15. Isla
ISLA
The controlled rate is over.
Then his mouth is on mine again, and the words become the whole climate of the room.
His hands drop from my hair to the hem of my shirt—his shirt. There are clothes of my own folded upstairs now, but I chose this one—and he pulls it over my head in a single motion that scatters my ponytail and my composure.
Cold air. His eyes on me.
No one has ever looked at my body like this.
Examined it, yes. Assessed it, weighed it, logged its vitals on a form.
But Theon looks at me as though he has spent years wanting something he never expected to have.
His breath leaves him rough and uneven, and I stand beneath the annex light with my heart trying to escape through my ribs.
“Theon—”
His mouth finds my throat, and the sentence dies there. He kisses the line of my neck, my collarbone, the slope of my shoulder. There is nothing careful about his hunger now. His teeth graze my skin. His hands span my waist and grip, walking me backward out of the annex and toward the bed.
The backs of my knees meet the mattress. He follows me down.
His weight settles over me. He pulls at the drawstring of my trousers, drags them down my legs, and kisses his way from my sternum to the soft skin beneath my navel. I am moving toward something I have never done, and he does not know that.
Or perhaps he does.
I cannot leave that unreported.
“Theon.” My voice comes out breathless and small. “Point of order.”
He lifts his head. His hair has fallen over his forehead, his eyes nearly black beneath it. He goes still at once. All that hunger, suspended because I spoke.
“I’ve never done this.” I say it before my face can close. “Any of it beyond kissing. I have no practical experience, and you should know your co-investigator’s qualifications before—”
“Isla.” His voice is low and warm. He brushes the loose hair from my cheek, the tenderness of it at odds with the grip bruising my waist. “I suspected in the alcove. I knew when you told me you’d had one trial and no idea what came after.”
“You knew.”
“I knew.” His thumb traces my cheekbone. “Do you want this? Not the theory. This. Now. Me.”
“Yes.” There is no delay. “Emphatically. I just don’t know if I’ll be any good at it, and I’m used to being the best at things, and—”
“Don’t worry, baby girl.” The words leave him rough and quiet. “I’ll be gentle.”
Baby girl.
No one has ever given me an endearment. Specialist. Summer. Subject. Asset. I have been designated my entire life. This man looks down at me with his restraint coming apart and calls me something soft. Something kept.
The sound my body makes is not one I authorize.
“Oh,” I say faintly. “Log that. Whatever that was.”
“Logged.”
He smiles—actually smiles—then kisses me again, slower this time.
He removes the rest of my clothes without looking away from me for long.
His come off faster: shirt over his head, trousers pushed down and discarded.
For the first time, I see all the ink across his shoulders and chest, skulls and roses threaded with chemical structures.
I put my hands on him because I want to. Wanting is the point.
His skin is hot beneath my palms. His breath catches.
“I want you,” I tell him, and my voice cracks. “I don’t understand the mechanism. It doesn’t reduce to anything. I just want you. All of you.”
“It doesn’t have to reduce.” He catches my hand and presses his mouth to my palm, then my wrist, then the muscle below my shoulder, where I once offered his needle. “Let it be true without proving it.”
Then he lowers his mouth to my body.
He starts at my throat and takes his time. His hands frame my breasts, his thumbs passing over my nipples until I arch beneath him. He listens to every broken sound, repeats the touches that pull them from me, and adjusts when my body answers differently. Patient. Thorough. Ruinous.
“Every sound you make,” he murmurs against my ribs, “I’m keeping.”
“The museum takes donations,” I manage.
His mouth curves against my skin.
He kisses down my stomach. Lower. His shoulders settle between my thighs and ease them apart. The position is too open, too far beyond every rule I have lived inside. My muscles lock.
He stops.
“Look at me,” he says.
I look down the length of my body at him: this dangerous, careful man between my legs as though there is nowhere else in the building he wants to be.
“Yes?” he asks.
“Yes.”
His mouth comes down on me, and language becomes useless.
The first stroke of his tongue jerks my hips from the mattress. His hands close around my thighs, holding me open while he learns what I like. Slow, then harder, then slow again. He finds the rhythm that makes my legs shake and the pressure that turns his name into a plea.
Heat winds tight inside me. I know what the literature says should happen. The literature has never had Theon’s mouth on it.
The pleasure breaks hard enough to bow my back. White light bursts behind my eyes, and my cry hits the concrete walls and comes back to us.
He does not stop.
“Theon—I can’t—”
My fingers tighten in his hair even as I say it. My thighs close around his shoulders, keeping him where he is.
“You can.” His voice vibrates against me. “Again, baby girl.”
He proves it. The second comes faster, sharp enough to leave me shaking. The third is slower and merciless, coaxed from a body that has already given him everything it knows how to give. Tears slip into my hair. Not pain. Not fear. Too much sensation with nowhere else to go.
