Page 73 of Kazimir

“Tell her I love her.”

“I suspect she knows.”

I took a bite because my body, traitorous and practical, immediately revealed how empty I was. Hunger came on me with a dizzy little rush. I ate standing at his desk while he loosened his tie and watched me as if every chew was a strategic victory. When I finished half the plate, some of the glassy edge in my nerves receded.

He took the plate from my hands and set it aside. Then he stepped into me, close enough that the line of his body became a wall and a temptation at once.

“You folded your light,” he said, as if returning to the part of the night that might still yield useful things. “Can you do it now?”

I closed my eyes and tried. The instinct came easier this time. Fold. Turn inward. Dim.

When I looked up, he nodded. “Better.”

“I can feel it.”

“Practice until it becomes reflex.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, because I had learned absolutely nothing from my own embarrassment downstairs.

His pupils widened. “Devon.”

I smiled sweetly. “What? I’m being obedient.”

“You are being provocative.”

“And?”

His hand closed around the back of my neck. Not hard. Not gentle either. Enough to make heat slide low through me in one hot, immediate line. “And I have already exercised restraint on your behalf this evening.”

I went up on my toes and brushed my mouth against his jaw. “Then don’t on my behalf.”

For a moment, I thought he might ignore the invitation out of sheer principle. Then he turned his head and kissed me with all the discipline he had been storing up and none of the mercy. My back hit the edge of his desk. Papers shifted. One pen rolled and stopped. His mouth took mine like a man who intended to remind both of us what belonged where.

I opened for him with a sound that had no dignity left in it.

His hand left my neck only to cup my breast through the silk of my blouse, thumb dragging over my nipple until it tightened painfully beneath the fabric. I gasped and arched into him. His other hand pinned my hip to the desk, fingers biting through cloth.

“No,” he said softly against my mouth when I reached for his belt. “You eat first. You rest next. Then perhaps I will let you climb me like you’re jasmine seeking a trellis.”

I was breathing too hard for proper outrage. “You are a tyrant.”

“Yes.”

“Smug, too.”

“Yes.”

I laughed against his mouth, and he kissed the sound out of me, slower this time, less punishing, until my whole body loosened despite myself.

When he finally drew back, he rested his forehead against mine once more. His voice dropped lower. “You are allowed fear. You are allowed rage. You are allowed desire in the same body as those. None of it lessens you.”

There it was again—that impossible way he had of saying the thing my body needed before I found language for it.

I put my hands flat on his chest, over the old scar, over the broad strength that had carried empires and grief and still somehow learned tenderness. “I love you,” I said aloud, because thinking it suddenly felt too small.

His eyes changed. Not softer. Deeper. “I know,” he said, and then along the bond, intimate as breath inside my skull: I love you. And I will kill him if he reaches for you again.

The vow slid through me like dark gold. Not pretty. Not civilized. True.