Liar.
“I am thorough.”
He undressed me the rest of the way with the same controlled possession he brought to everything else. His hands moved over fabric and skin like he was uncovering territory he already knew was his.
Then he slowly undressed himself. The belt came first. Then the buttons. His shirt went to the floor in a clean fold, because even now Dominic Graves couldn’t quite surrender order to chaos.
I watched him.
I watched the breadth of his shoulders, the hard line of his chest, the pale scars crossing his skin like a language I hadn’t learned yet. I watched the cut of his hips, the long muscle of his thighs, the sheer, unfair size of him as he stood there with dragon eyes and human hands and a restraint that looked thinner by the second.
The bond pulled tight and hot.
Mine,it said. Not as a word but as a deep ache.
Dominic’s gaze dropped over me, and the air changed. The man was still there. The discipline. The careful hands. But the dragon had moved closer to the surface, possessive and silent and very certain about the bed behind me.
He guided me back toward it, not pushing, not taking, just moving with that unbearable patience until the backs of my knees touched the mattress.
Then he followed me down.
The mattress dipped under his weight, and every part of me noticed.
He took his time. Took me apart by degrees, his hands at my hips and his mouth working in patient, unhurried pressure. His attention settled on me as intently as if he were sighting a weapon.
Every shift landed. Every place my body answered before I could catch up. He learned me.
He watched the muscle in my thigh jump and chose to do that again. He found the pulse at the back of my knee with his thumb and ran it slow until I was breathing through my mouth and gripping the sheet for purchase.
I laughed once unsteadily.
He looked up. His mouth wet. His eyes very black in the low light. “Little spy.”
“That isn’t my name.”
“It is accurate.”
“It’s rude.”
“It is mine.” He moved down again.
He knew now what would unmake me, and the infuriating man was choosing exactly when to use it.
He spread me open with unhurried patience, which should’ve been illegal in a man with that mouth. Two fingers slid into me as his tongue found my clit, and the second orgasm built slowly, dragged out of me by his hands, his mouth, and the bond humming through every nerve I had.
My fingers tightened in his hair. My back arched off the bed.
I said his name, not quietly and not with any self-control.
Dominic didn’t stop. He worked me through it with the same steady attention, holding the pace as the pleasure crested, broke, and caught again in a smaller aftershock I didn’t see coming. It hit me on the way down and cracked open something in my chest I had been carrying closed for weeks.
When he came back up, he took his time.
His mouth moved over me in a slow, deliberate path: the inside of my knee, the crease of my hip, the flat of my stomach where his hand had held me earlier. Then my ribs, the space between my breasts, my collarbone.
By the time he found my mouth, I was already reaching for him. He kissed me, and I tasted myself on his tongue.
He braced above me on his forearms. The heavy length of him pressed against me, hot and thick.
