CHAPTER 20 Nadia #2
"The Italian operation," he says.
"Yes."
"On Viktor's timeline."
"Yes."
"Using information from my files."
I hold his gaze. "Yes."
He looks at me. He is very still in the way he's still when he's containing something rather than when he's at rest.
"Viktor wanted Dara to do it," I say.
He doesn't move.
"He gave her a job she couldn't have executed cleanly.
I took it instead." I hold his gaze. "I know that's not the explanation that makes this operationally acceptable.
I know I used your files without telling you.
I know I ran a cross-operation without flagging it.
" I pause. "I'm telling you now because you deserve the full version. "
He is quiet for a long moment.
Then he moves.
He crosses the kitchen in three strides and his hand comes to the side of my face and he kisses me with the specific quality of something that has been under pressure for a long time and has just found the place it was always going to go.
It is angry and it is desperate and it is the least constructed thing I've ever received from him, which means it is the most him, and I respond with the same quality — the unmanaged version, the true version, the one that has been building since a warehouse floor and a farmers market and a studio and a safehouse and a kitchen table we've been sitting at from opposite ends for weeks.
His hand is still at the side of my face and I can feel the slight tremor in his fingers. His thumb traces my cheekbone and his eyes hold mine and whatever calculation usually lives behind them is gone.
"Tell me to stop," he says. Not a command. An offering.
"No," I say.
His mouth comes back to mine and this kiss is different from the first one.
Slower. Deeper. A thorough exploration that takes the breath out of me.
His tongue slides against mine with deliberate intent and I make a small sound into his mouth, wanting, and I feel him register it, the tightening of his hand against my jaw.
He walks me backward through the flat. I don't look where we're going because I'm watching him.
The dark focus of his gaze. The way his jaw is set against whatever he's containing.
The bandage I put on his arm two nights ago is stark white against the dark of his shirt.
My back hits the wall in the short hall outside the bedroom and he holds me there, his hips pressing into mine, and I can feel him through the layers between us.
Hard. The rigid length of him against my stomach.
"Liam," I say, and I don't know what I'm asking for except more.
He pulls back just enough to look at me.
His hands move to the hem of my shirt and he draws it up slowly, his knuckles dragging against my skin, the heat of his hands leaving lines of warmth as they pass.
I lift my arms and he pulls the shirt over my head and drops it somewhere on the floor without looking where it lands.
His gaze drops to my chest. The plain black sports bra.
Functional and not designed for being looked at.
He looks at it the way he looks at everything, like he's solving it.
Then his thumbs hook under the band and he pulls it up and off and I'm bare from the waist up in front of him and his breath catches.
It's a small sound. Barely audible. But I hear it because I'm listening for it, and because I've been cataloguing this man's sounds for weeks and this one is new.
He doesn't touch me immediately. He just looks, his eyes moving over the curve of my breasts, the dark of my nipples already tight, and the looking itself is its own thing. I feel it as heat across my chest and my throat.
Then his hand rises and his palm covers my left breast.
His hand is rough. Calloused, the hand of a man who handles weapons and other implements of his profession, and the roughness against my skin makes my nipples tighten further. He weighs my breast in his palm and his thumb sweeps over the nipple and I let out a shaky exhale.
He bends his head.
His mouth replaces his thumb and the wet heat of his tongue drags across my nipple and my head falls back against the wall.
He takes his time. He works the nipple with lips and tongue, pulls it into his mouth, sucks with a deliberate intensity that goes through me to the place between my thighs.
I make a sound, a moan, raw and unguarded, and he answers it by sucking harder, his teeth grazing me, and his other hand finds my right breast and palms it, rolls the nipple between his thumb and forefinger until I'm pushing into his hands and my breathing has gone ragged.
He switches. Mouth to my right breast, hand to my left, and the dual sensation goes through me in straight lines down to between my legs. I am wet. I have been wet since the kiss. I am aware of it as a physical fact.
"Liam," I say again, and his name in my mouth sounds like a plea.
