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"I want to wake up with your hands on me." A sleepy exhale, her lashes brushing against my skin. "I feel safest when you're touching me, Daddy."

For a while I didn’t know how to respond to that. She was asleep before I found my words. And I've been lying here in the dark ever since, running my thumb along the ridge of her hip bone, watching her breathe, cataloging the small sounds she makes when she shifts against me.

The woman I am protecting is the woman I was paid to kill. A year ago that contradiction would have been impossible. Now it's the only truth I have.

I should tell her everything. Right now. Before another second passes with my fingerprints on her skin and the contract still sitting in my encrypted inbox. But telling her means losing her, and losing her means she walks out of this safehouse and into the sights of whoever Vivienne sends next. The timer has already expired and Harlon is out for my blood while another Runner is out for Neve’s.

I will tell her. Soon. But not until Vivienne is handled and Neve is safe enough to hate me without dying for it.

My palm flattens against the warm skin of her stomach. She stirs, a soft murmur escaping her lips, and presses into my touch.

My fingers trace a slow path from her navel to the underside of her breast. Light. Barely there. A touch designed to register beneath sleep without breaking it. Her nipple tightens under the brush of my thumb and a quiet sound rolls from the back of her throat, feminine and hungry even in the dark of her dreams. Her hips shift, pressing back against my hard cock, and the friction sends a jolt of heat straight to my balls.

I brush the pad of my thumb across the stiff peak again, rolling the sensitive flesh between my finger and thumb until the bud tightens to a hard point. Her breathing changes. Deeper, with a catch at the end of each inhale that tells me her body is waking well before her mind.

"Daddy." Soft. Dream-laced. Her lips barely move around the word and my cock throbs against the curve of her ass.

I ease the sheet from her body and slide lower on the mattress. Warm skin glows in the pale light, goosebumps rising in the wake of cool air replacing cotton sheets. I press my mouth to her stomach, her hip, the crease where her thigh meets her pelvis.

Her arousal already pools between her thighs and her scent wraps around me.

My mouth waters for a taste.

Her legs part with an unconscious shift, her body opening for me before her eyes do. Slick heat glistens between her folds, pink and swollen from everything I've done to her over the past day, and my jaw locks at the sight. Beautiful. Wrecked. Mine.

I drag my tongue through her wetness in one slow, hungry stroke and her whole body shudders.

"Thane." Her voice is groggy, half asleep, half awake. Her fingers reach blindly and find my hair, curling into the strands without gripping. Her hips roll against my mouth in a lazy rhythm her body knows even when her brain is still floating somewhere between dream and reality.

I circle her clit with the tip of my tongue, slow and patient, building the pressure. Each stroke is calculated to pull her closer to the surface without shocking her awake. I want her to drift into this the way morning light drifts through glass. I want her orgasm to meet her at the edge of consciousness and drag her into the waking world on a wave she never sees coming.

Her breathing turns ragged. Those dark lashes flutter and fall, flutter and fall. I seal my mouth over her clit and suck, gentle at first, then harder when her thighs tremble against my shoulders. The grip in my hair tightens and a moan spills from her lips that bounces off the concrete walls and sinks into my bones.

"Oh, God." Green eyes crack open, glassy and drunk with drowsy pleasure. She looks down her body at me kneeling between her thighs and the raw vulnerability in her expression splits my chest clean open. "Don't stop. Please don't stop."

I push two thick fingers inside her tight, greedy channel. Her walls grip me and her back arches off the mattress. My tongue works her clit in deliberate circles while my fingers curl forward against the spot that makes her voice break apart.

She comes with a cry that splits the quiet of the safehouse. Her body trembles and pulses around my fingers while I work her through every ripple with my mouth and fingers. Her nails dig into my scalp. Her thighs clamp around my head. The taste of her release floods my tongue, sweet and sharp.

“Fuck, sweet girl, you drown me in your essence.” I groan against her sensitive flesh because I am greedy for every last drop this woman will give me.

Before the aftershocks fade, I strip my shirt over my head and settle between her trembling thighs. She's panting, flushed from her chest to her hairline, eyes still glazed and heavy. My cock hangs thick and aching between us, the head slick with pre-cum. I brace my forearms beside her head and lower my mouth to hers. She kisses me back with a hunger that makes my cock pulse against her wet entrance.

I press the head of my cock to her entrance and push inside. Fuck a condom. I want my woman bare. I want to feel her grip me with her pussy and take everything from me.

The difference registers in her eyes the same second my bare skin meets hers. Every time before this, I rolled one on. Every time, I put a barrier between us because some last scrap of discipline insisted on it. Her gaze drops between our bodies, to where the swollen head of my cock glides through her slick folds, and her breath hitches.

"Thane."

"Tell me to stop and I will." It’s too late. She’s mine all the way to her soul now. I know and so does she.

Her pouty pink lips part a fraction and her chest rises and falls. Green eyes search mine with a precision that rivals any weapon I've ever held. She's calculating. Reading me the way I suspect her father taught her. Looking for the lie, the manipulation, the angle.

She won't find one. Not in this.

"I don't want you to stop." Her voice is quiet, certain, stripped of everything but raw want. Her legs wrap around my waist and her heels dig into the small of my back, pulling me closer. "I want all of you, Daddy. Nothing between us."

I sink into her again in one slow, deep stroke. Fuck, she’s heaven. Her wet heat grips every bare inch of me, and the sensation is so intense my arms shake. The air leaves my lungs in a groan I can't contain. Her mouth opens on a cry that I catch with my lips. I pull back and push forward again, deeper, until our bodies are flush and there is nowhere left to go.