Page 30 of Honeyfires

"Noon specifically?"

"Eight-fifteen this morning. But the specific thought of you like this entered at noon." She got my jeans open. "I'm a thorough planner."

I sat up and caught her face in my hands.

She looked at me, startled.

"You don't have to do anything you're not—"

"Petra Alves." She covered my hands with hers, steady and sure. "I am about to take you apart." Clear. No equivocation anywhere. "I need you to let me. Can you do that?"

I looked at her.

"Yes," I said.

The smile that broke across her face was triumphant and warm all at once. "Good." She kissed me, then said against my mouth: "Put your hands above your head."

My arms moved before I'd consciously decided on it.

She looked at my hands against the headboard and made a small, pleased sound that did unspeakable things to my composure.

"Don't move them," she said, "unless I say so."

I hadn't expected that. I also wasn't going to lie and say I didn't feel it in every nerve ending I possessed. "Noted."

She pulled my jeans and underwear off in one motion and sat back to look at me, and the thorough attention she gave me was the same she gave the tattoos, the compass, everything she'd decided to know properly.

"Gorgeous," she said quietly. Her hands settled warmly on my thighs. "Tell me what you like."

"You're not touching me anywhere useful."

"I'm working up to it." Her thumbs traced my inner thighs, slow circles, not close to where I needed them. "Tell me what you like."

"Pressure," I managed, which cost me something I wasn't willing to admit outloud. "And you, specifically, to please—"

Her hand made contact, and my hips came off the bed completely without my permission, which was embarrassing, and I had approximately zero negative feelings about it.

"Here?" she asked, with the feigned innocence of someone who knew exactly what she was doing.

"Yes. Exactly—yes."

She learned fast. Cheerfully, methodically, infuriatingly fast. She worked me with the same focused application she brought to finding exactly the right book for exactly the right patron, learning every sound I made and exactly how to make me make it again, and within minutes I had abandoned all pretense of composure and was holding onto the headboard because I needed something solid to grip.

"You're watching me," I said, because she was. That cataloging librarian gaze, direct on my face while her fingers moved.

"I'm studying you." She lowered her mouth to my clit with ruinous lightness. "I'm going to very carefully cat—"

"If you say catalog—" Her fingers pressed exactly right, and I lost the rest of the sentence completely. "That. That was the rest of the sentence."

"Noted," she said serenely, and did it again.

She slid two fingers inside me and found a rhythm that—

I wasn't going to last.

I was not going to last.

My hands were still on the headboard. I was gripping it hard enough to leave marks. I could feel every muscle in my body pulling toward the edge, and she was watching my face the whole time, patient and focused and entirely too pleased with herself.