He kisses his way back up while I lie ruined beneath him. His mouth is wet with me, his eyes dark, and his control is hanging by a thread. I can see it in the tremor of his arms.
“Isla.” My name sounds dragged from him. He settles between my thighs, hard and heavy against me. “Tell me what you want. Do you want my cock?”
The word rises before I can examine it. He called me baby girl. He tucked in my laces, came for me in the alcove, stands between me and every locked door. My mouth opens.
“Yes, Daddy.”
Theon freezes.
Every muscle in the arms braced beside my head turns rigid. For half a second, I think I have said the wrong thing.
Then a sound tears out of his chest—low, starving, almost a growl. His forehead drops to mine, and his whole body shudders.
“Say it again.”
“Daddy.” This time I know I mean it. “Please.”
“Fuck.” He kisses me hard, once, then pulls back far enough to see my face. The chemist surfaces through the hunger. “Your post-extraction panel was clear. Mine is current. No exposure since. Your contraceptive?”
“Quarterly injection. Nine weeks until the next dose.” The program prescribed it for cramping, officially. Another thing they controlled. Tonight, I choose what it is for. “I want you bare. And I don’t want you to pull away.”
His eyes close for one strained beat.
“Nothing between us,” he says. “Eyes on me, baby girl. I want to see all of it.”
He pushes into me.
Slowly. His eyes stay locked on mine, reading every change. Pressure, stretch, then a brief bright sting that pulls a sound from me. He stops at once, halfway inside and trembling with the effort of holding still.
“Breathe,” he says, ragged and tender at once. “Four counts. You know this one.”
I breathe. Four in. Four out. The sting eases, leaving fullness behind.
I wrap my legs around his hips and draw him closer.
“There she is.” He sinks the rest of the way into me. We both make broken sounds. Then he holds still, buried deep, breathing as though he has surfaced from cold water. “Do you feel me?”
“Everywhere.”
“Good.” He draws back and rolls forward, slow and deep. My vision blurs at the edges. “I’m the first man inside you.” Another stroke. His voice drops into the register that lives at the base of my spine. “The first.”
His palm presses low on my belly, above my pubic bone, and the added pressure makes every movement sharper.
“Theon—”
“And the last.” His pace builds, still controlled even as his words turn rough. “The only one. No one else gets this. Say you understand.”
“I understand.” My nails score the ink across his back. “Yours. I choose it. Log it, notarize it, I don’t care—Daddy—”
The word breaks what remains of his rhythm. He groans against my throat and drives deeper, harder, one hand cradling my head against the mattress. Gentle with me even while he talks like a man who has forgotten gentleness exists.
“Look at you. Taking me so well. My good girl. My brilliant, ruinous girl.” His hand slides between us, fingers circling where I am already burning. “Come for me. One more. Come on my cock, baby girl. Let me feel it.”
I come apart beneath him.
My body clenches around him. His rhythm fractures, his breath tears loose, and his control finally goes with it. He buries his face in my neck and follows me over, hips pressed flush, my name broken in his mouth as he comes inside me.
For several breaths, neither of us moves. The bunker hums around us. Sixty feet overhead, a hunt is gathering, and down here there is only his weight, his heartbeat against mine, and the slow return of air to my lungs.
He shifts onto one forearm before I have to ask, taking most of his weight off me. When he lifts his head, his eyes are blue again. Mostly. Something in them remains unguarded.
“Data point,” he says hoarsely.
“Present it.”
“Nine seconds.” His thumb traces my swollen lip. “My mind went quiet for nine seconds. Tied my lifetime record.”
“Only nine?” I am boneless, oversensitive, and far too pleased with myself. “Flawed methodology. The trial requires replication.”
His laugh is low and real against my throat.
“Naturally.”
He withdraws slowly, watching my face. Then he disappears into the compact washroom and returns with a warm cloth and water. He cleans me with quiet concentration. There is nothing clinical in the way his hand steadies my thigh or in the possessive satisfaction on his face.
“Sore?” he asks.
“A little.”
“Tell me if that changes.”
“Logged.”
He tosses the cloth aside, gathers me against his chest, and arranges the blanket over us. I spread my hand over the chemical structures inked into his skin and listen to his heart slow.
The museum of tiny freedoms is still there. It does not burn, and it does not need to. Tonight I add something large enough to demand its own room: I chose him, and the choice did not destroy me.
“Daddy,” I murmur against his skin, experimental, just to feel him shiver.
“Careful, baby girl.” His arm tightens around me. His voice is a warm rasp, already thickening again. “Ask me for replication in ten minutes.”
Four counts in. Four counts out.
The guard inside me is not gone. But for now, with his hand spread across my back, she is quiet.