
I shake my head, because I don’t, not fully. I only know that I have never wanted someone this fast, this badly. It feels bigger than a rebound already, bigger than revenge, bigger than the dull ache Ethan left behind.
This feels like hunger.
And maybe, if I were stupid enough to name it this early, a kind of worship.
His mouth drags down my throat. His hand spans my waist, then slides up my back, then back down again, learning the shape of me through my clothes. Every touch is deliberate. Every pause feels like choice.
“Tell me to stop,” he says.
I can’t.
Not because I’m weak. Because I don’t want to.
So instead I whisper, “Don’t.”
That’s all it takes. He pulls back just enough to look at me, and whatever he sees there must satisfy him, because the next second his hand is under my skirt and his mouth is on mine again and I’m gone.
His hand slides up the inside of my thigh, slow enough to make me ache before he even touches where I need him.
I’m already wet. That embarrasses me for half a second, until he groans under his breath when he feels it and the sound turns the embarrassment into something hotter.
“Christ,” he murmurs against my mouth. “You’re drenched.”
His fingers drag through me once, firm and slow, and I jolt in his lap.
He smiles into the kiss. Not kindly. Not cruelly. Like a man who is far too pleased with himself and has earned the right. “So responsive,” he says. “I barely touch you and you’re ready to come apart for me.”
I should be mortified by how true that is. Instead I grind down against his hand and feel his cock jerk hard under me.
That makes him laugh, low and rough. “There she is.”
He hooks one finger into the side of my underwear and moves it aside. Then he rubs my clit with the pad of his thumb, just enough pressure to make my whole body tighten.
“Oh God.”
“No,” he says, voice dropping. “Look at me.”
I do. That’s the mistake.
Because he’s watching me with a kind of focus that makes everything feel bigger.
He circles my clit again, a little harder, and I gasp and clutch his shoulders.
“Good girl,” he says softly.
The praise goes straight through me.
His mouth drops to my neck while his fingers keep moving. Not hurried. Not fumbling. He knows exactly how to touch me, even now, like he can feel which pressure makes me arch and which one makes me whimper and which one has me rocking against his hand before I can help it.
“You’re beautiful like this,” he says against my skin. “Do you know that?”
I shake my head.
He kisses just below my ear, then bites lightly, soothing it with his tongue. “You should.”
Then he slides one finger inside me, and I cry out.
He groans in answer, his hand tightening on my thigh to hold me open while he eases it deeper, feeling the way I clench around him. “So fucking tight.”
His thumb never stops on my clit. The combination is too much too fast. I’m already trembling in his lap, already chasing his hand, and when he adds a second finger and curls them just right, I lose what little composure I had left.
“Viktor.”
“Again.”
My head falls back when he strokes that spot inside me.
“Viktor.”
“That’s it,” he says, kissing my throat, my jaw, the corner of my mouth. “Say it again when you come.”
I do.
He makes me come in his lap with his fingers buried inside me and his mouth on my neck, and it’s so sudden and intense I almost bite him when the orgasm tears through me.
My thighs shake. My whole body jerks. He works me through it with a filthy kind of patience, like he has no intention of stopping just because I’m already shaking.
When I finally sag against him, breathless and wrecked, he takes my mouth again and kisses me until I can breathe properly.
Then he stands, lifting me with him. I cling to him automatically, arms around his shoulders, legs wrapping around his waist, and he carries me the few steps to the wide bench along the side of the cabin like I weigh nothing.
He sets me down and gets my skirt up around my hips, then kneels between my knees and just looks at me for a second. At my thighs spread for him. At my flushed face. At the damp mess he made between my legs.
The look alone almost makes me come again.
“Do you have any idea what seeing you like this does to me?” he asks.
I shake my head.
He kisses the inside of one thigh, then the other. Slow, open-mouthed kisses that make me shiver.
“These legs.” Another kiss. “These hips.” His hands spread over them, firm and possessive. “This soft stomach.” He palms it through my clothes with something like reverence, not judgment. “These tits.”
He gets my top open enough to pull my breasts free, and the look on his face when he sees them makes my breath catch.
“Perfect,” he says, and bends to take one nipple into his mouth.
I arch with a moan.