Page 4 of Throwing Fire

Myhre’s too controlled to roll her eyes, but she does lift one perfectly-arched eyebrow.

I tap the holopanel on my desk, which has started blinking since the meeting with Kez should have started three minutes ago. “That all?”

Myhre nods. “When do you leave?”

“Eighteen hundred, give or take.”

“Very well.” Myhre powers down her displays and slowly unfolds from her chair. She drifts to the door and gives me a smile over her shoulder, partially masked in the midnight fall of her hair. “I’ll have a preliminary report ready before you go.”

Not something to look forward to, one of her preliminary reports. They can suck down whole days. But I don’t want her to know how much I dread them.

“Sounds good,” I say.

When the door snicks closed behind Myhre, I reach down and run my hand over the soft shag of Kez’s hair.

“Hey, kitten.” I’m not sure whether she’ll want to talk or fuck. I’m open to either. Or both.

She rolls her cheek against my thigh and smiles up at me. “Music,” she says.

She wants to fuck. I smile back as I reach across to the holopanel and tap up a playlist of the Zunkfunk she’s got me listening to, to cover the noise we’re about to make. I also turn up the room’s airvents, to get rid of Myhre’s hot jasmine perfume. Last thing I want while I’m fucking my kitten is to smell another woman’s scent.

Afterwards, Kez sits in my lap, her face in my neck, arms aroundmy shoulders. My desk chair ain’t the best for post-coital cuddling. I’ll need to get a couch if we’re gonna do this every day. But for now the chair will have to do, because there’s no way I’m giving up this time with my kitten.

“Five days, we’ll be doin’ this on a beach,” I murmur to her. The pleasure planet I’ve picked for our vacation is one big beach. We’ve got a private Hab and a one klick stretch of sand all to ourselves. I plan to fuck her on every centimeter.

She kisses my neck, the way she likes to during the afterglow. “You’ll get sand in your ass if we do it this way on a beach.”

“You’re assumin’ I’ll be on the bottom.”

“A gentleman would.”

I chuckle. “Then you’re definitely gonna be the one with the sandy ass.”

Kez rolls her cheek along my collarbone. “Can we talk seriously for a moment?”

I figured this was coming from the way she reacted to the name Reg Bale gave me. I gave her the short version of the interrogation when I got back last night. But since it was already after midnight and she was waiting in bed, it was the really short version. And I got distracted before I finished even the really short version, so I don’t think I gave her any names. I certainly didn’t give her Duncan’s. That’s a problem I intend to deal with myself. “Mmm, what do I get?”

“What do you want?” she counters.

I smile up at the ceiling. I love negotiating with my kitten. “Tonight. My place. Two toys.”

She hums into my skin. “I thought we were going to stay on the Clouds overnight.”

“Fuck, no.” The last time we stayed overnight on the Cloudlands, I really did end up with sand in my ass.AndI didn’t get laid.

“Oh.” She loads that one little word with disappointment. My kitten does inflection like no other woman I’ve ever known. “I figured if we were staying on the Clouds overnight,we could go down to the Night Market. Meet up with Slip and Alb. Alb’s a really good drummer, and it’s totally different when you’re spinning to live music.”

Now that is tempting. The only thing close to as much fun as playing with our growing collection of sex toys is throwing fire with Kez. “If we stay overnight, there’d have to be rules.”

She tightens her arms around my neck. “I’m good with rules.”

Yes, she is. “Rule one would be that I can put it anywhere.”

She shivers and smothers a moan in my shoulder. “Agreed.”

“You know rule two.” Rule two is our safe word. We’ve needed a safe word from our very first time together. And we’ve only gotten more adventurous since then. “Rule three is thirty seconds.”

A harder shiver. Maybe thirty seconds is too long. She was struggling at twenty seconds two nights ago. “Kitten, look at me.”

---