Page 15 of Knight
The First Collision
Neither of us moves.
The worddealis still hanging in the air between us and we are standing six inches apart and I can feel the heat coming off his body through the gap like a furnace with the door cracked. My pulse is in my throat. My fists are still clenched inside my pockets. Every rational thought I own is telling me to step back, to leave, to go home and count my money and pretend I did not just sell something I cannot name to a man I do not know.
He lifts his hand.
Slow. So slow I can track every inch of the movement. His fingers reach my chin and the touch is gentle — devastatingly, impossibly gentle — the pad of his thumb tracing my jawline like he is learning the architecture of my face by feel. It contradicts every clinical word he just spoke. Every transactional clause. Every wall he built withexclusivityandarrangementandno feelings.
This touch has feelings in it. This touch is drowning in them.
"Tell me to stop," he says. His voice is wrecked. Low and scraped raw, nothing like the rehearsed pitch he gave me sixty seconds ago. This is underneath. This is the thing he was trying to bury with contracts and conditions and it is clawing its way out through his fingertips.
I should tell him to stop. I should enforce the terms before the ink is dry. I should remind him — remind us both — that this is a transaction and transactions do not start with a man's hand trembling against your face.
His thumb drags across my bottom lip. My breath catches. I feel it in my spine — a bolt of heat that drops from the base of my skull straight through my center and lands between my hips like a fist closing.
I do not tell him to stop.
His mouth is on mine before the silence finishes answering for me. And it is nothing like I expected — nothing polished, nothing practiced, nothing like the smooth operator in the rolled sleeves and the inherited watch. His kiss is desperate. Bruising. His hand slides from my chin to the back of my neck and he grips my hair at the root and pulls and a sound comes out of me that I have never made in my life.
He swallows it. Drinks it straight from my mouth. Presses me backward until my shoulder blades hit the office door and the lock rattles. His other hand finds my hip, grips hard enough to print bruises through the denim.
"Fuck," he breathes against my lips. "Fuck. I was not supposed to—"
"Shut up."
I grab his collar with both hands and pull him back into me.
My shoulders hit the office door again with a thud that rattles the frame, and the impact knocks the breath from me. But I don't stop. I can't. "Fuck," he breathes against my mouth. His hand slides from my hip to the small of my back, pressing meflush against him. I can feel the hard length of him through the tailored fabric of his pants, and my cunt clenches in response—sudden, vicious, demanding.
I bite his lip.
He groans—low, guttural, wrecked—and his grip tightens. "Nova."
My name in his mouth sounds like a wound.
I'm burning. Eighteen months of survival mode, of numb efficiency, of treating my body like a tool—and now I'm on fire. His hands find the zipper at the back of my outfit, dragging it down with a sound that cuts through the hum of the fluorescent lights. Cool air hits my spine, then his palm—hot, rough, possessive—spreading across my exposed skin.
"I called you in here to negotiate," he says, his breath hot against my neck. His teeth graze my collarbone, and my back arches off the door. "Now look at you."
I don't have a response. My brain is static. My body is running the show now, and it wants things I haven't let myself want in years.
My hands shove his jacket off his shoulders. It hits the floor with a soft thump. I'm already reaching for the buttons of his shirt, fingers clumsy with urgency, and he lets me—watches me with glittering eyes as I expose the lean muscle of his chest, the faint trail of hair below his navel.
"Slow down," he says, but his voice betrays him. It's ragged. Frayed.
"No."
I grab his belt, pull him into me, and the friction against my aching clit makes me whimper. His hand shoots up, fingers wrapping around my throat—not squeezing, just holding. A warning. A promise.
"Who's in charge here?" he asks.
I answer by grabbing his wrist, dragging his hand from my throat down to the waistband of my thong. His fingers slip beneath the fabric, and the sound he makes when he finds me—soaked, swollen, desperate—is almost violent.
"Nova. You're dripping."
"I know."
