Page 248 of Slashed Bonds

“Next thing you’ll tell me you’re in a mafia family.”

“I mean.” The hand in my hair doesn’t pause. “Would it surprise you?”

“Nah.”

I say it honestly. Because I’ve been rich. Not his rich, but rich enough, once, in a house on Alder Row with a father who had a card like his.

“I know what it’s like to be rich. We love secrets.”

“Don’t we?”

He assures me. But his eyes have gone to my mouth and haven’t come back, and the room’s gotten smaller in the way rooms do.

“We haven’t fucked,” he says.

There it is.

“And whose fault is that, Cap?”

“Uno-reversing against me is tacky.”

“Because you’re only now realizing you want this pussy,” I toss back, “and you’ve been distracting yourself with everything under the sun while everyone else gets to enjoy me?”

Something moves in his face.

I watch it move. The thing he won’t say, pushing up under the stillness and getting pushed back down, and I understand it’s not about me, not the way I’d framed it to make him flinch. It’s about him. The man who doesn’t take what’s being passed around a room. Who waited in a lobby and said wait in line to a loading dock full of his own scent and then waited in that line himself for five weeks while two men he loves went ahead of him.

He wasn’t distracting himself. He was choosing not to be the fourth man in a line. He’s never once been fourth at anything.

“That’s not it.” He says it against my mouth, his lips brushing mine without quite kissing. “That’s not what it is.”

“Then what is it, Cap?”

I whisper it. And I kiss him back, because I’m done waiting to be kissed, and he groans into my mouth. A real one, low, a sound that goes down through the mattress, and he shifts. One arm under me. A turn of his whole weight, and I’m on my back with the pillow gone somewhere and Cassian Vane is above me, hovering, his forearms on either side of my head and his knees on either side of mine.

Oh.

I’ve never seen him from here. From under. Five weeks of him beside me, behind me, across a dot or a kitchen or a grave, and never once above, and the sight of it does a thing to the arithmetic in my body that I would never, under oath, admit to. The power of it. The dynamic. A man who could and hasn’t, looking down.

“I don’t like to rush eating what I like, Morrigan.”

A warning. And fuck me sideways and upside down, because his voice has dropped into a register I’ve never heard out of him, husky, a vibration more than a sound, the kind of voice that’s got its hands on you before the rest of him does, and every dirty thing I’ve ever thought lines up in my head at once and waits to be called on.

“Then you’d better get used to saying grace before meals,” I hum.

Taunting. Knowing. Because this man is going to ruin me, and I’ve decided I’d like to be present for it.

He moves.

Like a viper going back into the brush, fluid, no wasted motion, a thing that was above me and is now between my legs in the time it takes the drummer behind my eye to hit the snare once.

His hands on my thighs. His shoulders under my knees. And he licks his lips, slow, looking up the length of me with gray eyes gone dark, and I know from that alone that we are going to have a fucking time.

“Grace before meals.”

CHAPTER 38

Grace Before Meals Part II