Page 37 of Fake Marriage Mafia Triplets

He moans and bucks his hips three times before gently pushing me away. “I’d rather be inside you.”

I nod and get to my feet. He guides me to the bed, lays me back on the bed that is apparently ours, and takes off the rest of my clothes slowly. Then he stops, both hands braced above me, and just looks. I let him. Being looked at like that and not reaching for the joke that would end it is the closest thing to surrender I have in me.

“Tell me if you want me to stop,” he says.

“I want you to not stop.” I pull him down. “Ever, ideally, but let’s start with tonight.”

He laughs against my throat, the real one, the one almost nobody gets, and then he moves his mouth lower and the laughing stops.

He takes his time with me. He closes his mouth over my nipple and slides his hand between my thighs, and he groans against my breast when he feels how wet I already am for him.

He works two fingers into my pussy slowly before curling them into the spot that makes my hips come off the bed while his thumb circles my clit in the same unhurried rhythm. I’m loud in a way I stopped being embarrassed about weeks ago. He reads every sound I make and gives me more of whatever pulls the loudest one, patient and relentless, until I’m shaking and gripping his wrist. “Get inside me, or I’m going to lose my mind.”

“Say it again,” he says, and I understand he doesn’t mean the demand.

“I want you.” It’s as close as I can get to the other thing, the thing I know now and can’t say yet, but maybe he hears what I don’t say, because his control finally cracks.

He settles between my thighs and pushes his cock into me in one slow stroke, and we both freeze at the fit of it, at how far past pretending we are. Then he moves, slowly and deeply, each stroke drawing a sound out of me I don’t try to hold back.

I wrap my legs around him to pull him deeper, and he drops his forehead to mine and stays there, breathing me in, and this close, there’s nowhere to hide what I’m feeling, and I stop trying to hide it.

“Look at me,” he says, and I do. He watches me the whole time, adjusting his angle when my breath catches, giving me exactly what I need because he’s spent seven weeks learning it. The pressure builds and builds. When it breaks, it takes all of me with it. I come around his cock, crying his name, my nails digging into his back.

The sound he makes when my pussy clenches around his shaft tells me he’s right there with me. He drives deep, holds, and comes with a groan pressed into my neck, his whole body shuddering into mine, and for once neither of us reaches for anything to say that would make it smaller than it was.

Afterward he doesn’t roll away. He gathers me against his chest and pulls the duvet over both of us. His heart is beating hard under my ear, and he slides his hand along my back like he’s not ready to let the moment end and isn’t going to pretend otherwise.

“That wasn’t the arrangement,” I say into his chest, because one of us has to, and it’s always me.

“No.” His hand doesn’t stop moving. “It hasn’t been the arrangement for a while. I stopped keeping track of when.”

I don’t answer, because the honest answer is the one word I’m not ready to hand him in a bed while there’s a man out there planning to kill him for the crime of being alive. I don’t want the first time I say it to be the same night I have to worry about it being the last.

His phone buzzes on the nightstand with a text from Platon. Nikita reads it over my shoulder, and I feel the shift in him, the operator coming back online.

“Lazar,” he says. “Platon has movement to walk me through.”

“Go.” I push at his chest before he can offer to stay, because he will, and I don’t want him choosing me over the thing that keeps us both breathing. “Go plan your war. I’m going to lie here and feel superior about it.”

He kisses me once more slowly, then gets up and dresses in the dark. He stops at the door as he always does now, like leaving me costs him something. Then he’s gone down the stairs to talk about the man who wants him dead, and I’m alone in the bed that is apparently ours, feeling too much and refusing to name any of it.

The nausea hits about ninety seconds later.

I make it to the bathroom before it wins, and I’m still on the cold tile with my forehead against the edge of the tub when the door opens and Maren enters. She doesn’t knock.

“I heard you through the floor.” She sits down on the tile next to me, back against the tub, close but not touching. “That’s the third time this week I’ve heard it. And at least three weeks in a row. I’ve been counting, because you clearly aren’t.”

“It’s stress. It’s the schedule. I haven’t been eating right.”

“Piper.” She says my name in the tone she uses when she’s done letting me run a game on her. “You don’t drink coffee anymore. You gagged at the salmon Tuesday, and you love salmon. You’ve been asleep by nine like a toddler, which isn’t you—you have never once in your life gone to sleep before the job was done.” She’s quiet for a second. “When was your last period?”

The tile is very cold. “Nine weeks.” It sounds worse when I say it aloud.

She purses her lips and doesn’t seem surprised. “It’s time to stop living in denial. You need to get a test⁠—”

“I took a test.” The admission surprises me on the way out. “Weeks ago, right after the range, when you first started counting at me. It came back negative, and I let myself stop counting, because the test said I was allowed to.” I press my forehead harder against the tub. “Then the tired and the food and all of it didn’t stop, so I told myself it was the schedule and the travel and never eating right, because those were all true too, and a true reason is the easiest thing in the world to hide behind. You taught me that one.”

I don’t say the rest, which is the loudest thing I could have said.