19. Nineteen
The wallet was done by the time I heard the elevator.
I'd been at it three days when he wasn't looking, which wasn't easy in a flat where the man tracked me like a hound.
It was bifold. Plain. Four card slots and a billfold, vegetable-tanned, the kind of piece my da gave apprentices to ruin before he'd let them near anything that mattered.
The stitching down the spine was honest work and nothing more.
A man who knew leather would clock the tension going soft at the back third where the left hand had given up its share, and he'd know exactly what had happened to the hand that made it.
Aleksi wouldn't. That was half the point. He'd carry the thing for years and never know it was the ugliest wallet I'd made since I was nine.
I slid it into the waistband at the small of my back and pulled my shirt down over it.
The key didn't fight him tonight. He came in clean, the way he hadn't the night he'd torn my shirt open, and I tracked him by sound.
Coat off. Keys in the dish. The fridge, then nothing from the fridge, which meant he'd thought better of a drink.
Then his weight in the doorway of the dining room, and the particular quiet of a man working out how to start.
I didn't look up from the clam. "Yer late."
"I was at a warehouse counting handbags."
"Sounds like a promotion."
"Don't." He came in and set something on the table beside my elbow. I turned my head. It was a bag, the kind of cheap knockoff I'd stitched a hundred of in a room full of women who were all dead now.
My hands went still.
"I need you to look at something," he said.
"Not yet," I said and stood.
He looked at me. "Not yet?"
"Ye walked in here with a face like a funeral and a bag full of bad news, and I've been waiting on ye all day." I came round the table slowly, wiping the wax off my fingers on a rag. "So whatever's in the bag can sit there another ten minutes. I made ye something."
He froze. "Fin, you shouldn't have."
"Aye. Don't get sentimental, it's shite." I tossed the rag onto the table. "It's on me somewhere. Ye've got to find it."
"Fin."
"Those are the terms." I spread my arms a little, the rag-clean hands hanging loose. "Ye want yer present, ye work for it. Same as everything else round here."
He didn't move for a second, and I watched him decide whether to be annoyed about it. Then his mouth quirked, and he crossed the floor.
"Where?" he asked, and I held back a little shudder as he put his hands on my hips.
"That'd be telling."
His hands came up to my shoulders. He patted down the seams of the shirt like he was frisking me, which the beautiful, daft man probably was. His hands slid down my arms.
"Yer cold," I said.
His hands worked down to my waist, and then he went to his knees, and my cock gave an interested twitch as he looked up at me.
"Where's yer brother?" I asked as he ran his hands down the insides of my thighs. "Because if Niko comes round that corner while ye've got yer hands down my trousers, I'll never hear the end of it. Neither will ye."
"Out."
"Out where?"
"Sent him to Gregori's for the night. Told him if he came back before morning I'd put him through a window."
That stopped me for half a second. He'd cleared the flat. On purpose. The great daft bastard had planned this, and he hadn't said a word about it.
I didn't let it show. "Warmer," I said instead, though his hands were nowhere near.
He looked up at me from the floor. "Liar."
"Aye," I managed. "But ye should know better than to play games with a Scotsman."
He put both hands flat against my stomach and slid them up under the shirt, palms dragging over my ribs. A shiver chased up my spine that had nothing to do with temperature.
"Higher," I said, which was a lie, because the wallet sat low at my back and I wanted his lips where his hands were.
He went higher. Thumbs at my sternum, big fingers spreading round my sides, and he leaned in close enough that his breath came warm through the cotton. He pressed his lips to the middle of my chest through the shirt, and I lost the next word in my throat.
"That's no' searching," I got out. "That's cheating."
"You said warmer."
"That was before, ye great—"
His hand found the dip of my spine and stopped there. The bastard kept his eyes on mine the whole time he worked it free.
"Found it," he said.
"Aye. Took ye long enough."
He drew it out, the ugly honest thing, and turned it in his hands down there on the floor like it was worth a damn. He ran his thumb down the stitching. "It's—"
"Don't ye flatter me," I warned him. "I know what it is."
He didn't flatter me. He tucked it away inside his jacket without a word, and that was the only thanks I'd get and the only kind I'd have taken.
"Mine," he said.
"It was always yours, ye thick—"
"Everything you make is mine." He hadn't stood.
He stayed down there on the floor, and his hands closed hard on the backs of my thighs and pulled, so I had to catch the table or go down into him.
