Page 38 of Curvy Sold Mate

“Off,” she breathed, tugging at the cotton shirt she was wearing. Viktor helped her pull it over her head, and the sight of her—flushed, her dark hair against the wall behind her, her body all curves and warmth—hit somewhere below language, somewhere primal and specific that had been waiting for this since before he had words to describe the wanting.

He kissed her throat. The hinge of her jaw. The soft place behind her ear where her pulse was hammering, and the sound she made—low, startled, greedy—vibrated against his lips and undid something at the base of his spine. His mouth moved lower, following the line of her neck, and he put his teeth on the tendon that ran from her shoulder to her ear and bit down, gently, and her hips jerked against his.

“Bed,” she said, and her voice had dropped into a register that made his hands shake, “now, Viktor, right now—”

They made it to the mattress. Barely. Her back hit the sheets, and his weight followed her down. They were pulling at each other’s remaining clothes with the gracelessness of two people who wanted too much to be patient about the mechanics—her fingers on his belt, his hands dragging her underwear down her thighs, the urgency making them clumsy, elbows and zippers and the brief frustrated sound she made when the clasp of her bra resisted and he reached behind her and unhooked it with the efficiency of a man who could disassemble a ward anchor in the dark.

“How did you do that so fast?” she said, breathless.

“Practice.”

“With whom?”

“Clasps. Buckles. Mechanical fasteners generally.”

She laughed—sharp, surprised, real—and the laughter broke something loose, a release valve in the intensity. For a half-second, they were just two people in a bed, ridiculous and human and wanting each other badly enough that the wanting made them graceless, and the grace of the gracelessness was its own kind of beauty.

Then his mouth found her breast, and the laughter dissolved.

He cupped the weight of her in his palm and closed his mouth over her nipple, and her spine arched off the mattress, her hand seizing the back of his skull and holding him there. His tongue circled, his teeth grazed, and she gasped—a sound that was sharp and specific and went straight through him—and he did it again, harder, and her hips rolled up against him with a deliberateness that made his breath stutter against her skin.

Viktor kissed lower, and she let him go, her fingers loosening in his hair as his mouth moved down the plane of her stomach, and her thigh tensed against his shoulder, and her breath fractured into sounds that were escalating and entirely without pretense.

He gripped her hip, angled her, and put his mouth on her.

Olivia’s whole body jerked. Her heel dug into his back, her hips rising to meet him, her hand fisting in the sheets while the other found his shoulder, and her nails bit down hard enough to sting. She was loud—the sounds she made were specific and demanding and devoid of any attempt at modesty, direct in bed the way she was direct everywhere, unwilling to perform a restraint she didn’t feel.

“Faster,” she breathed, and he gave it to her, and her thighs clamped against his ears, and the bond between them blazed with the feedback loop of her pleasure registering in his body and his response feeding back through the connection into hers, an amplification that made his vision go white at the edges.

She came with a cry that punched out of her chest, his name cracking apart inside it. He worked her through it until her hand found his jaw and pushed him up, oversensitised, shaking.

Olivia pulled him up by the jaw, kissed him hard—tasting herself on his mouth and kissing him harder for it, her tongue against his, her teeth on his lower lip—and the groan that tore out of him broke against her mouth.

“Now,” she said. Not a request.

Viktor pushed into her, and the groan that left him was low and involuntary and stripped of every layer of control he’d been maintaining for months. He felt her everywhere—the heat, the tight grip of her body adjusting around him, the way she exhaled against his jaw, and the sound she made was nothing either of them recognized, a sound that belonged to the place where the bond and the body merged, and the distinction between his pleasure and hers dissolved.

He moved, eight years of distance collapsing into deep, urgent, relentless rhythm. She rose to meet every stroke with her heels driving into the backs of his thighs, her nails raking down his spine hard enough that the sting turned bright. He swore against her throat and drove into her harder.

She wrapped her leg around his waist and pulled him deeper, and the angle changed, and her eyes flew open, and the sound that ripped out of her was raw and escalating.

“Right there, Viktor… Right there, don’t you… don’t you dare stop…” Her hand found the headboard behind her and gripped it, her body arching beneath his.

He braced both hands on the mattress and gave her everything he had—the full force and the full focus and the decade of silence behind it—and the bond carried the building wave between them, her orgasm approaching through the connection as a tightening in his own body, a heat at the base of his spine that matched hers, and when she shattered against him the force of it dragged him over the edge with her.

Her back bowed off the bed. Her mouth opened, and the sound she made was guttural and raw. Viktor followed a breath later, his body shuddering against hers, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, the bond between them blazing so bright he could feel it in his teeth.

After, they lay tangled in sheets that had been clean that morning. Viktor’s arm was across her ribs. Her head was on his shoulder. Their breathing slowed in unison, and the bond sizzled between them with a depth it hadn’t had an hour ago, as though the physical had unlocked a register that had always existed and had simply been waiting for permission to open.

Neither of them spoke. Viktor could feel her thinking—the bond carried the texture of it, the quick, restless quality of a mind that was already processing what had happened and building frameworks around it and deciding what it meant—and he let her think, because the alternative was speaking, and speaking would require him to describe what had just happened to his chest and his hands and his understanding of himself, and he did not have the vocabulary.

Her fingers traced the scratches she’d left on his chest—light, absent, the way she traced annotations in the margins of her investigation files. “Those are going to show,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Kahn will see them.”

“Kahn will pretend not to see them. “