CHAPTER 23 Liam
Liam
I kiss her like a man who has stopped managing things.
My hand finds the back of her neck and I pull her to me and the kiss is not careful.
It is not the version we had in the safehouse kitchen, which was a question.
It is not the version we had in the safehouse bedroom, which was an answer.
This is the version we have been waiting to have in this specific room.
Weeks of watching her cross this house and not being allowed to do this in it. I am done not doing this.
She makes a sound against my mouth, small, involuntary, the kind of sound that bypasses everything and goes straight to the part of me that has been losing this war.
Her hands are at my jacket, pulling, and I shrug it off without breaking the kiss, and then her fingers are at the buttons of my shirt and mine are at the zipper of her cardigan and we are the specific kind of clumsy that happens when urgency meets too many layers of clothing.
"Fuck," she says against my mouth, because her sleeve has caught on her wrist and I am trying to pull my shirt over my head at the same time, and we are tangled in the middle of the study in the grey afternoon light and it would be funny if it were not so urgent.
I get her cardigan off. She gets my shirt off.
We stand there breathing, her chest rising and falling, and I look at her.
Really look. The way I have not let myself look in this room.
Her pupils are blown wide and her lips are swollen from kissing and the thing she has been keeping under the controlled face is at the surface and she is not putting it away.
"The bedroom," I say.
"No," she says. Her hand flattens on my bare chest. "Here. I do not want to walk somewhere and lose the temperature of this. I need to feel you now."
I cut her off with my mouth.
We move. I am not tracking logistics. I am tracking the heat of her and the taste of her and the way her body gives against mine when I walk her backward until her thighs hit the desk. The Brennan file slides to the floor. Neither of us cares.
I pull her shirt free from her waistband. She reaches behind herself and unclasps her bra with the specific efficiency of someone who does not waste movement, and then she is bare from the waist up and I stop.
I stop because I have to. Because she is in front of me in this office, the office where I make decisions, and she is without the layers I have been accounting for.
Her breasts are small and the cold of the study has tightened her nipples and she is watching me watch her and her breathing has gone shallow.
"Liam," she says. Just my name. A reminder that looking is not enough.
I put my hands on her waist and I bend and I take one nipple in my mouth and she arches into me with a sound I will think about for the rest of my life.
Her hand comes up to the back of my head, fingers in my hair, holding me to her.
I work her with my lips and my tongue and the graze of my teeth and she makes another sound, a moan she tries to swallow and does not quite manage.
I give the same attention to her other breast until she is trembling under my hands.
I want to take my time. I want to catalogue every reaction. But she is reaching for my belt and I am reaching for hers and we are past slow.
I get her trousers open. She kicks off her shoes and I push her trousers and her underwear down her hips in one motion and she steps out of them and then she is standing in my study in nothing but her socks and the grey light and she is.
"You are beautiful," I say. Not because it is the thing to say. Because it is true and I cannot not say it.
Something flickers across her face. She reaches for my belt and this time she gets it open. The button. The zipper. Then her hand wraps around my cock and I lose all ability to form sentences.
She strokes once. Twice. My forehead drops to her shoulder and I breathe through the feeling of her hand on me.
"Wait," I say. "Wait. If you keep doing that."
She makes a sound that might be a laugh, might be something else, and releases me.
I get my wallet from the discarded trousers. I find what I need. She takes it from my hand and tears the wrapper and she rolls it onto me with the same focused precision she applies to everything, and the precision of it undoes me as much as anything else.
I step close. I put my hands on her waist. I turn her around.
She goes still. Not resistant. Surprised. She looks over her shoulder at me and there is a question in her eyes and I hold her gaze.
"I want to see all of you," I say. "But this time I need to take you this way. Is that all right."
"Yes," she says. No hesitation. "Yes."
She braces her hands on the desk. The desk I was sitting at four minutes ago, reviewing the Brennan data. The same surface. The same room. Everything is different.
I step behind her. I run my hands down her back.
Her spine, the indentation of her waist, the flare of her hips.
