"I know."
"It doesn't bother you?"
"More than it should."
Her hands stop. The stillness belongs to a woman who just heard something she wasn't expecting.
"Why?"
I pull her sweater over her head. She lifts her arms and lets me. I unclasp her bra and let it fall.
My thumb drags across one nipple, slow and deliberate, and the peak tightens under the pressure. I cup her breast, feeling the weight of it in my palm, the softness against the calluses.
When my mouth replaces my thumb, closing around the peak with slow, firm suction, her spine arches off the wall and her fingers curl into my hair and grip. I pull with my lips, then circle with my tongue, the flat of it dragging across the hardened peak in strokes that match the rhythm I'll set later when I'm inside her. She doesn't know that yet. I do.
I switch to the other breast. My thumb keeps working the first, wet from my mouth, rolling the peak between my fingers while my tongue traces the same slow circles on the second. The sound she makes is low and continuous, a vibration I can feel in her ribcage under my hand. Her hips shift against the wall, restless, searching for pressure I'm not giving her yet.
"Because a woman who watches my face while I'm inside her is going to see everything I've spent my life keeping out of sight," I say against her skin. "The composure holds in Ward's office. It holds in a courtroom. It does not hold with you."
Her jeans and panties come off with my hands and her cooperation, my fingers hooking the waistband and stripping denim and cotton down her legs.
She's completely naked, standing against her mother's kitchen wall. The sight of her stops my hands on my own belt.
The lamplight catches the sheen between her thighs. She's wet, visibly, and the want that goes through me is blunt and immediate and strips every professional instinct I own down to the animal underneath. My mouth goes dry. My cock is straining against the wool, and I can feel my own pulse in it, heavy and demanding, and every rational process I've built in thirty-four years of learning to control rooms is being outbid by the need to put my mouth on her and taste what I'm doing to her.
I leave my belt. I drop to one knee on the kitchen floor, my hands on her hips pressing her back against the wall, and the sound she makes when she understands what I'm doing is half protest and half surrender.
I lift one of her thighs over my shoulder, opening her, and press my mouth between her legs. The first long stroke of my tongue parts her from entrance to clit, and the taste of her hits me straight at the base of my spine. Salt and heat and the slick evidence of a want she can't argue away any more than I can. Her whole body jolts.
Her hand finds the back of my head, fingers fisting in my hair hard enough to sting. I find her clit and work it with slow, firm pressure, my lips closing around the swollen bud, pulling with a rhythm designed to take her apart at the speed I set.
Two fingers slide inside her. She's tight and hot and wet enough that they push in without resistance, the slick heat gripping them as I curl against the front wall and find the spot that makes her head tip back against the plaster.
"You look like a man on his knees for the first time." Her voice is wrecked, but the observation is sharp and pointed, Greer watching and filing even now. "I don't think anyone's ever seen this version of you."
She's correct. I answer by curling my fingers harder and sealing my mouth over her clit with a suction that makes her spine arch off the wall and her hand fist tighter in my hair.
When I feel her getting close, the muscles tightening, I pull back. My mouth leaves her. My fingers slow to a shallow, teasing stroke.
"Don't you dare," she breathes.
"You wanted to build a file." I press a kiss to the inside of her thigh. "I'm contributing to the record."
"I will kill you."
"Later."
My mouth returns, and this time I don't ease off. My tongue circles her clit with firm, steady pressure, my fingers curving deep, stroking the spot in a rhythm that matches my tongue. Her hips grind against my face. Her breath comes in short, fractured pulls.
She comes against my mouth with both hands in my hair and a sound that breaks open behind her ribs. Her inner walls clench hard around my fingers in rhythmic pulses, her thigh shaking against my shoulder.
I work her through it, slower, gentler, until her grip loosens and her breathing starts to come back.
I stand. She looks at me, flushed from her cheeks to her chest, her back against the wall, her eyes glazed and dark.
Mine.The word arrives uninvited and absolute. She's standing against her mother's wall with my mouth still wet from her and the fury still in her eyes underneath the haze.
Mine.The woman who just read my worst weapon and is still within reach.