"Same as everything you do." He looked up, and there wasn't a soft thing in his face.
"Three days you hid from me. Put that hand into something I'd carry every day of my life and said nothing.
You think I don't know what that costs you? "
"Dinnae—"
"I'm not going to say it." His thumb drove into the meat of my thigh, hard enough to leave a mark, hard enough to take the next clever thing right out of my mouth. "I'm going to do something about it instead. Hold still."
"Make me," I got out, because I'm a mouthy bastard and I'll be one with my dying breath.
He yanked my belt the rest of the way open and had my trousers off my hips in one rough pull, no patience left in him now, and put his mouth to my cock through my underpants while I was still working out something smart to say.
The heat of it went up my spine and dragged the smart clean out.
I got the good hand into his hair and gripped.
The bad one I kept fisted at my side, out of it, mine to manage.
"Ye gonna fuck me on the floor in your dining room," I managed. "What would Niko say?"
"I should fuck you on the sofa where he sleeps. I should fuck you on the table where he eats. In the shower where he—"
"Aye, I get it. Ye want to get revenge on your brother or fuck me proper then?"
"Shut your mouth, Fin. Or use it for something better than talking."
"That a threat?"
"It's an order."
"Aye, sir," I said, just to watch his jaw tic, and got my mouth shut for me when he yanked my underwear down and swallowed me to the root.
The clever words in my head died. All of them.
Aleksi had no finesse, and he didn't need any, just the heat and the wet of his mouth and that big hand splayed flat on my belly holding me to the table edge so I couldn't drive up into it the way my hips wanted.
He pinned me there and took me at his own pace, and the not being allowed to move was its own kind of ruin. I gripped his hair with my good hand.
"Greedy fuck," I got out. "Three weeks ago ye didnae ken what to do with another man's cock and now look at ye. Cannae get enough, can ye?"
He pulled off long enough to drag his tongue up the underside of me, eyes coming up dark. "You've ruined me, Fin. You're the worst thing I could ever want, and I can't stop wanting you."
Then he closed his lips around the head and sucked, and I lost the thread of what I'd been smug about.
He worked a hand up the inside of my thigh and forced two fingers into my mouth without breaking rhythm.
I moaned and sucked on them, knowing full well where they were going.
He pulled the fingers from between my lips with a wet pop and slid them back until he could press into my hole.
There was nothing gentle about it either.
He didn't bother wasting time with a single finger and went straight to stretching me out to take him.
"Christ, Aleksi, you impatient bastard," I hissed, and he chuckled as he bobbed up and down on my cock. "Ye animal. We've a bed twenty feet—"
"You'll take it here," he growled. "This is my house. I'll fuck you where I want."
He pulled his mouth off me and stood, and the loss of his heat had me chasing it like a fool. He kept his fingers in me while he rose, working them, and used his free hand to turn me by the hip until I was facing the table. He bent me over it. The wax and the awl rattled in their tray by my ear.
"Mind the leather," I got out.
"Mind your mouth." He kicked my feet wider. I went down onto my forearms. He freed himself behind me, and I heard him spit, and then he was pressing in.
He gave me no quarter. He'd stretched me roughly, and he took me the same way, one long shove that drove the air out of me and bent me flat to the table. I bit down on a sound that'd have the doorman running in to check.
"There." His hands closed on my hips, both of them, hauling me back onto him. "That's how you wanted my cock. Not the bed. Here. Don't lie to me now."
"Wasnae—" He rolled his hips, and the word turned into something with no dignity in it. "Wasnae lying. Move, ye great Russian bastard, or I'll—"
Whatever threat I'd had left me on the next thrust.
He set a pace that wasn't kind. The table took it, legs grinding the floor, the tools chattering in the tray, and I gave up holding still and let him have it the way he wanted. The good hand found the table's edge and held. My breath came out of me in pieces.
"Say the rest of it," he said behind me, low, the words coming on the rhythm. "You'll what."
"Cannae remember." I'd not the air for cleverness. "Ye fucked it out of me. Happy?"
His hand came up the line of my spine and pressed flat between my shoulders, holding me down to the wood, and the bend of it changed the angle and lit me up from the inside out. I made the undignified sound again and didn't care who heard it now.
"Aye, there—" I got out. "Right there, ye—Christ. Don't ye dare go gentle on me."