Chapter 5 #2
“I’m appreciating.” He spreads his hand over my sternum and eases me back onto the mattress. “I’ve been telling myself for a day that this was a bad idea. I still think it’s a bad idea, but I’ve stopped caring.”
He lowers himself over me, and the heat of his bare chest against mine makes me arch up.
He drags his mouth down my throat and closes his lips around one nipple, sucking hard enough that I gasp and push my fingers into his hair to hold him there.
A light scrape of his teeth sends heat straight down into my clit.
“You’re trying to stay controlled,” I say, breathing harder than I want to admit.
“I’m failing.” He bites the underside of my breast softly and drags his tongue across the mark. “I’ve been failing since I found you on my floor.”
He keeps moving down. He kisses a line along my ribs and over my stomach, then hooks his thumbs into my jeans and underwear to drag them down together.
He drops them off the side of the bed without looking away from me, and then he settles between my thighs and pushes them wider apart with his shoulders.
The first stroke of his tongue up my slit makes me grip the sheets.
He licks up the length of me slowly then circles my clit with the broad surface of his tongue while he watches my face.
I lift my hips off the mattress, and he presses one forearm across them to hold me down.
The restraint of it, being pinned open while he takes his time, drags a sound out of me I don’t recognize.
“There you are,” he says against me, and the vibration of his voice makes me swear.
He works two fingers into my channel while his mouth stays on my clit.
My pussy is already slick, and the stretch combined with the pressure of his tongue winds me tighter than I’m ready for.
He curls his fingers forward, finds the spot that makes me jerk against his forearm, and stays there, patient and relentless, reading every sound and giving me more of exactly what pulls the loudest reaction.
“I want to hear you,” he says, lifting his mouth just enough to speak.
“I want to hear you too.” I get a fistful of his hair. “I like your voice better than your restraint.”
He laughs against my thigh, low and rough, and puts his mouth back on my folds.
The pressure crests fast and sudden, and I come against his mouth with my thighs shaking around his head and a loud moan.
He stays with me through all of it, slowing only when I push weakly at his shoulder because it’s too much.
He rises over me, mouth wet, and I pull him down to kiss him before I’ve caught my breath. I can taste myself on him, and that I don’t care tells me how far past sense I am.
“I’m not done,” I tell him. “I want you inside me.”
“You just came on my hand.”
“Now I want to come on your cock.” I reach between us to close my hand around his shaft, and he freezes, swearing under his breath.
He’s hard and thick, already wet at the tip, and I stroke his cock once from base to head just to watch his control slip.
“Unless you’d rather keep being deliberate about it? ”
“You’re going to be a problem.” He catches my wrist, pins it beside my head, and lines up his cock with his other hand.
He pushes into me slowly, inch by inch, giving my sheath time to stretch around him, and the fullness of it makes me dig my nails into his back and gasp. He bottoms out and holds there, his forehead dropping against mine, both of us breathing hard.
“You’re so fucking wet,” he says, wrecked.
“You have no idea how long I’ve been like this.” The confession slips out before I can stop it, and I don’t take it back.
Then he moves, and I stop caring what I admit.
Each thrust is deep enough to push a sound out of me I can’t control.
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper, and he groans against my neck and drives harder.
I roll my hips to meet him because I refuse to just lie here and let it happen to me, and his sharp inhale when I change the angle tells me he noticed.
This is reckless. Some distant, still-functioning part of me knows it.
I’m in bed with a man I robbed less than twenty-four hours ago, a man whose family spent the day deciding whether I belong in this house or handed to their enemies, and his cock is buried inside me and I’ve never wanted anything less complicated in my life.
Great instincts, Piper. Really. The thought comes with a flicker of dark humor before he shifts his weight and I lose the ability to think at all.
“You feel incredible,” he says against my throat, all the control gone from his voice.
“You do too.” I clench around him on purpose, and the raw sound he makes is worth every bad decision that led me here.
He reaches between us and finds my clit, rubbing firm circles timed to each thrust, and the double sensation makes the room narrow to the places where our bodies meet. He fucks me harder, knocking the headboard against the wall, and the pressure climbs again, sharper this time.
“I’m close,” I manage, and my voice breaks on the second word.
“I know. I can feel it.” He presses harder against my clit and changes his angle to hit a spot that makes me arch off the bed. “Come for me. I want to feel you come around my cock.”
The orgasm tears through me. My inner walls clench around his cock in waves as I cry out against his neck, and the pulse of it drags him over with me.
He buries his cock deeper and comes with a low groan he’s clearly been holding back for as long as he could, and the heat of it sends one last aftershock through my wrecked nerves.
We lie still afterward, breathing hard. The room smells like sweat, sex, and the cedar from the open closet, and neither of us speaks.
I keep my hands at my sides. If I touch him now, I’ll want him to touch me back. Then I’ll want it again tomorrow, and I’ve seen what happens to women who start needing things from men like him.
Dad told me once the worst marks are the ones who swear they’re in control right up until the second they aren’t. I always assumed he meant the people he conned. Lying in Nikita Rusakov’s bed, I’m starting to think he meant me.
He pulls out and rolls onto his back beside me.
I stare at the ceiling and think about what I should have twenty minutes ago.
Neither of us said a word about protection.
He finished inside me and I let him, and I didn’t think about it once until now, which is sloppy.
I add it to the list of tonight’s bad decisions but don’t say it out loud, because that means deciding what to do about it, and I’ve decided enough for one night.
Nikita gets up, and I brace for the part where a man like him leaves the room and lets me find my own way back to being an asset.
Instead, he crosses to the bathroom. I hear water run before he returns with a glass and sets it on the nightstand on my side without comment.
He doesn’t ask if I’m all right. He just sees to my needs.
“This doesn’t change the arrangement,” I say.
“I know.”
Neither of us argues. The silence leaves the lie intact.
He watches me without reaching for his clothes, and for once, he doesn’t seem to have decided what happens next.
I sit up first, drink half the water, and retrieve my underwear and jeans from the floor. Nikita dresses without looking at the bed, and we return to the closet and the files as though clothing can restore the boundary we crossed.
We spend the next forty minutes rebuilding the order of the safe, identifying two missing insurance statements, and matching storage-unit numbers to the leases Platon compiled this morning. Nikita works beside me in silence, and neither of us mentions what happened in the bedroom.
By the time I place the last folder on the shelf, his phone buzzes. He angles the screen so I can read Platon’s text:
“Callum is secure. I moved him to the cottage, and Vera is handling intake. I found another route through the Gideon broker. We need to review it at first light.”
I nod, so Nikita sets down the phone.
“Platon doesn’t ask for a first-light meeting unless the trace got worse,” he says.
Maren’s name is at the end of that trace.
She pulled the buyer records for me this morning without asking what she was walking into, the same as she has for every job I’ve ever run.
I let her do it because I needed the information more than I needed her safe.
That makes me feel like a shit even though Nikita would have ended the call if I said too much.
“How much worse can it get before it reaches Maren?”
Nikita doesn’t answer right away, and the pause tells me more than a firm answer would have.