He lifts his head. His mouth is still hovering at my breast and his eyes find mine and his pupils are blown wide and the sight of it hits me. Liam affected. Liam unmanaged. Liam looking at me like he is starving and I am the only thing.
My hands find the hem of his shirt and I pull.
He helps me, reaching back and pulling it over his head in one motion, and then he is bare from the waist up too and I am looking at the broad planes of his chest and the muscle of his abdomen and the ridge of scar tissue along his left side that runs down and disappears below his waistband.
I have seen him shirtless before, in passing. This is different.
I touch him. My palms flat against his chest. The heat of him under my hands, the rise and fall of his breathing, the way his muscles tense under my touch.
I trace the scar with my fingertips and his jaw tightens.
I lean in and press my mouth to his collarbone and his breath catches against my lips.
I slide down.
My mouth moves over his chest. Lips and tongue across the contours of him. I feel the twitch of his stomach as I move lower. My knees hit the floor and I look up at him and his face is raw, almost pained, his jaw clenched tight.
My hands find his belt. I work it open with fingers less steady than I would like, the small clink of the buckle loud in the quiet of the flat. Button. Zipper. His hips are narrow and I push his trousers and his boxers down together and then he is in front of me and I can see all of him.
He's thick. The shaft flushed and hard, curving slightly upward. I look at him. I hear the rough exhale he makes when he sees me looking. I wrap my hand around the base of him and he twitches in my grip and I feel my own body clench in response.
I lean forward and take him in my mouth.
The sound he makes is not a moan. It is rougher than that.
Something dragged out of him from his chest, a sound that might be my name or might just be want.
I take him slowly, my tongue flat against the underside of him as I slide my lips down his length, tasting salt and skin and him.
He is big enough that I have to adjust, open my jaw wider, and I hear the sharp hiss he makes when I take him deeper.
I set a rhythm. Slow. Deliberate. My mouth sliding up and down his shaft while my hand works the base of him.
I press my tongue against the underside, trace the ridge of the head, swirl around the tip before taking him deep again.
I can feel his hand in my hair. Not pressing.
Just resting. His fingers tightening with each stroke of my mouth.
"Nadia," he says, and his voice is wrecked, ragged, and my name in that voice makes me moan around him. I feel him jerk in my mouth, his hips twitching forward on instinct before he controls himself.
He pulls me off.
His hand tightens in my hair and he draws me up and I rise on unsteady legs and he is kissing me again, hard and deep, and he tastes himself on my tongue and the combination of it does something to him I can feel.
His hands are at my waist, working my jeans open, pushing them down my hips along with my underwear, and I step out of them and then I am bare against him from chest to thigh and the skin-to-skin of it is almost too much.
He guides me backward through the bedroom door and onto the bed and I go.
He stands over me for a moment, looking.
His gaze moves over me with the same focused attention he brings to operational maps and I feel it everywhere it touches.
My throat. My breasts. My stomach. The flare of my hips. The wet between my thighs.
He lowers himself over me.
I feel his cock against my stomach, hard and hot and slick from my mouth, and I lift my hips toward him on instinct. He braces himself on one hand and reaches between us with the other and I feel the head of his cock slide through the wet of me, dragging across my clit, and I gasp.
He does it again. Slower. The friction is sharp and bright and I am twitching under him, chasing the pressure, wanting him inside me.
"Liam. Please."
He positions himself at my entrance and holds there. The head of his cock pressed against me and neither of us moving and I can feel the restraint of him in the tremor of his arms where he brackets my head.
"Look at me," he says.
I look. The hard angle of his jaw. The tension in his brow. The hunger in his eyes. He is holding himself on a leash and I can see the effort of it and I can see the precise moment he lets it go.
He pushes inside me.
Slowly. Inch by inch. The thick of him stretching me open and the sensation is everywhere at once.
The fullness. The pressure. The way my body yields around him and clings to him and tries to pull him deeper all at once.
I hear myself making sounds, small broken exhales, half-words that mean only yes and more and you, and he keeps pushing, deeper, until his hips are flush against mine and he is buried inside me completely.
He stops.