Page 18 of Crown of Thorns

He looked at me. His hands were on my thighs, holding. Possessive. The default.

"Where?"

"Where I tell you."

His face changed. Not anger. Not the calculating assessment I'd seen in the corridor and the study and the drawing room. Arousal. Not at my body, at my defiance. The distinction mattered. The wedding night had been territorial, a man claiming what the contract provided. This was different. This was a man whose architecture of control was being challenged from inside the structure, and the challenge wasn't generating anger. It was generating need.

I moved his hands. Put them where I wanted them. He went. Not passively, with the coiled attention of a man who was learning something he hadn't expected to learn.

"Higher." He went higher. "Not there. There." He got there. "Now don't move them."

"You're enjoying this."

"I'm the only person in this house who's allowed to tell you anything." I got the belt open. Got the rest of it open. Wrapped my hand around his cock and felt his whole body register the contact, a jolt straight up through the spine, the tendons in his forearms standing where they braced on the desk either side of my thighs. "So no. Don't move them."

He didn't move them. He stood there with his hands exactly where I'd put them and let me work him, slow, deliberately slow, my thumb dragging across the head on every upstroke because I'd found on the second pass that it made his jaw lock. It made his jaw lock every time. I did it eleven more times. I counted, because counting is what I do, and because the count was the first piece of leverage I had ever held over Lorcan Byrne.

"Renny."

"That's not an instruction."

"It's a warning."

"Noted."

He broke first. He took my wrist off him, hard, and pushed my skirt to my hips and got two fingers into me without any transition at all, and found me wet enough that he stopped for a fraction of a second and looked at my face like he'd caught me out in something.

"Don't," I said.

"I haven't said anything."

"You were going to."

"I was going to say that you've been sitting in my library reading my accounts for three hours in this condition." He curled the fingers. My hips went off the desk. "Which is either commitment to the work or a diagnostic finding."

"Both."

It was contested the whole way. That was the difference. The wedding night had been a survey conducted on a body that wasn't participating in the paperwork. This was two people with different kinds of leverage testing each other's grip, and neither of us got to run it clean. I pushed back. He adjusted. I demanded and he gave and then took something back for the giving. When he tried to turn me over, I put my heel in his hip and stopped him, and he stopped, and the stopping was the most articulate thing he'd done since the ceremony.

"On the desk," I said. "Facing me. I want to see it happen."

"See what happen."

"You. Coming apart. I've been watching you do it in three-second increments in doorways for seven weeks and I want the whole thing at once."

Something went through his face that had no name in my catalogue. Then he took hold of the backs of my knees, dragged me to the edge of the desk, and pushed into me standing, all the way, and the sound I made was loud enough that I thought about the corridor and then decided I didn't care about the corridor.

His mouth on my collarbone. The freckle constellation he'd claimed five weeks ago, his lips found it again, and the familiarity of the gesture was more devastating than any new territory would have been. He'd remembered. The specific location. The exact pressure. He'd remembered, and the remembering meant it hadn't been inventory. It had been attention.

I arched into him and the sound I made was not clinical. His hand tightened on my hip, the bruise from the wedding night had faded and a new one was forming under different terms. My hands in his hair. Pulling. Not gently. His breath against my neck, ragged, the control fraying at edges I hadn't reached before.

He fucked me on the accounts. The ledgers slid and went over the edge in a slow avalanche of paper and neither of us looked. My legs were locked around him. His hand was flat between my shoulder blades holding me up because the desk was polished and I was going backwards on every stroke. His mouth was at my ear and he was talking, which he had not done on the wedding night, low and continuous and filthy, telling me what I felt like and what he had thought about doing to me in this room and how long he had been thinking about it, and I understood that the man had been keeping a ledger of his own.

"Say the date," I said.

"What?"

"You've been thinking about it since a specific day. You know the day. Say it."