CHAPTER 21 #2
He is bare from the waist down. I did not hear him undo the trousers. The bicep seam runs a steady gold, the inside of the prosthetic wrist hotter where the lattice flares against my thigh, and his cock is hard against my leg — heavy, warm, his hand wrapping the base and guiding it slow.
He holds there at the threshold, the head just notched against me, and waits — the soldier's discipline of a man who will not advance one inch on a position he has not been cleared to take. Marcus's hands at my shoulders, holding me steady. Luca's hands cup my jaw.
"Yes," I say, before he can ask again, because I cannot stand the held breath, and he slides into me in one slow even press that pulls a sound out of me I do not recognize — half-vowel, half-want — and Luca's mouth catches the sound against my mouth.
Adrian's human hand splayed warm against my spine.
His prosthetic on my sternum. He goes slow at first, slow enough that I name each stroke — the stretch, the sharp warm where his hip meets mine, the bronze flattening the breath out of me where it touches the bone — and Luca's mouth on mine and Marcus's mouth at the cord of my neck, low under the cobalt-blue ends of my hair, and Marcus's hand has slid down between them to find my clit from the side, two fingers, steady.
Some still-running diagnostic in me waits for the part of this that should feel like surrender, like a perimeter handed to three armed men at once, and the part never comes; what comes instead is the unguarded thing, and I cannot work out whether that is safer or far worse.
"Adrian. " His name a second time.
"Stay with me. " Low. Stay the way he uses it when he wants me to keep my eyes open.
I keep them open. He picks up the pace — not fast, only firmer, the deepness of him in me beginning to throb at the inside of my pelvis — and Marcus's fingers on my clit are steady and Luca's mouth has gone to my breast and I am coming, the first time, sudden and bright, bitten back in Luca's mouth.
Adrian holds. He does not finish in me. His voice broken at the edges: "Not in you. Renner has the towel."
Luca, against my mouth, smiling barely: He has thought of everything.
Adrian eases out, careful, the prosthetic still flat on my sternum.
He takes the small white workshop towel from Luca's hand and finishes against it at the side of the bench, forehead going down against my shoulder, the prosthetic cradling the back of my head, his human hand working tight and quick.
He says my name when he comes. Just once.
Low. Eliza. The bronze flares the brightest I have seen and then settles back to a steady held gold, a forge gone quiet at the edge of a long shift.
He stays at my shoulder a long minute. Marcus's hand comes up to the back of Adrian's neck for one half-breath — a brother's hand, the only place the three of them touch each other at all — and then it is gone and back on my hip.
"Yours," Adrian says to Marcus over the top of my head, soldier-clean, no jealousy.
"Quinn. " Marcus's voice at my ear.
I turn my face to him. The slate shirt is gone — undone during the last minute, fallen behind him onto the workshop chair.
The throat-scar a thin pale line under his jaw; the bullet-graze at the left bicep white and flat; the two parallel knife scars on the back of his left hand visible, decorative-looking, almost intentional.
His chest bare, olive-warm — a man precisely as strong as he needs to be and not a pound more.
"Bench," he says. Palms at my shoulders, guiding me back.
Luca's hands lower my head to the pillows.
Marcus climbs onto the bench, barefoot, kneels between my thighs and looks down at me like he is rewriting his economy in real time — which is exactly the phrase that flashes through my head and exactly what he is doing.
He goes utterly motionless above me — the practiced restraint of a man who reads the other party and makes them close the last distance, so the choice is always theirs and on the record.
One hand cradles the back of my hip; his other rests open on the drop-cloth, palm up, an offer rather than a demand.
I push up and meet him. He breathes out, slow, and takes the meeting for the yes it is.
"Eyes on me, Eliza. " The broker's reflex even now, even with everything else in him stripped down to the one thing: "Let me read the figure of you while I do this."
I look.
He slides in one slow inch. Then another.
He stops at the second inch and breathes very still against my mouth, like he will break if he does not stop.
Luca's hand at my forehead, pushing my hair back; Adrian's prosthetic hand in my left hand, fingers interlaced, bronze warm against my palm, the titanium ring on the human thumb cool against my knuckle.
