Page 101 of Ruin
Not a groan, not a growl, not the controlled sounds of a man who modulates even his pleasure.
This is unarmored. Close to pain.
The sound of a man letting someone see the part of him that exists beneath the architecture.
"I see you," he breathes. "I've always seen you."
We move together.
The rhythm isn't punishment, and it isn't tenderness.
It's something more honest than either.
His hands grip my hips, pulling me into each thrust, and my legs tighten around him, my heels digging into the small of his back, drawing him deeper.
The desk shudders beneath us with every stroke.
His monitors flicker with surveillance feeds of an empire we're both supposed to be running and neither of us is looking at anything except each other.
The orgasm builds differently this time.
Not against my will. Not something I fight.
It rises through my body like a tide, warm and inevitable, and I let it come because I'm done fighting things that are going to take me regardless.
It crests.
My body clenches around him and my forehead presses against his, and I exhale his name like something I've been holding in my lungs for days.
No screaming. No crying.
Just his name, and the quiet devastation of meaning it.
He follows me.
His arms wrap around my back, crushing me against his chest, and he buries his face in my neck and comes with a sound that vibrates against the collar and through my collarbone and into the hollow of my throat where my pulse is hammering.
His arms are shaking.
Cassius Wolfe's arms are shaking, and I hold him through it and feel his heartbeat against mine and don't let go.
We stay like that for a long time.
Tangled together on his desk in the blue light of the surveillance monitors, the spilled whiskey soaking into the paperwork beneath us, his face in my neck and my fingers in his hair and the city glittering through the windows like it doesn't know what's happening thirty floors above it.
He carries me to his bed.
Not the guest room.
His.
I don't fight it.
My arms are around his neck and my face is against his shoulder and the hallway passes in a blur of dark walls and soft carpet and the steady rhythm of his footsteps.
He lays me on the sheets and pulls the covers over both of us and I curl against his chest and listen to his heart.
The beat is slower now. Steadier.