She is lean and strong and the grey light catches the definition of muscle and I think about weeks of watching her move through this house without being able to put my hands on her in it, and now I am here, and she is trembling.
I reach around her. I find her. Hot and wet and ready, and the sound I make is not a word. I stroke through her, learn her, find her clit and circle it and she drops her head between her shoulders and moans.
"Tell me," I say. "Tell me what feels good."
"That," she manages. "Right there. Do not stop, do not."
I do not stop. I keep my fingers where she needs them and I feel her getting closer. The tension in her thighs. The breath going ragged. She is saying "I need you inside me, I need it now, please, Liam."
I position myself at her entrance. One hand on her hip, the other guiding myself, and I push in.
Slowly. So slowly. She is tight and hot and I want to drive into her but I make myself go slow because I need her to feel this. Every inch.
"Oh god," she breathes, and her back arches, and I sink deeper until I am fully inside her and we both go still.
She is all around me. Hot and slick and tight. I can feel her pulse around my cock and I am holding on to my control by the thinnest margin I have left.
"Move," she says. "I need you to move."
I pull back. I thrust in. She pushes back to meet me and the impact is a sound, skin against skin, and she moans and I make a sound from somewhere deep and I do it again, harder.
I find a rhythm. One hand on her hip, the other braced on the desk beside hers, and I drive into her with steady strokes and she meets me every time. The angle is deeper this way and I can feel the way she responds when I angle slightly up, the way her breath catches when I find the right spot.
"Liam."
"I have you," I say. "I have you."
I increase the pace. The room fills with the sounds of us.
Our breathing. Our bodies. The desk shifting on the floor.
She drops to her elbows and the new angle makes her cry out and I think I might die from this.
The sight of her bent over my desk. The feel of her around me.
The knowledge that she chose this. Chose me.
Over the operation, over Viktor, over everything she was supposed to be.
I reach around her again. My fingers find her clit and I circle it in time with my thrusts and she jerks like I have shocked her, a sharp desperate sound out of her throat.
"Do not stop," she gasps. "Do not. Liam. I am."
"Come," I say. The word is raw, stripped of anything but the need to feel her come apart. "Come for me, Nadia. Let me feel you."
She breaks.
Her whole body seizes and she clamps around me so hard I see white and she says my name.
Not the controlled version. Not the managed version.
Just my name out into the grey afternoon air of this office where everything has changed.
I feel the pulses of her orgasm around my cock and I thrust through them, drawing it out, and I feel another wave hit her because she shudders again and her arms give out and her chest collapses against the desk.
I do not stop.
I cannot. Weeks of wanting her in this house has boiled down to this.
The slick heat of her. The sounds she is making.
The sight of her bent over my desk with her spine curved and her hands gripping the far edge.
I plant both hands on her hips and I drive into her with something that is not control anymore.
"Again," I say. Not asking. Telling.
"I cannot."
"You can." I change the angle, tilt her hips up, and I feel her body respond. The clench. The gasp. The way she pushes back into me even as she is saying she cannot. "One more. Give me one more."
She is shaking. Her fingers are white-knuckled on the desk edge. I reach around again and when I touch her clit she sobs, actually sobs, a broken wet sound that undoes me completely.
I fuck her through it. Hard steady strokes that rock the desk and rock her and send the Brennan file further across the floor, and she is contracting around me in waves and I feel my own orgasm building at the base of my spine and I know I am close. Right there.
"Nadia." My voice breaks on her name.
"Yes," she says, and I do not know if she is answering me or urging me or just saying the truest thing in this room.
I come with a sound pulled from somewhere deep.
I bury myself in her and I hold there, pulsing, my forehead dropped to her back, my hands gripping her hips hard enough to bruise.
The orgasm rolls through me in waves, each one making my hips jerk involuntarily, each one accompanied by a sound I cannot control.
Harsh. Undone. Nothing like the version of me that manages operations and checks circulation twice.
We stay like that.
The room is quiet except for our breathing. The grey light has gone slightly darker. Clouds moving. I can feel her heartbeat through her back, or maybe it is my own.
I press a kiss to her spine. Then another, between her shoulder blades. She shivers.