Page 103 of Boardroom Mask

JILLIAN

“Come to me / Burn your starry crown / My dark angel”

— “Come to Me” by PJ Harvey and Mark Lanegan

The booth is built for one body and one confession, so with two of us in here, there’s no space that isn’t shared. Kir’s thighs surround mine. His chest pins me against the back panel. I can feel the hard line of his belt buckle and the harder line of his erection against my stomach. Every breath I take pushes me closer to him because there’s nowhere else to go.

He doesn’t kiss me like I expected him to, though.

Instead, hedrops.

Kir Lazarev sinks to his knees on the floor of the confessional. His thumbs press into the groove above my hipbones, hard and possessive, and he looks up at me through the dark, those gray eyes catching the thin seam of candlelight leaking through the lattice.

“What are you doing?” I whisper hoarsely.

“Worshipping you.” He pops my jeans button one-handed, unzips me, then drags my pants and underwear down in one rough swoop.

“Kir!”

He presses his mouth to the inside of my thigh, just above the knee, and I feel teeth. “Spread your legs.”

“Kir, we are in a?—”

“I told you to spread your fucking legs, Jillian. Do it before I do it for you.”

Gulping I do. Because of the jeans tangled around my calves, I can only part my thighs a few inches, which is almost worse because it means everything that follows will happen in tight, claustrophobic proximity. His shoulders wedge into the narrow gap I’ve made. His breath breezes over my center first, hot and uneven, and then his mouth.

I cry out when he licks my folds, then immediately clap my hand over my own mouth.

He pulls back half an inch and grabs my wrist. “Hands down.”

“Someone will hear!”

“I said handsdown, Jillian.”

I drop my hand to my side and ball it into a fist. He rewards me by dragging his tongue flat and slow from bottom to top, and my head cracks back against the wooden panel hard enough to hurt.

“Be quiet,” he murmurs against me. “Or, actually, don’t. I really don’t care.”

He seals his mouth over my clit and sucks. My hips jerk forward and he pins them back with one forearm banded across my pelvis. The strength in that single arm is staggering. I can’t move at all. I can only sit here with my back against wood that’s heard decades of whispered sins and take what he’s giving me.

He’s not gentle about it. He eats me with his whole mouth—lips, tongue, teeth—sloppy and ruthless. He knows exactly what I need, but when I try to grind against his face, he pulls back.

“Ask.”

“No.”

“Then I stop.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

He pulls his mouth away entirely and rests his chin on my hip, looking up at me with wet lips and zero mercy. “Try me.”

I last about four seconds before caving. “Please.”

“Please what?”

“Please don’t stop.”