Chapter 14
THE ELEVATOR opened on a hush of pale stone and city light.
Mariah stepped out first, heels silent on the runner, pulse sprinting while the rest of her kept its cool.
She didn’t look back to see if he followed.
She sensed him, heat and gravity, a presence that sharpened the air until it tasted like lightning.
Leif keyed the door. The mechanism clicked. The penthouse accepted them.
Inside, the lights were low, amber along the floor, a soft wash up the walls, the city beyond the windows glittering like a thousand witnesses.
She stopped halfway to the living room, the slit of her bronze dress whispering around her thigh, and turned.
He’d already closed the door, thrown the deadbolt, and set his palm against it, like he was staking claim to the night.
“Say it,” he told her, voice quiet and demanding. “Say you want this.”
She should’ve teased him. She should’ve made him work for it. Instead, the truth slipped out with uncontrolled intensity. “I want this.” Her chin lifted. “I want you.”
He crossed the distance in three strides. No smile. No pretense. His hand bracketed her jaw, thumb riding the slick heat of her lower lip, and then his mouth took hers. The kiss didn’t ask, it found. Didn’t coax, it consumed.
She rose into it with a sound that betrayed how hard she’d held herself together downstairs. He tasted like whiskey and danger, like a man who chose what he took and took what he chose. He tasted like the one thing she shouldn’t want and couldn’t resist.
The door was at her back before she knew he’d moved her.
His forearm planted above her head, the other hand cinched her waist, and he kissed her until thought thinned to a thread.
The thread snapped when his palm slid south, fisted in silk, and dragged her tight to the proof of what she was doing to him.
Heat jolted through her. Need answered need like sparks catching tinder.
“Bedroom,” he murmured against her mouth.
“Make me walk,” she countered, breathless and reckless. “Make me earn it.”
His eyes darkened. “Then leave something behind with every step.”
Her laugh was a tremor. “Deal.”
He stepped back an inch, enough to see her, to mark the way the dress clung to her ribs and the lift of her chest. She set her palms to his lapels, smoothed downward, and tugged his jacket open.
Buttons gleamed at his cuffs. She undid one, then the next, kissing the inside of his wrist when she freed it.
His breath hitched, barely. She bit him there, a shallow scrape with her teeth that tasted like steel and skin.
He tipped her face up with two fingers. “You leave the heels on.”
“Yes, Boss.” She heard the surrender in her voice and didn’t flinch from it.
“Again.”
“Yes.” She met his gaze. “Boss.”
Something in him relaxed and sharpened all at once.
He tugged the zipper at her spine, the gradual glide of metal a hot line she experienced in places that had nothing to do with skin.
Air kissed her back. Silk slackened and fell.
She let the dress slide off her shoulders, caught it at her hips, and stepped away from the door.
The first thing she left behind was bronze silk that pooled at their feet like she’d melted into want.
She wore lace and nothing else. Not shy.
Not coy. Hot color rose under her skin while the city threw jewels across her shoulders.
His gaze dragged down and back up, calculated enough to seem like hands.
He shrugged out of the jacket and dropped it on the entry table.
She walked backward toward the living room, unhooking the tiny clasp between her breasts as she went.
The lace loosened. He followed like a tide, coatless, sleeves rolled, hunger in his eyes and control in the lines of his body.
She let the bra go when she reached the edge of a rug, tossed it aside, and watched his mouth go hard.
“Touch yourself,” he said.
Her stomach swooped. “Right here and now?”
“Here. Now.” He didn’t slow. “Show me what you’ve been thinking about since the balcony.”
She slid a hand down—the curve of her waist, the soft plane of her belly—until heat welcomed her palm.
She stroked herself through the lace, shoulders braced to the window, city at her back, him in front of her like a storm she’d invited in.
His gaze went heavier, hotter. He stopped within arm’s reach but didn’t close the distance.
“Under,” he ordered softly.
She slipped fingers beneath the lace and found exactly what he’d put there.
Her knees nearly gave. She held herself up with a hand on the glass and breathed through the shock of it, the obscene relief of no more pretending.
He watched every move, eyes flicking from her face to her hand to the pulse in her throat.
“Look at me.”
