Page 27

"You can." He rises from the floor and crawls over me, his clothed body pressing against every inch of my bare skin. The contrast is cruel. I'm naked, trembling, soaked, and he's fully dressed with every ounce of his control locked down tight. His mouth hovers above mine, his breath ghosting across my swollen lips.

"You're doing so well." Low and rough and tender. "So perfect for me, sweet girl."

The praise slices through my frustration and sinks into a place so deep my eyes sting. My arms wrap around his neck and I pull him down, taking his mouth in a kiss born from pure, aching need. He lets me have it for five heartbeats before he breaks away and slides back down my body.

This time, his mouth moves slower. His tongue traces lazy patterns through my wetness, avoiding my clit entirely, teasing the swollen nerves on either side until I'm writhing and whimpering and pulling his hair hard enough to sting. He hums against my sensitive flesh and the vibration almost sends me over.

Almost.

"Daddy, please." My voice is wrecked, raw. "Let me come. I need to come."

"One more time. Hold it for me one more time, sweet girl, and I'll give you everything."

His fingers push back inside me. Two thick digits stretching and curling forward with patient, relentless rhythm. His tongue finally closes over my clit, sucking the throbbing flesh between his lips, and electricity shoots through every nerve I own. My hips buck off the bed. His free hand pins me down, holding me exactly where he wants me.

The wave builds for the third time and my entire body vibrates with the force of the denied release threatening to split me apart.

"Now, Neve." He lifts those dark whiskey eyes to mine and the raw hunger burning in them takes the last of my air. "Come for Daddy. Show me what a good girl you are."

It’s like he has put a spell on me. I shatter on command for him.

The orgasm doesn't build and crest. It detonates. Every denied wave, every pulled-back second, every moment of his controlled, devastating patience crashes into me at once and I scream his name. Both names. The real one and the one that belongs only to us in the dark. My walls clamp around his fingers and my back arches so hard off the mattress that only my shoulders and heels touch the sheets.

"That's it. That's my perfect girl." His mouth gentles on my oversensitive flesh, coaxing out aftershock after aftershock while his free hand strokes the plane of my stomach. "You took everything I gave you. So beautiful. So fucking good for me, Neve."

The praise keeps coming, low and rough and pouring over me while my body trembles and pulses and slowly, slowly descends from the highest peak I've ever reached. Tears slip from the corners of my eyes. The intensity, the vulnerability, the way he dismantled me with nothing but patience, his mouth, his fingers, and the disciplined denial that makes him dangerous in every arena of his life.

He stretches out beside me and pulls me against his chest. My face presses into the warm hollow of his throat. His heartbeat is steady, controlled, and that steadiness anchors me while my own pulse races toward something resembling normal.

"You're trembling." His lips brush against my hair.

"You just destroyed me, Thane." My voice comes out small and wrecked. "What did you expect?"

His low laugh rumbles through his chest and settles warm in the pit of my belly. His arms tighten around me and I curl into him, boneless, high, marked in ways that won't show on my skin.

I press my lips to the scar along his collarbone and close my eyes. In a concrete safehouse with no warmth, no photographs, no trace of the man who built it, I am more alive and more wanted than I have ever been in my entire twenty-three years.

His phone buzzes, shattering the peace.

It comes in a single sharp vibration against the glass desk across the room. His body goes rigid. The arms around me stay locked in place but every muscle in his torso turns to stone beneath my cheek. His jaw works once before locking tight.

I lift my head. The expression on his face steals the warmth from my bones.

"Thane?"

He's already pulling away. Already moving. The man who just whispered praise against my skin and held me through the tremors vanishes, replaced by the controlled stranger who carries the quiet danger my father wore into every room he ever entered.

He crosses the room, picks up the phone, and reads the screen. The muscles in his shoulders draw tight, tendons straining against his neck.

I sit up. "What is it?"

He sets the phone facedown on the desk. When he turns to me, those whiskey eyes are blank. Wiped clean of every emotion. It’s like a ghost is staring at me from behind the face of the man who just made me call him Daddy.

"Nothing you need to worry about, sweet girl. Just business."

But his fingers curl into fists at his sides and the knuckles go white.

Something is very wrong.