CHAPTER 20 Nadia #3
His forehead drops to mine and we breathe together, our mouths inches apart, sharing the air between us.
I can feel his pulse inside me. The twitch of his cock as my body adjusts around him.
The grip of me tightening on him. I am impossibly full.
Stretched. Inside me in a way that has nothing to do with operations or handlers or any of the architecture of the last two months and everything to do with this.
His body inside mine. His breath on my lips. His weight against me.
"Move," I whisper. "Liam. I need."
He pulls back slowly. So slowly. Until only the head of his cock is inside me and I feel every inch of the withdrawal, the drag of him against me, the clutch of my body trying to keep him.
Then he thrusts back in. One long deep stroke that takes the air out of my lungs and makes my back arch off the bed.
He sets a rhythm. Deep and unhurried, each stroke measured, pulling almost all the way out before driving back in to the hilt. It is not fucking. Not yet. It is something else. Something closer to a man trying to reach a place in me he can only get to this way.
I wrap my legs around his waist and lock my ankles at the small of his back.
The angle lets him go deeper. I feel the head of his cock press against the deepest part of me, the bright sharp ache of it bleeding into pleasure, and I cry out and he does it again, finding the spot, hitting it with the precision of a man who maps things.
His pace quickens. The measured rhythm gives way to something harder.
Faster. The sound of skin against skin filling the room, wet and immediate.
I can hear myself. The choked sounds escaping my throat with each thrust. I can hear him.
Low sounds from deep in his chest. My name in his mouth, broken.
"Feel you," he says, between thrusts. "Nadia. I can feel you."
I can feel myself. The tightening in my core. The coiled tension that winds tighter with each stroke. My hands grip his back, my nails digging into the muscle, and I know I am leaving marks and I do not care. I want him to feel me on his skin for days.
The pressure builds. Crests. I am close. He must feel it because he shifts, changes the angle, and his thumb finds my clit and circles it with the same deliberate pressure he applies to everything.
"Come," he says. "Nadia. Come for me."
I break.
It is not a wave. It is a seizing, shuddering thing that grips him inside me and does not let go.
I hear myself say his name and I feel my body clench and release around him in pulses, and through the haze of it I feel him follow.
His rhythm faltering. His hips stuttering.
A sound torn out of his chest as he spills inside me, hot and deep, his forehead pressed to mine as both of us come apart.
He does not pull out. He stays where he is, softening inside me, his weight settling onto my body in a way that is not a burden. My legs fall open around him, loose and trembling. His breath is hot against my neck. I can feel his heartbeat against my chest, rapid and hard, slowing by degrees.
We lie there in the quiet of the safehouse.
The laundromat below us is closed at this hour and the city is doing its three in the morning thing through the walls, distant and uncaring, and I feel the weight of what we have done settle over us.
Not just the sex. Everything before it. Every choice and near-miss and close call that brought us to this room and to this bed and to this moment where his body is still joined to mine and I cannot tell where I end and he begins.
Liam lifts his head. His eyes are softer now, the raw edges gone. His hand comes up to my face and his thumb traces my cheekbone and the touch is impossibly gentle for a man who was inside me like that a moment ago.
"Next time," he says, his voice rough and low. "You tell me."
I nod against his palm. "I'll tell you."
He pulls out slowly and the loss of him makes me wince. Oversensitive. Aching. The tender throb of a body well-used. He settles beside me and pulls me against him, my back to his chest, his arm heavy across my waist. I can feel him against me. The heat of him. The steady rhythm of his breathing.
We do not talk about Dara. We do not talk about the Italian operation or the Irish operation or the fact that I ran a job behind his back using his intelligence and he had to track me through it.
That conversation is coming. The way I know a storm is coming when the air goes still and green.
But not now. Now there is only this. The press of his body against mine.
The slowing of our heartbeats. The dark quiet of the room.
I close my eyes.
Outside, somewhere in the city, the Italians are reviewing an access log and the Irish are waiting for a briefing I have not prepared and Viktor is probably already planning the next operation and Dara is somewhere walking on her knee that shifts in cold weather and does not know how close she came to a building she would not have walked out of.
I am in this bed. I am in this man's arms.
For now, that is enough.
I do not sleep.
He does, eventually. I feel it in the change of his breathing first, the slow descent into the rhythm of a man whose body has finally accepted that the day is over.
His arm stays heavy across my waist. His chest rises and falls steady against my back.
The bandage on his arm has stayed clean, which is something.
I lie very still.
I think about Italian corridors and dock access logs and the way Viktor's voice goes flat when he is performing patience rather than exercising it.
I think about Dara at the apartment in Astoria with the light on.
I think about a job that was hers tonight that I took without telling either of them, and a man in this bed who tracked me through it and came to me bleeding and said you are not disposable and meant it.
I think about you matter said in the register of a man who does not say things he does not mean.
I think about my father, who declined an assignment and died for it and did not have anywhere else to be when he made the decision.
I have somewhere else to be.
It is in this bed.
Which is the problem, and is not the problem, and which I am going to have to sit with for longer than the four hours between now and morning if I am going to do the thing I have been turning in my head since Viktor's voicemail last week.
The thing I have not said yet. The thing I have been building toward without permitting myself to look at it directly, which has the shape of a coffee shop in a neighborhood designed to be unmemorable and a story I have not yet constructed.
I close my eyes.
I do not sleep.
But I stay.