Page 103 of Flames and Blood

He goes completely still under me.

He doesn’t pull away. His hand comes up and spreads across the back of my head and holds my mouth exactly where it is. For two seconds, he doesn’t move, and Gideon Crowe always moves.

“Do it,” he says. It comes out of him ragged.

I don’t.

I put my lips there instead, open, and hold them against the place where his pulse would be, and I feel his hand shake once against my scalp.

Then he sits up under me and gets an arm across my back and pulls me down onto him hard, and slow is finished. I get my knees under me and take him at a pace neither of us chose. His hands are on my hips. His mouth is at my collarbone. I ride him until my thighs are shaking, and the whole narrow bed has moved a hand’s width across the floor.

“Gideon!” I choke out. I finish first, saying the name nobody else uses. He goes a few strokes later with his face pushed into my shoulder and both arms locked around my back, and I hold his head there and feel every second of it happen to him.

We stay wrapped around each other a long while. My heat goes into him. His cold comes back into me. Somewhere in the middle we end up the same temperature. I didn’t know that could happen, and I don’t say it out loud in case saying it ends it.

Then he lies back and takes me with him, and I end up on my side against his chest with his arm over me and the lamp burning down in its niche.

“The man on the stairs,” he says into my hair. “Aldis. He came past this door twice today.”

“Checking on you?”

“Checking the bar. Hesper says they were talking about locking me in here. I think it offends him that nobody’s used it.”

“Aldis has opinions about everything. He didn’t speak to my mother for a month once, over the correct way to store a spear.”

“Who won?”

“Aldis. Nobody has ever beaten Aldis on the subject of spears.”

He laughs. It goes through his chest and into my back. I’m collecting his laughs now. They’re the warmest part of him.

His hand rests open over my hip. My eyes want to close, and I won’t let them, because sleep costs hours and I’ve already lost enough hours that should have been spent in bed with this man.

“Gideon.”

“Mm.”

“When a job ends. What do you do after?”

His hand doesn’t move.

“I go back to my office,” he says.

“You have an office?” Somehow, I never imagined that.

“I do. There’s a desk and a chair. I write up the file, I close the ledger, and I wait for the next name to come across it.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. It’s a good system.”

I want to ask him what happens when the system doesn’t work. When the job is over but it’s not supposed to be. I don’t.

His arm comes tighter over me, barely, just enough to feel through my back.

I stay until the lamp is nearly out.

Then I dress in the dark. He watches me do it from the bed and doesn’t ask me to stay. I don’t ask him anything either. At the door I lift the inside bar myself, quietly, and he lets me.