Page 67 of Power Play

"I'm not done being thorough," I tell her.

"Then multitask."

I strip her jeans and underwear in one motion because the alternative is letting her keep stroking me at that pace, and if she keeps stroking me at that pace, thorough is going to become very brief. She makes a sound that's half laugh, half protest when my hands leave her long enough to pull the fabric past her ankles.

Meagan Keating just laughed while I was undressing her. The sound rewires something behind my ribs that I didn't know had wiring.

My mouth moves lower. I take my time because the urgency that drove every previous encounter has burned itself out, and what's left is closer to reverence than I will ever say out loud. I kiss the flat plane of her stomach, the notch of her hip, the inside of her thigh where the skin is soft enough that my lips barely register the texture.

When my mouth finds her clit, the sound she makes isn’t the controlled, rationed response of someone managing the encounter. It's raw, open, stripped of verification.

My tongue circles the swollen nerve with the pressure she needs, the tempo that builds her in stages. I slide two fingers inside her and curl them forward while my mouth holds steady, and the combination pulls her hips off the mattress.

She's told me with her body what her voice would never volunteer. The fact that I listened, that my mouth knows her the way my hands know a weapon, is wrecking us both in ways that have nothing to do with the physical.

Her hips lift against my mouth. Her hand tightens in my hair. I hold her steady and work her with the patience of a man who has nowhere else to be. The desperate impatience underneath is mine alone: I need to feel her come apart because the alternative is saying what's building behind my teeth. I'm not ready yet. Not yet.

She comes against my mouth with a cry that she doesn't suppress. The pulse of her body against my lips and around my fingers, the way her spine arches and her hand clenches and releases in my hair, carries an honesty that her voice would never permit.

I move up her body. She reaches for me before I've settled my weight, her hand closing around my cock and positioning me with deliberate focus. The grip is a statement: she isn’t a passenger in this bed.

She pulls me into her and the slide is slow, both of us feeling every inch of the stretch. The heat of her around me is staggering, the slick grip of her body pulling me deeper than the pace should allow.

When I'm fully inside her she holds my face between her hands and makes me look at her. Her eyes are wet and open in a way I’ve never seen from a woman who verifies before she feels.

"Stay here," she says. "In this. Don't redirect."

"I'm here."

I move inside her with a rhythm that belongs to no timeline except this one. There is no anger driving the pace. There is no desperation. The speed stays slow. The depth holds, every stroke pressing into her until her breath catches and her inner muscles tighten around me in a response her body gives before her mind authorizes it.

What I'm feeling is too large for fast and too honest for anything except exactly this: her body around mine, her hands on my face, her eyes holding me in the one place I've spent my adult life learning how to escape.

I don't escape.

My hips find the angle that makes her back arch, the one I learned in her apartment the first night when her spine lifted off the mattress and her fingers dug into my shoulders hard enough to leave marks.

I hold the angle and the depth and the slow, devastating rhythm that lets both of us feel everything. Her legs wrap higher around my waist. The shift takes me deeper, and the sound she releases is low and unguarded, carrying none of the composure she wears outside this room.

Her hands slide from my face to my back, nails pressing crescents into the muscles along my spine.

"Don't stop." The words leave her mouth with no composure attached. "Whatever you're doing, don't stop."

I don't stop. My hand slides between us, thumb finding her clit, pressing with the calibration her body taught me. The slow deep strokes and the steady pressure of my thumb build her in stages I can feel. Her muscles clench around me tighter with each pass. The rhythm of her breathing fractures into shorter intervals that match the pace of her hips rising to meet mine.

The orgasm builds from somewhere deeper than the physical. When it hits, it takes the last of the walls with it. Her body locks around me, the clenching pulses pulling me over the edge with her, and what comes out of me isn’t a sound. It is her name, spoken into the curve of her neck with everything I've been holding back since the day I stopped lying to myself about what she is to me.

The aftermath is quiet. Her fingers trace idle paths across my shoulder blade, the same pattern she traced the first time, and the repetition of it locks something into place.

I’m lying in this woman's bed with my face in her hair and my hands still on her hips. Every trained instinct I have is telling me to say something useful, something that demonstrates value rather than exposing what just cracked open underneath the discipline.

The redirect fires.

I feel it start. The pivot toward competence, the reaching for a task that will absorb the feeling before it can become a sentence. The pattern is so familiar that my mind is already composing the follow-up: the filing timeline, the enforcement division's probable response window, the contingency planning for Arthur's counterintelligence.

I catch the redirect. I hold it in my hands the way you hold a live round, with full awareness of what happens if you grip wrong.

I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.