CHAPTER SIX #2
“That’s it. That’s all of it. Breathe through your nose.”
“Both hands on me. One around my cock and one flat on my chest, so I know where you are the whole time.”
Then he turned me over.
He got a hand spread wide on my sternum and lifted me up off the mattress with it, so that I was on my knees with my back against his chest and my whole weight sitting in his palm.
He got into my pussy in one long push and stopped there.
“There’s the rest of it,” he said. “Hold still for me.”
Something happened in his chest. It was not a word and it was not a sound a man makes. It came up through his ribs into my back and I did not care in the slightest what it was.
He fucked me like that. Slow to start and then not slow, his hand still flat, every stroke going through the hand.
“You feel that? That’s you doing that. I’m just standing here.”
That was a lie and we both knew it. He had my whole weight in one hand and his cock in me to the root and he was not standing anywhere.
And then, with no word about it and no change at all in his grip, he lifted me off and turned me and put me on my back where I could see the door.
He did not explain it. He did not so much as look at the door himself. He put me where I would not be facing away from it.
He hooked my knees over his arms and got back into my pussy and looked at me the whole way in.
“Tell me where I am.”
“In my pussy,” I said, and he made me say it a second time while he was moving, so that the word came apart in the middle.
“Nope. Look at me. You’re gonna come with your eyes open.”
I looked at him.
His eyes did not change shape. I was staring straight into them and I can swear to that in front of anybody. They changed anyway.
Something came forward behind them and looked out at me, black and unhurried and enormously patient, and the word Luca had given me for it was panther. It did not blink. Neither did I.
His hands never lost control. Everything else in that room did. His hands stayed exactly as steady as they had been in the doorway, and that was the filthiest thing that has ever happened to me.
His thumb came down on my clit.
“Now. Come on my cock, little courier. Let me feel it.”
And I did. Or he did first — his cock going deep and stopping there, that sound in his chest again, his hand flattening out across my sternum.
I have gone back over it many times since and I still cannot put the two of us in order. I know his cock was still in me at the end of it and his thumb was still resting on my clit. I know his rings were still on my hip and they were the same temperature as I was.
He got off the bed and picked his own shirt up off the floor and dropped it over me, and I put it on because it was there.
Then he brought me the water he had come up with, cracked the cap, and set it in my hand. Cold off the neck of the bottle, over the salt of him.
I drank half of it with both hands and my hands were not steady, and he watched them not be steady and said nothing about that either.
He sat down on the crate. He did not sit on the bed.
“Drink all of it. You didn’t drink anything at dinner.”
“You were watching what I drank at dinner.”
“I watch what everybody drinks at dinner. It’s most of my job.” He turned the lamp switch over in his fingers without pressing it. “You want the light on or off when I go?”
That one. Not the other two. That is the question that took my legs out from under me — a man asking about a lamp, in a room with no lock, after all of that.
My eyes went hot with no permission from me at all.
“I don’t want you to go.”
I heard myself say it and I did not take it back. I would have said worse than that to keep him in the room.
He didn’t make me pay for it. No joke, no smile, nothing said back. It was the only mercy available in that building and he found it on the first try.
Below us the compressor kicked on again. It ran four seconds and quit mid-cycle with the pressure still in it, and the pipe knocked once and went quiet.
Marcus’s head came up.
That machine cuts out at the top of its cycle and never anywhere else. Somebody had been standing at the panel with a hand on the breaker, and now they were not.
“Marcus, somebody’s got a hand on—”
“I know.” He was off the crate and between me and the door before my feet were on the floor. “Stay where you are.”
He didn’t have to open it.
Adrian was in the doorway. Ten past two in the morning, filling the frame the way he fills everything, the yard lamp behind him and the wrecked bed in front of him.
Marcus said his name, quiet, with no question anywhere in it, which out of Marcus is the whole alarm.
“She’s staying where she is,” Marcus said.
“No. She isn’t.” Adrian did not look at him while he said it. “Victoria. Up.”
He came past Marcus without touching him, picked my jeans up off the floor, and put them in my hands. He did not look at the bed while he did it, and the room went cold the way a yard goes cold when a wolf comes into it.
“You’re not sleeping over this yard tonight. Get dressed.”
He held up the window catch. Fresh file marks shone along the tongue.
“Somebody was on this roof while we were downstairs,” he said. “I killed the compressor so we could hear the roof boards. There’s a room over the inner stair. No outside access.”
Marcus took the catch from him. “Show me where they stood.”
I pulled on my jeans under Marcus’s shirt. The warmth of the bed was still on my back. Somebody had measured the distance from that bed to the window before either of us got into it.