I am still warm and loose from Adrian, and I had expected my body to flinch at the asking-again so soon, the way a worked muscle flinches at a second load — and instead it opens for the second man easier than the first, which is not a thing I have a file for, which I would have sworn an hour ago was not a thing my body would consent to.
I do the small dangerous arithmetic anyway: I have let two men inside me tonight and there is a third still waiting, and I am not afraid of the number. The not-being-afraid is the part that frightens me.
Marcus's tell is the voice, and the voice has gone to nothing — he swallows once, the throat-scar pale in the amber light, and lets the silence hold for him.
He moves, slow, until I have lost track of slow and he is fully in me, and I tell him with my hips there is no adjust, there is only more, and he moves.
He fucks me at the cadence of the sentence he is making with his body — paused at the punctuation, lengthened at the music, faster only at the answers — and at some point I have wrapped my legs around his waist and reached up to find the wire-scar at his throat and run my thumb across it.
Marcus makes a sound I have never heard a man make, the sound of someone losing the thing he has been guarding for eleven years.
"Eliza Quinn. " He is not whispering. He is saying it. "Eliza Quinn."
I come for him. The second time. Loud. Luca's hand presses warm against my mouth at the last instant — not to silence me, only because I had reached for him, and his palm is what I reach for. I bite down lightly on the heel of his hand. He does not flinch.
Marcus stays in me through it. He has held to the edge himself. When my cunt stops fluttering he leans down, mouth to my mouth: "I am going to come, darling. Inside you. Tell me if that is wrong."
"Inside me."
He comes the way he does everything — quietly, and for once with no language at all.
The man who narrates every room he is in has nothing to say at the one moment he most would; the running ledger simply stops mid-line, the account closed without a figure, and there is only his breath against my collarbone and his forehead going down after it. Three slow thrusts and stillness.
His hand finds mine where Adrian's was, and Adrian has not moved his fingers — three hands interlaced for a half-breath, Adrian's prosthetic, Marcus's, mine — and then Marcus is up, easing out, palm flat on my sternum like that is the place he checks the heartbeat.
"Renner. Yours."
Luca has been at my head all night. He has kissed me.
Held my face. He has not been in me. From the head of the bench he reaches back one-handed and peels the white tee off over his head in his slow careful way — chestnut falling forward, the platinum lock pushed back behind the ear with the same two fingers that seat a hair-fine wire into its groove — and comes down onto the bench between my thighs.
He does not enter me yet. He puts his mouth on me.
His mouth on my cunt, slow. He did this once on the floor of the server farm with the decryption console humming and three monitors casting blue, and this is the careful inverse of that night — calibration instead of catch, mapping instead of caught.
His tongue on my clit, his fingers spread against the insides of my thighs, no hurry.
He has been at my mouth and my hands all night, and he has been waiting through every minute of the other two with a patience I have learned to feel as intimacy.
My hands find his hair. Chestnut and platinum mix in my fingers.
My left hand, the wrist with the surgical scar exposed, slides up over the back of his neck where the small puncture scar lives, and Luca makes a soft sound against me and I come for the third time, slow, a long deep one, his tongue flat against my clit and his fingers easing into me and curling.
He lifts. Climbs the bench. Kisses my mouth — the warm-salt of me on him; I taste myself on him and it does not embarrass me, which a month ago I would have flagged as evidence — and guides himself into me and slides home in one long even press that goes farther than I expected because I am wet and open and have been since Adrian.
"Querida. " Soft, against my temple. A small Spanish exhalation, half-prayer, the English gone out of him the way it goes when the count goes. "Dios. Quédate. Quédate conmigo."
I stay. Marcus's hand at my breast. Adrian's prosthetic at my sternum, the bronze now the steady gold of a man who has finished and is at peace.
Luca's hips slow, slow, slow. He counts — I can almost hear the count he is not making aloud, the rhythm of a man who has lived inside calibrated intervals so long they have become a second pulse — and on the twelfth thrust he stills inside me, hand at my jaw, mouth at my mouth, and comes.
"Bonita," he says, against my mouth. The Spanish endearment I have not heard from him. The one his grandmother used. "Bonita."