12. Raven #2
And I hear it. I hear my own voice say it out loud in a room, and the humiliation and the relief arrive in the same half-second, and I can't tell them apart.
Something changes in his face.
"Again."
"Please."
He puts the feather down on the nightstand — deliberately, taking his time about it, the way you'd put down a tool you were finished with — and then he puts his hands on me, and the difference is obscene.
After thirty-four minutes of almost-nothing, his palms are so hot they're nearly painful, flat on my ribs, my hip, the back of my thigh, and I make a sound into my own forearm that would be audible through three doors if there weren't a jukebox still going in my head.
He takes the jeans off. He takes his time about that too.
And when his mouth goes where his hands have been I stop being a supervisory special agent, or a fugitive, or a woman with a plan, and I'm nothing at all but a set of nerve endings in the dark in Kansas with my fingers in a man's hair.
His mouth moves slowly along the inside of my thigh, lips dragging warm against my skin, and my fingers tighten in his hair as my legs tenses around him.
We go on like that for a long time. He doesn’t rush one second of it, and I savor every moment.
After what feels like hours of being caressed by that feather I am so far past ready that the first touch of his mouth on my flesh nearly undoes me.
He presses another lingering kiss low against my stomach, just beneath my navel, and my hips lift toward him before I can stop them, a sharp breath catching in my throat.
He instantly notices, and backs off — much to my protest. Settling in beside me, barely touching me. Teasing me with ungodly amusement.
“Ilya–” I whine,
“Mmm?”
“You are being – God help me – deliberately cruel.”
“So what if I am,” he agrees, leaning so close I can feel his breath brush against my skin. He leans over across my hips, letting the feather aside, instead using his fingers and lips to tease my skin.
Still sitting beside me on the bed, he uses his upper body to lean over my waist, essentially pinning me to the bed with his proximity alone, looking at me over his shoulder – a look that I’ll be thinking of for weeks – before sliding two fingers into me.
I gasp from the sudden sensation of fullness that is both unexpected and delightful.
He curls them, my heels dig into the mattress and I moan in ecstasy.
“Please –”
“You keep saying that like it’ll make me be merciful.” He murmurs, glancing over his shoulder at me again. A wicked grin on his too handsome face.
“I’ll say it as many times as you want me too just please, Ilya. I need you.”
He hums softly in Russian. Then slides off the bed, never losing his hold inside me with those masterful two fingers. Sliding the last barrier between us off his hips with his other hands.
Then, in a move I don’t anticipate he pulls away completely, causing me to gasp. Positioning himself yet not giving me an ounce of what he knows I’m so desperate for.
“Is this what you want?” He asks in my ear, rubbing his length against me teasingly.
“Yes. God, please–” I mew.
When he finally slides into me everything else in the room disappears with the intense pleasure that follows.
I arch into him, he meets me with equal eagerness, his strong arms keeping my hips exactly where he wants them.
He doesn’t stop, he doesn’t slow, the dam is broken and we’re both lost to the need running rampant between us.
He finds a rhythm that has my legs tightening around him almost immediately, each hard roll of his hips driving me deeper into the mattress beneath.
I clutch at his arms, his shoulders, any exposed piece of skin I can get my nails into.
Needing to feel him beneath my hands while the pressure builds within.
His mouth finds mine again, swallowing the sounds I can’t keep quiet, and when he shifts the angle of my hips to drive even deeper my nails dig so deep into his skin I know it will leave marks.
Then he slides one hand up my leg, drawing it up and over his shoulder, before moving both hands to my hips to pull me hard against him.
This time he drives even deeper, something I didn’t believe was even possible.
The change sends a sharp pulse of pleasure and pain simultaneously through me.
I break away from his mouth with a gasp, my head lulling backwards against the mattress.
He doesn’t relent, and my leg still at his waist tightens around him instinctively, every muscle in my body pulling taut as the pleasure climbs higher and higher until I’m barely holding onto anything except him.
Once we’re both shaking from the desperation that drove us to release I try to get up, but he doesn’t let me. Instead, he bites my neck, pushing me back down, taking both my wrists in one broad hand and placing them over my head, and starts again.
“Ilya, we can’t –”
“I can.” He growls. “I’m not finished with you. I still need you, to be inside you, to feel you clasp around me as I take you over the edge.”
And just like that, my eyes are rolling back once more, my body responding to his every thrust. And the appalling thing, the genuinely humiliating thing, is that I need him just as much.
This time is longer, more feverish, and by the end of it I have both hands fisted in the sheet above my head, losing myself in the absolute pleasure he brings me.
By the time he finally finishes, slowing, before pulling away completely, my skin is slick with sweat, my pulse hammering in my veins, and even the slightest shifts of his body against mine makes me shudder.
I lie sprawled across the whole width of the bed with the sheet somewhere around my knees, entirely unable to move, and he sits against the headboard with one hand resting flat against my breast. He doesn't say anything for a long while.
"Where," I say into the mattress, "did a man like you learn to do that?"
I mean it as a joke.
He takes long enough answering that I turn my head.
"From a woman who couldn’t be touched," Ilya says.
He isn't looking at me. He's looking at the ceiling, and his hand is still flat on my breast, and he has gone somewhere else entirely.
And I lie there in the dark in a hotel in Kansas with everything in my body still humming, and understand that he has just told me something about his wife that he did not intend to say out loud — and that he isn't going to take it back, and that he is not going to explain it, and that I now know something about the mother of that sleeping child two doors away that she almost certainly never told anybody.