She did, and the filth of meeting his eyes while she touched herself set her skin on fire. His control looked like a loaded weapon he’d chosen not to fire yet. The room felt like a fuse.
“Enough.” He finally closed the space and caught her wrist, drawing her hand out slick and shaking. He brought it to his mouth and licked her fingers one by one, eyes on hers the whole time, making a meal of her need. Heat tore through her so fast she had to lock her knees to stay standing.
“Bedroom,” he said again, voice deeper. “Now.”
She turned, intending to obey. He hauled her back the last inch and bent her over the back of the sofa instead, one palm flattening the small of her back to keep her there, his mouth at her shoulder. He bit her, not to hurt, to mark, and she arched like he’d drawn electricity across her skin.
“You said make you walk,” he reminded, lips at her ear. “You didn’t say how straight.”
She couldn’t help laughing, wrecked and bright. “You’re impossible.”
“I’m inevitable.”
He slid the lace down her thighs without looking away from her face reflected in the window.
She stepped out of it, one foot, then the other, heels still on, feeling indecent and invincible.
He stroked the backs of her thighs, then higher, and she folded over the sofa with a breath that broke on his name.
He didn’t take her then, didn’t give her what her body was begging for.
He pressed his mouth between her shoulder blades and made her wait while he unbuttoned his shirt, each popped thread a small surrender.
She looked over her shoulder in time to watch him shrug it off, muscles and scars catching the light, belt already loosening.
“Bedroom,” she pleaded, for real this time.
He caught her mouth in a kiss that tasted like approval and punishment and stepped back to let her up. “Go.”
She did, hips swinging because she couldn’t not, skin alive everywhere he’d touched and everywhere he hadn’t.
She left the lace on the sofa, the taste of herself on his tongue, the ghost of his bite at her shoulder, the city gasping at the glass.
She reached the hallway and paused at his look—dark, claiming.
She lifted a hand and hooked a finger, calling him with nothing but her smile.
He came like a verdict.
They stripped more as they went. He caught her at the console table and slid his hands up her ribs to her breasts, thumbs circling until she was panting.
She reached back and dragged his belt free, tossed it, then caught the waistband and shoved it down.
He took over, formal trousers pooling at his ankles, the hard length of him catching the light.
She bit her lip and he swore, a quiet, vicious word that seemed like worship and wasn’t.
“Bed,” he said.
“Bed,” she echoed, but detoured for the wall.
He pinned her there with his body while her hands mapped him like she’d paid admission—shoulders, chest, the hard cut of his abdomen, the V that arrowed into heat, the weight of him hot against her palm.
He shuddered, caught her wrist, and lifted it to the wall above her head, palm open, fingers splayed where his would fit.
He placed his hand over hers, pressed. The contact was nothing and everything, a brand where no ink showed.
“Mine for the night,” he said against her mouth.
“Yours.” She surprised herself by meaning it with something like relief.
He spun her and walked her the last steps, his hand at the side of her throat—command, not choke—his mouth at her ear promising everything and delivering more with every breath.
He pushed her to the edge of the bed and she went down with a bounce, hair wild, mouth open.
He stood at the foot and took in the sight of her like it might undo him.
“Legs,” he said. “Wider.”
She held his stare and opened for him. He knelt, big hands sliding under her knees to set them over his shoulders, and dragged her to the edge where he wanted her. He didn’t start gentle. He started right. His mouth found her and the world went bright.
She broke on a gasp and a curse, fingers fisting in the duvet. He ate her like a secret he’d kept too long, like he’d been waiting all night to live here. He learned her fast, found what made her climb and what made her fall, and kept her exactly where he wanted her until she had to beg.
“Please,” she moaned, shameless and shaking. “Leif, please.”
“Look at me.”
She forced her eyes open and the sight—his mouth on her, the heat in his gaze, the promise written in the depth of his eyes—tipped her straight over.
The orgasm hit hard enough to blur the city.
She rode it with her heels biting his back and his hands holding her exactly where he wanted her, and he didn’t stop until she went liquid.
He came up slow, kissed the inside of her knee, then the tender place where her thigh met her body, then the soft throb of her clit with the lightest brush that made her jolt.
“Again,” he said, and she almost cried with how much she wanted to obey and how impossible it felt.
“Need you,” she whispered.
“You have me.”