"Yer cold," I said.
His hands worked down to my waist, and then he went to his knees, and my cock gave an interested twitch as he looked up at me.
"Where's yer brother?" I asked as he ran his hands down the insides of my thighs. "Because if Niko comes round that corner while ye've got yer hands down my trousers, I'll never hear the end of it. Neither will ye."
"Out."
"Out where?"
"Sent him to Gregori's for the night. Told him if he came back before morning I'd put him through a window."
That stopped me for half a second. He'd cleared the flat. On purpose. The great daft bastard had planned this, and he hadn't said a word about it.
I didn't let it show. "Warmer," I said instead, though his hands were nowhere near.
He looked up at me from the floor. "Liar."
"Aye," I managed. "But ye should know better than to play games with a Scotsman."
He put both hands flat against my stomach and slid them up under the shirt, palms dragging over my ribs. A shiver chased up my spine that had nothing to do with temperature.
"Higher," I said, which was a lie, because the wallet sat low at my back and I wanted his lips where his hands were.
He went higher. Thumbs at my sternum, big fingers spreading round my sides, and he leaned in close enough that his breath came warm through the cotton. He pressed his lips to the middle of my chest through the shirt, and I lost the next word in my throat.
"That's no' searching," I got out. "That's cheating."
"You said warmer."
"That was before, ye great—"
His hand found the dip of my spine and stopped there. The bastard kept his eyes on mine the whole time he worked it free.
"Found it," he said.
"Aye. Took ye long enough."
He drew it out, the ugly honest thing, and turned it in his hands down there on the floor like it was worth a damn. He ran his thumb down the stitching. "It's—"
"Don't ye flatter me," I warned him. "I know what it is."
He didn't flatter me. He tucked it away inside his jacket without a word, and that was the only thanks I'd get and the only kind I'd have taken.
"Mine," he said.
"It was always yours, ye thick—"
"Everything you make is mine." He hadn't stood. He stayed down there on the floor, and his hands closed hard on the backs of my thighs and pulled, so I had to catch the table or go down into him. "Same as everything you do." He looked up, and there wasn't a soft thing in his face. "Three days you hid from me. Put that hand into something I'd carry every day of my life and said nothing. You think I don't know what that costs you?"
"Dinnae—"
"I'm not going to say it." His thumb drove into the meat of my thigh, hard enough to leave a mark, hard enough to take the next clever thing right out of my mouth. "I'm going to do something about it instead. Hold still."
"Make me," I got out, because I'm a mouthy bastard and I'll be one with my dying breath.
He yanked my belt the rest of the way open and had my trousers off my hips in one rough pull, no patience left in him now, and put his mouth to my cock through my underpantswhile I was still working out something smart to say. The heat of it went up my spine and dragged the smart clean out. I got the good hand into his hair and gripped. The bad one I kept fisted at my side, out of it, mine to manage.
"Ye gonna fuck me on the floor in your dining room," I managed. "What would Niko say?"
