Chapter 14 #2
She didn’t pause to appreciate anything this time, no clinical inventory.
She just pushed him backward toward the bed with the flat of both hands, hard, and felt her own shove rebound through the loop as a spike of want that made him grunt.
“Down. Now.”
He went down. She followed, straddling him before he’d finished landing.
The gold lines came up bright and fast under her hands, brighter where she was rough with them. And she was rough with them, dragging her nails down his chest and feeling it come back double and using the double to go rougher.
It was a feedback she could have written a paper on and absolutely was not going to.
“Brooklyn—” his hips came up under her, involuntary—“if you keep—the loop, I feel what you feel doing it, I won’t—”
“Then don’t.” She kissed him hard, took his lower lip in her teeth, felt her own small mean pleasure at it hit him and light him up. “You held two men down and gave the calmest statement I have ever heard, all day, all week, Mr. In-Control. You don’t get to be in control in this bed.”
“That’s a plan of att—”
“Do not.” She sat up, breathless, grinning, felt him feel the grin. “Not a plan. A demand. Keep up.”
She didn’t go slow and she didn’t go down on him to study anything. She was too full of the day for foreplay to be patient. She got a hand between them and wrapped him.
Smooth and gold-flecked and enormous, and the loop caught her own hunger and bounced it back so hard she gasped.
She lined him up and sank down in one long claiming motion that punched a sound out of both of them at once.
His shudder arrived in her body the half-second before the stretch did, that eerie beautiful lag, weather ahead of the storm.
Except she was the storm and she wasn’t waiting on it.
“There,” she breathed, seated, full, wrecked. “That. Okay. That’s the—hold on, don’t move, I felt you feel me feel—this is so much—”
“You said no findings,” he managed, gold-lit, gripping her hips and pointedly not steering.
“That wasn’t a finding, that was a noise.” She started to move. “Different thing entirely.”
She rode him with the brakes off, the way she’d wanted to do everything today and hadn’t been allowed to.
The loop climbed with no ceiling, her pleasure and his braided so tight she lost which was which. Every roll of her hips came back to her doubled, so that she was chasing her own sensation through his body through hers.
A bright vicious circuit that made her greedy and loud and none of the things she’d trained herself to be. His hands stayed where she’d put them.
He let her drive. He let her take it, big and undone and hers.
And that—the letting, from a man who could fold two attackers in a second and chose not to steer her by so much as an inch—undid her worse than his hands could have.
She came first, hard and fast and cursing, and felt it crash through him.
Felt him buck up under her and grit through it, because she wasn’t done and he could feel she wasn’t done.
She didn’t stop.
She used it, the loop not resetting, just climbing off the wreckage of the first one.
The second built almost before the first let go.
“Again,” he said, wrecked, “I feel it when you—do that again, I’ve got you—”
“I know you’ve got me, that’s the problem—” and then words stopped being a thing she did.
She chased the second one with her nails in his chest and her forehead dropped to his, both of them slick and gold-lit and ragged.
When it broke it took him with it. His release crashed into hers through the same circuit at the same instant.
The gold flared bright enough to throw shadows up the wall of mismatched frames before it faded, slow, back to warm.
She collapsed forward onto him, boneless, his arm coming hard around her back like he’d been braced to catch her all along.
Eventually they surfaced.
Round two was slower.
The adrenaline finally spent, the shaking finally gone, so that the second time was the tender one, unhurried, his turn to set a pace and hers to let him.
The exact opposite of the first time, she thought, wryly, but didn’t say so out loud.
Her comm was on the nightstand where she’d dropped it. She picked it up out of pure reflex, the way she picked up everything.
Then she went into her archive, and found the thing she hadn’t opened, and opened it.
A match has been located in your locale.
Matched: Falkin, Vorjan House. Senior guard, visiting delegation.
“You’re smiling at your comm,” Falkin said, not entirely awake.
“I’m reading my agency notification. I archived it unopened. Then went back and checked on it. Twice.”
A pause. “Was it good news?”
“Jury’s out,” Brooklyn said, and put the comm face-down, and did not pick it up again.
“So,” Brooklyn said into his chest, in the warm room, in her own bed, not once reaching for a door. “That was different from last time.”
“You were angry,” Falkin said, warm and honest and thoroughly undone, “at a man who’s Earth-side and couldn’t feel it, so you spent it on me. I have no complaints. I would like it noted that I have no complaints.”
“Noted.” She felt his laugh move through his chest and, faintly, through the loop. She let it. She was learning to let things. “You put your hands between me and two men today. Didn’t ask permission first.”
“No.”
“I’ve decided I’m keeping you.” She propped her chin on his sternum. “For the record. That’s not the adrenaline talking. I checked.”
“You ran the numbers.”
“I ran the numbers. In bed. During. It’s a sickness.
” She reached up and traced one fading gold line down his throat, felt the ghost of it come back through the loop.
“You should know I didn’t wear anything under this today.
Not a statement. The freight mess ate my whole week and I’m three days behind on laundry. ”
“So the little garment humans keep beneath the outer one,” Falkin said gravely, “is optional.”
“It is extremely optional. It’s strongly optional.” She was laughing now, cracked all the way open, reaching down to pull her grandmother’s blanket up over both of them.
The one thing in the room that had ever been made for her by someone who wanted nothing back.
Draped now over a blue-haired alien in her bed, in her warm room, on a night she did not have to be perfect. “You own zero garments, by the way. Just armor. It’s a crisis and we’re fixing it.”
“I own armor,” Falkin agreed, unbothered, and pulled her closer.