"Did you mean it?"
"...y-yes—"
"Then I'm not done with you."
I start fucking him in earnest.
Not the slow gentle fucking from before. This is different. Harder. Deeper. The kind of fucking I have been holding back from him for months because he wasn't ready and I knew it. He's ready now. He's loose and slick and stretched and wrecked and saying my name into the pillow with every thrust, and the only word in my head is—
Mine.
I drive into him again. Hand still in his hair.
Mine.
The sound of my hips against his ass is obscene in the dim of the suite. He's pushing back against me, taking it, cock hanging hard between his thighs again, slick smeared down to his knees.
Mine.
I bend over him. Mouth at the back of his neck. Bite down on the bond mark again and his whole body bows up off the bed.
Mine.
"Atlas—Atlas, I'm—"
"Yes, baby."
"Again—Atlas, I'm gonna come again—"
"Yes."
Mine.
He breaks for the third time with my teeth in his bond mark and my cock buried to the hilt and my knot already starting to swell again, faster than nature, the product working in reverse now. The clench of him around me drags a second orgasm out of me before I'm ready for it. I lock inside him. Knot swelling fast. My weight pressing him flat into the bed, my arm clamped tight around his ribs, my mouth at his throat.
I come with that single word in my head and his body trembling under mine and the bond between us pulsing so wide I lose the city, lose the hotel, lose the room, lose everything except the heat of him and the weight of him and the absolute certainty.
Mine.
Mine.
Mine.
Chapter 8
Mom's been deadheading peonies for ninety minutes and shows no sign of stopping.
I'm on my knees in the gravel between the patio stones, pulling weeds from the cracks because she asked me to and I have spent the last forty-eight hours discovering I will, evidently, say yes to almost anything anyone asks of me, in the panicked hope they will not ask the question I actually don't want to answer.
My hands are filthy. My t-shirt is sweat-stuck to my back. The sun is in the wrong place to make any of this less hot.
Somewhere in the house, in the dresser drawer of the bedroom I drove home to yesterday afternoon, are the clothes I wore to a private dining room and a hotel suite I am not allowed to mention. Atlas's car keys are in the bowl by the front door, where I dropped them when I came in, because Atlas kissed me goodbye outside the hotel yesterday morning and got into a black car bound for the airport and let me drive his to the estate alone. He is currently in another time zone doing the thing he tried to tell me about over the duck. I have spent the last twenty-six hours feeling the absence of him in the bond like a tooth I keep finding with my tongue.
I'm also still—
I shift my weight on my heels. Wince.
—sore.
