Chapter 10 #2
“I couldn’t watch it.” The words come out before I can stop them.
“I’ve spent five nights telling myself this arrangement is smart, and you’re just an asset I’m protecting.
Then that man closed his hand on you, and every lie I told myself went out the window at once.
I know it was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake while I was doing it. I did it anyway.”
She stares at me. The fury doesn’t leave her face, but the desire underneath it is the same as mine, and I recognize it because it’s wrecking her composure the exact way it’s wrecking mine.
“You don’t get to do that,” she says, quieter.
“You don’t get to almost blow four years of hiding because another man touched my wrist. You don’t get to act like no one’s allowed to put a hand on what belongs to you when nothing here belongs to you.
I’m not yours. I’m playing yours. There’s a difference, and you nearly got us both killed forgetting it. ”
“I haven’t forgotten it. That’s the problem.
” I take a step toward her, but she doesn’t move back, which is the only permission I’m going to get and more than I deserve.
“You want me to say it wasn’t about wanting you.
I can’t. I wanted to break his hand because it was on you.
That’s jealousy, and it overrode the plan before I could stop it, but I would do it again.
That is the most dangerous thing I’ve admitted to anyone in four years, and I’m saying it out loud because pretending I didn’t feel it is what almost got us killed. ”
The room is very quiet. Past the door, the club goes on without us, glasses clinking, low voices, and money changing hands.
“You should leave,” I tell her, because it’s the last honest thing I can offer her.
“The car’s downstairs. Platon will take you back to the house and I’ll finish this alone.
If you walk out that door right now, we go back to the arrangement, and I’ll never say another word about it. That’s yours to choose.”
She looks at the door then me before she crosses the room and takes a fistful of my shirt. She doesn’t leave.
I kiss her first. I’ve wanted to since she walked half a step ahead of me into a room that believes she was my wife, and the wanting has been building under every careful inch of distance I’ve kept all night.
When I kiss her, it isn’t gentle. She kisses me back with the same fury she was aiming at me a minute ago, teeth and heat, her hands twisting in my shirt to drag me closer, and the fight we were having turns into this without either of us deciding to let it.
“This is a mistake,” she says against my mouth, making the word sound like a dare.
“Then stop.”
“No.”
I get my hands into her hair and kiss her harder.
She bites my lip and pulls me by the shirt until the backs of her thighs hit the desk.
I lift her onto it, shove the desk lamp and a stack of papers out of the way, and step between her knees.
She’s already working my belt open while I drag the hem of her dress up her thighs, both of us rough with it, past pretending this is anything but what it is.
“Someone could walk in,” she says, and it comes out breathlessly instead of cautiously.
“Platon moved to the corridor when we came back here. No one opens this door but him.” I get her underwear off and drop it, push her knees wider, and look at her, flushed and furious, but wet and entirely done arguing. “Do you want me to stop?”
“Hell, no. Fuck me.” She hooks a heel behind my thigh and pulls. “Stop asking and touch me.”
I slide two fingers into her while I work her clit with my thumb, and she’s so slick and ready that her pussy clenches around my hand almost at once, a sound coming out of her that goes straight to my cock.
She’s louder than the first time I gave her an orgasm days ago, past managing herself, and every noise burns off another layer of the control I’ve worn all night.
I work her until she grabs my wrist and gasps that if I don’t get inside her now she’ll finish without me. With a breathless laugh, I free my cock and push into her in one stroke.
She cries out and I swallow it with my mouth. She’s hot and tight around my cock as she takes all of me at once while dragging her nails down my back through my shirt. She locks her heels against my ass so I can’t pull back even if I wanted to.
I don’t want to. I set a hard rhythm on the edge of that desk, one hand fisted in her hair and the other gripping her hip to hold her where I need her.
She meets every thrust, rolling her hips up to take me deeper while swearing at me, telling me harder in a voice stripped of every performance she’s given all night.
“This is what you couldn’t watch,” she says, ragged, her forehead against mine. “Someone else getting to have this.”
“No one else gets this.” I drive into her and feel her clench. “Say you understand that.”
“Make me believe it.”
I do. I get my thumb back on her clit without breaking rhythm and work her in fast circles while I fuck her, and she comes apart around my cock with my name more a gasp than a word.
Her pussy spasms hard enough to drag me to the edge with her.
She looks at me through it, and I bury myself deeper and come inside her with a groan I couldn’t stop if the door opened right now, while she keeps me locked against her with her heels and the wrecked look on her face.
Neither of us moves for a moment. Her forehead stays against mine, both of us breathing hard, the case and Vogt’s card sitting forgotten on the corner of the desk where the whole reason we came here waits for us to focus on it again.
The same thought comes back—the one that hit me the first night she was in my bed and that I haven’t let myself consider again.
I came inside her again and neither of us stopped to think about it.
I turn it over as I would any risk I’ve accepted with my eyes open.
I built four years of survival on never taking a risk I couldn’t undo.
This is the second one I’ve taken with this woman that I have no wish to undo at all, and that unsettles me more than the recklessness.
“We’re not calling this a mistake,” she says finally. Not a question.
“No.” I brush a strand of hair off her damp cheek, and she lets me. The plain domestic ease of the gesture frightens me more than the jealousy did, because I have no strategy for wanting this. “We’re not.”
Then my phone buzzes against my hip, once, cut short, pause, and once more, longer this time. It’s the pattern Platon only uses when he needs my attention, and I pull back enough to read the screen over her shoulder.
Vogt made a call the second he cleared the floor. Not to a buyer. He reported the case and the “associate” who stepped between him and Mrs. Rusakov, straight up the chain to Lazar Malenkov. Shilov doesn’t know you’re alive. He knows someone dangerous is guarding her, though, which is almost as bad.