12. Kat #2
His hands map me like he's memorizing coordinates he'll need later, every place he touches lights up like it's the first time anyone's touched it. I drag my palm down his chest, over the bandage, feel him hiss and push into my hand instead of away from it.
I never let anyone see me want anything this much. Not since I learned wanting things out loud gets them taken.
I want this anyway.
Eleven years I have made certain no one ever saw me need.
Need is a lever. Need is the exact place they put the crowbar when they take a person apart slow and legal, like they took my mother apart.
I learned young to keep mine sealed where nobody could get a hand on it.
Yet here I am, bare under a man who counts exits in his sleep, letting him watch precisely how much I want him, with the lights on and my whole face uncovered, handing him on purpose the one weapon I swore on two graves I would never let anybody hold.
The terror of that and the heat of it fused somewhere around his mouth on my throat, and I am not trying to pull them apart anymore.
I want to be known that far down even if it's the thing that finally kills me. Especially, God help me, if it's him.
His mouth drops lower, and I stop thinking about anything I've ever denied.
There's only his weight, his breath uneven against my skin, the low sound he makes when I say his name again like it's the only word I remember.
He asks once more, quiet against my ear, if I'm sure, and I answer with my hands on him, pulling him closer, telling him without words that I have never been more certain of anything in my life.
He kisses his way down my throat, my collarbone, the curve of my breast, unhurried like he has all night to catalog every place I forgot could feel like this.
My fingers find his hair and I try to pull him back up, some vestige of sense reminding me that a man with bruised ribs and a bullet graze along his side shouldn't be doing any of this.
"Naveed. You're hurt."
He doesn't stop. His mouth drags lower, over my stomach, and he smiles against my skin, which is somehow worse than if he'd ignored me completely.
"I've wanted you since the night you climbed out that window in four-inch heels and called me an overreacting bodyguard," he says, voice low and rough against my hip. "You don't get to worry about my ribs now. You should've thought of that before you woke up a sleeping tiger."
Dear God, what have I gotten myself into. Somewhere in the left side of my brain I'm trying to reconcile this man right here with the man I've come to know, the one I'd more than once thought kept his own leash too tight.
I laugh, breathless, the sound breaks apart entirely when his mouth reaches the inside of my thigh. Every rational thought I have evacuates at once. There is no hiding this, not with his hands spreading my legs wider, not with his eyes locked on mine like he's daring me to look away first.
I don't.
His tongue finds my clit and I arch off the bed, a sound tearing out of me that I don't recognize as my own. He groans against me, the vibration of it obscene, I fist the sheets because I need something to hold onto that isn't his hair, isn't his shoulders, isn't the ribs I'm supposedly protecting.
"Naveed…fuck…"
"Say it again." He lifts his head just enough to speak, breath hot against slick skin. "Say my name like that again."
I do. Twice. Three times, when his fingers slide into me alongside his mouth, the two sensations together short-circuit every thought I have left.
He works me with a patience that should be illegal in a man who runs at 0500 and counts exits before he counts anything else, like he's got nowhere else to be, like the only mission that matters tonight is watching me come apart.
"You're close," he says, and it's not a question. He knows my body better after ten minutes than men I've slept with for months. "I can feel it. Give it to me, Katarina."
The full use of my name does something to me that his fingers alone couldn't. I shatter around him, hips rocking against his mouth, his name breaking out of me in pieces. He doesn't let up until I'm boneless, until I'm begging him with a hand fisted weakly in his hair to stop, please, I can't—
He kisses his way back up my body instead, slow, deliberate, like he's rewarding himself for good behavior. When he reaches my mouth I taste myself on him and some instinct with no name in me responds to that more than it should.
"You didn't stop," I whisper against his lips.
"I don't stop when I want something." His hips settle between my thighs, the hard line of him pressing against me through fabric that suddenly feels like the only thing standing between me and everything I've been avoiding for weeks. "I told you. Sleeping tiger."
I reach for the waistband of his boxers and he catches my wrist, pins it gently to the pillow beside my head.
"Ribs," I remind him, breathless, half-laughing, half-desperate.
"I don't feel them." His mouth drops to my ear, and his voice drops with it, rougher, hungrier, a tone I've never heard from him before, not in the weeks I've observed his silences, his clipped sentences and his refusal to waste a single unnecessary word.
"Right now the only thing I feel is how wet you are for me.
How badly I want to be inside you. How long I've thought about exactly this. "
"You never said anything."
"I'm saying it now." He grinds down against me, slow, deliberate, the friction even through the last layer of fabric enough to make my hips buck up to meet his. "Tell me you want this. I need to hear it."
"I want this." My voice is wrecked. "I want you. Now, Naveed Safar, please…"
He shoves his pants and boxers down in one fell swoop and I catch my first real look at him, thick, hard, flushed, and any lingering shred of hesitation dissolves completely.
He reaches for the condom in his wallet with a steadiness that undoes me almost as much as his mouth did minutes ago, this soldier's precision even here, even now, rolling it on while his eyes never leave my face.
"Okay?" he asks, checking in even mid-storm.
"Yes. God, yes."
He pushes into me slow, and the stretch makes me gasp, my nails biting into his shoulders hard enough that he hisses through his teeth. He stills once he's fully seated, forehead dropping to mine, breathing hard.
"Fuck, Kat." The curse sounds foreign in his mouth, that clipped soldier's economy abandoning every rule it's ever followed. "You feel…Christ. I'm not going to last if you keep looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you actually want me here." His hips draw back, then drive forward, the answer dies in my throat, replaced by a moan I couldn't muffle if I tried. "Like I'm not just a weapon you tolerate standing guard at your door."
"You're not," I manage. "You're not just that. You're…God, right there, don't stop…"
Bless his heart, he doesn't. He builds a rhythm that starts controlled and unravels by degrees, every thrust punctuated by a rasped word against my throat, my jaw, my mouth.
I grind up to meet him, matching him thrust for thrust, and the sound of skin against skin fills the room alongside both our ragged breathing.
"Harder," I beg, and he breaks loose at the word.
He hikes my leg higher around his waist and drives into me deeper, faster, the bed frame knocking softly against the wall, his hand sliding down to find my clit and circle it with the same devastating precision he brings to everything else in his life.
"You're going to come again," he growls against my ear. "I want to feel it. Want to feel you fall apart around my cock the way you did on my tongue."
The dirty words from a man who has said maybe forty sentences to me in three weeks do something reckless and electric to my body. I didn't know I needed this, needed him unraveled, undone, growling filth against my skin like the discipline finally gave out and this is what's underneath it.