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Her mouth curves. She doesn’t glance at Jamie when he tries to thrust. She stills him with her weight. “Only when I say.”

He waits. She lets him move once. He makes another sound, hungrier, and looks at me while he does it.

I find the next line because she’s still watching my face. My voice stays even. My attention catches on her eyes, on the wet sound of her riding him, on Jamie’s throat working under the choker.

Heather keeps her pace. She keeps looking at me.

I read.

She takes Jamie while she reaches over and opens my trousers.

Her fingers wrap around my cock and lift it out. I keep my voice inside the poem. Then her thumb swipes the head and the next word disappears.

I reach the end of the line without it and hear the damage immediately.

Heather stops moving.

Jamie makes a small frustrated sound that she ignores. The quiet sits on my skin. I’m sitting here with my cock in her hand and the Duke’s sentence broken in my mouth.

Heather takes the ruler off the nightstand and strikes the inside of my thigh, sharp enough to make my eyes water. My knee jumps but I don’t drop the book.

“Again.”

I find the beginning of the line.

“Clearly,” Heather says.

I read it correctly. Jamie smiles against the pillow.

Heather resumes. Hips first. Then the slow pull of her fist on me, timed to nothing I’m allowed to choose.

Her fist works my cock in slow pulls. Her hips keep Jamie on the pace she already chose. Jamie gets greedy. His next thrust comes harder than she gave him.

Heather’s other hand wraps around his throat. “I didn’t change the pace.”

Jamie stills beneath her. “Sorry.”

The Duke doesn’t pause for a man being put back in his place on my bed.

Heather holds Jamie still and moves on him herself. He takes it with his hands where she put them.

“Good boy.”

The phrase hits me in the gut. I heard him beg for it last night through the wall. I heard how ugly and hungry it made him. The memory sits in my mouth with Browning.

Jamie shudders under her. He looks wrecked with gratitude.

Her thumb smears wetness over the head of my cock and keeps going. She attacks my concentration like it’s the point of the lesson. Her hand ignores my cadence. It tightens at the ends of lines. It goes slick and precise under the head when I reach the hard punctuation.

I shift to keep the book steady and she stops stroking, then starts again mid-word so I have to hold both. I refuse to rush. I refuse to flatten the poem into noise. If she wants the voice she stole me for, she’s going to hear it properly.

The Duke moves from admiration into grievance, explaining every ordinary pleasure as though it were an offense committed against him.

Heather’s thumb presses beneath the head of my cock. I keep his complaint intact anyway.

She stops riding and looks down at Jamie. “Now fuck me.”

He thrusts up at once, eager.