Page 51 of The Boss
He gave it. He rolled his hips and drove into her until the room forgot its own name. When she climbed, he lifted one of her legs higher along his arm and angled deeper, dragged his mouth down her throat and tasted the hammer of her pulse. He let her wrists go to get a hand between them and stroked her where she was slick and swollen, and she came apart around him with a cry that sounded like surrender and victory atonce.
He flipped her when she was still shaking, drew her up onto her knees, and fitted himself behind her. One hand pressed at the back of her neck—not to hold her down, to anchor her—while the other slipped under to find her again. He pulled her back onto him and fucked her deep, the slap of skin a drumbeat, the rhythm single-minded and merciless. She met him, learned him, matched him, and when she shattered this time it was with her teeth in the sheet and his name fierce and unpretty in her throat.
He followed, voice breaking on a curse, thrusts jerking and then burying, pulsing inside her until he had nothing left to give but the heft of his body and the rasping sweep of his breath against her shoulder. He stayed there, pressed along her spine, hand spread over her ribs like he was reminding himself she wasreal.
For a long minute they didn’t move. The room hummed with silence, with city, with the faint tick of cooling muscles and the softer, stranger tick of something she didn’t name. When hefinally eased free, he did it with a care that contrasted indecently with the way he’d taken her. He vanished for a moment, returned with a damp cloth, and touched her with a tenderness that made her eyes sting. She blinked hard and blamed the sweat.
He tossed the cloth aside, stretched out, and pulled her over him so her cheek landed above his heart. It beat like a fist against her ear—hard, steady, human. She listened until her breath matchedit.
She should’ve gotten up. She should’ve put the dress back on and drawn fresh lines. Instead, she let herself go heavy on him while his palm traced idle paths up and down her spine as if he couldn’t stop touching her if he tried.
“What are you thinking,” he asked at last, voice softer than she’d heardit.
“That you taste like trouble,” she said into his skin. “And I’ve never wanted trouble this much.”
His chuckle was more exhale than laugh. “You’ll survive it.”
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
His hand paused at the hollow of her back, pressed warm. “You will.” A beat. “Stay.”
It wasn’t a command. He had plenty of those already. It was an ask. That was worse. She tipped her head enough to look at him. The lines around his mouth had eased. The avarice in his eyes had shifted to something like satisfaction, like possession, like a man who’d won and still wanted more because winning wasn’t the point.
She wanted to say yes. She wanted to see what he’d look like in the morning, mouth soft with sleep, hair wrecked by herhands. She wanted coffee in his kitchen with nothing on but one of his shirts and her heels. She wanted toomuch.
“Five minutes,” she compromised, because five minutes could hold a lifetime if you letthem.
He accepted that, palm returning to its leisurely path along her spine. Five minutes slid into more. They dozed. Woke. Kissed slow and filthy. She rolled him and rode him with her hair falling around her face and his hands on her hips guiding and giving up control in alternating breaths. He sat up and sucked her nipple into his mouth while she worked on him, gasping, grinding, coming again with a choked sound he swallowed. He flipped her with a laugh that wasn’t a laugh and took her sideways, her leg thrown over his hip, while she tried not to scream. The city watched and blessed them with light.
When the edge finally dulled, they lay tangled and silent, her cheek to his chest again, his fingers tangled in her hair. She could’ve fallen asleep there without thinking, without caution, without the voice that had kept her alive insisting shemove.
The voice returned like atide.
She eased away on a breath. Fear wasn’t the problem. He hadn’t hurt her. What scared her was the opposite. How easily she could stay, how quickly she could lose herself in him until morning blurred into forever. Survival had taught her not to hand anyone that much power. She needed the distance, needed the reminder she could still walk away. He made a sound that might’ve been protest if he’d had more energy to bother with words and then let her go, eyes half-lidded, mouth curved like he knew she’d come back even if she didn’t know ityet.
She went in search of her dress and smoothed it on. The reflection in the windows threw back a woman with flushed lips and bite marks blooming at her shoulder, hair wild, eyes toobright. She pressed her fingers to the tender mark at her throat and felt the thud beneath—hers or his, she couldn’ttell.
She went back to the bedroom. He’d turned onto his side, forearm under his head, watching her with that steady, unblinking attention that had first undressed her at the Alabaster Club. The room smelled like sex and skin and a satisfaction so complete it made her knees go weak all over again.
He swung his legs off the bed. She tried to wave him back, but he was already standing, already tugging on trousers with a look that promised no argument would stop him. “I don’t let you walk out of here alone,” he said, voice iron. “Not even when your place is only one floor down.”
She wanted to protest, wanted to keep the small shield of distance, but something in her softened at his insistence. He slipped into his shirt half-buttoned, caught her hand, and walked her to the door. The penthouse deadbolt clicked behind them, and he paced her the short way down the hall and into the waiting elevator. The mirrored walls reflected them both, tousled and raw, apair bound by something neither of them had askedfor.
At her floor he escorted her out, stopping at her apartment door, palm braced beside her head. He kissed her again there in the quiet hallway—slow, claiming, areminder that whatever she thought she was running from, he would follow. Only when she unlocked the door did he let her slip inside.
She leaned against the wood after it closed, pulse sprinting, body still humming. Endless minutes passed. Through the silence she could sense him returning to his penthouse above her, aweight in the ceiling, apromise in the air. She pressed her hand to her mouth and tasted him all over again.
She’d wanted trouble. She’d taken it. She’d loved every second.
And she already knew one night would never be close to enough.
God, she wassoscrewed!
Chapter 15
LEIF WOKEto a city that pretended nothing had happened. Dallas glittered like a lie, glass catching sun as if yesterday hadn’t tried to cut his life in half. The Trinity ran dark through the grid, calm on the surface, moving hard underneath. His penthouse sat above it all, quiet as a sealed vault. It should’ve felt safe. It didn’t.
He’d been up before dawn. He’d watched the river turn from iron to pewter to a slice of light, and he’d listened to the building breathe. Coffee went cold beside untouched breakfast. Alaric checked in twice. Magnus once, voice flat and dangerous, every syllable filed to anedge.
