Page 47 of Captured By the Pakhan

"You are being extremely unfair."

"I'm being extremely fair. I'm being the fairest man in the state of Kansas."

"You're enjoying this."

"I'm enjoying it enormously," he agrees, and drags the feather up the inside of my thigh over the denim, which shouldn't work and works, and my hips come off the bed about an inch.

The feather stops.

"No," I say. "No, no, come on⁠—"

"You moved."

"I have been lying here for half an hour⁠—"

"Thirty-four minutes."

"—thirty-four minutes, and you have not put a single hand on me⁠—"

"That is correct."

"Is that the point?"

"That is the point," Ilya says.

And I break.

I'd like to say I held out. I'd like to say a great many things about myself, and about the woman who has stared down four men in a truck and a Pakhan with a knife at her throat, and none of them survive contact with a bird's feather and a patient man in a hotel outside Salina.

"Please," I say.

And I hear it. I hear my own voice say it out loud in a room, and the humiliation and the relief arrive in the same half-second, and I can't tell them apart.

Something changes in his face.

"Again."

"Please."

He puts the feather down on the nightstand — deliberately, taking his time about it, the way you'd put down a tool you were finished with — and then he puts his hands on me, and the difference is obscene. After thirty-four minutes of almost-nothing, his palms are so hot they're nearly painful, flat on my ribs, my hip, the back of my thigh, and I make a sound into my own forearm that would be audible through three doors if there weren't a jukebox still going in my head.

He takes the jeans off. He takes his time about that too.

And when his mouth goes where his hands have been I stop being a supervisory special agent, or a fugitive, or a woman with a plan, and I'm nothing at all but a set of nerve endings in the dark in Kansas with my fingers in a man's hair. His mouth moves slowly along the inside of my thigh, lips dragging warm against my skin, and my fingers tighten in his hair as my legs tenses around him.

We go on like that for a long time. He doesn’t rush one second of it, and I savor every moment. After what feels like hours of being caressed by that feather I am so far past ready that the first touch of his mouth on my flesh nearly undoes me. He presses another lingering kiss low against my stomach, just beneath my navel, and my hips lift toward him before I can stop them, a sharp breath catching in my throat.

He instantly notices, and backs off — much to my protest. Settling in beside me, barely touching me. Teasing me with ungodly amusement.

“Ilya–” I whine,

“Mmm?”

“You are being – God help me – deliberately cruel.”

“So what if I am,” he agrees, leaning so close I can feel his breath brush against my skin. He leans over across my hips, letting the feather aside, instead using his fingers and lips to tease my skin.

Still sitting beside me on the bed, he uses his upper body to lean over my waist, essentially pinning me to the bed with his proximity alone, looking at me over his shoulder – a look that I’ll be thinking of for weeks – before sliding two fingers into me. I gasp from the sudden sensation of fullness that is both unexpected and delightful.