Page 144 of Under Arthur’s Protection

She smiled. “I will.”

I pushed inside her, watching her face the whole way for the tiniest flinch—and got nothing but her lips parting and her nails digging into my shoulder. The cut in my arm protested, so I shifted more of her weight against the wall and let my hips do the work.

She clung to me and breathed my name like it was all she had left. “Oh, Arthur.”

“You feel like heaven.” I went slow, because nothing outside the shower needed either of us before morning. “So tight around me I can’t think straight.”

Her breath hitched, and her pussy began fluttering around my dick.

“That’s it.” I pressed a kiss to the side of her head, holding her body up as much with my chest against hers as with my arms. “You see what you do to me?”

“Oh, Arthur,” she moaned. “It’s so right.”

“I know, sweetheart. I know.” I rolled into her, slow and deep, and she clenched around me hard enough I had to breathe through it. “All for you. Only ever you.”

She turned her face into my neck, panting, and I kept talking into her wet hair—filthy and reverent in the same breath, as I moved inside her—until her breath went ragged and thin. I slowed, about to check if she was all right.

“Don’t you dare stop.” She rocked against me, forehead pressed under my jaw.

“Never, sweetheart. I’ll never stop.” I drove in harder, giving her what she wanted. What she needed. And I’d give her everything. The orgasm. The moon. The fucking stars above. “Fuck, I love you.”

I lost my rhythm and kept going more on momentum than anything else. Every op I’d run had an exit built into it. There was no exit on the far side of a sentence like that. I’d never said it to a woman before. Not like this. It was too soon, too much, too⁠—

“I love you too.” The words were desperate, without any pause or flinch. She gripped the back of my neck and adjusted her legs. “And I’m almost there.”

I hadn’t expected the words back, and I definitely didn’t expect them so easily. I found my rhythm again. A better rhythm. A faster one, that had my whole heart inside of it.

She tightened around me, and her body drew taut. She cried my name into my neck, and I let her take me with her, hips flush to hers, my groan muffled in her wet hair, careful even then, careful all the way through.

We finished wrapped around each other, and I eventually lowered her to her feet.

After, I dried her with the softest towel in the cupboard, letting my lips touch each injury. I gave her one of my shirts, and she slid into the big bed. By the time I pulled the covers over us, she was mostly gone, and she fit herself against my chest like she’d been sleeping there for years.

Her breathing went long and slow inside a minute. The house settled. Lance’s door closed down the hall. The persistent light rain ticked at the window, and for the first time since we’d eaten at The Train Station in Brenton, nothing anywhere was hunting us.

Chapter 45

Lancelot

The divan—the little couch in the mid-cabin—had been mine on the way over. I’d claimed it before we cleared the runway, stretched out with my ankles crossed and my hands behind my head while Arthur delivered the close protection briefing to a woman he was trying hard not to ogle.

But on the flight back? Arthur was on the divan with his arm around that same woman and her head tipped against his shoulder. Both of them were bruised, bandaged, and completely unbothered by having me as an audience.

I was at the worktable in the aft cabin with my laptop, doing what I did best—making us look good. Or trying to, given that ninety percent of what had actually happened was classified under an agreement with a secret society.

“Okay, here’s the concept I’ve got so far,” I said, loud enough for them to hear over the engines. “The FBI and Caine-Ferraro retained Round Table Security to provide close protection for their authentication specialist during a high-value engagement in England. RTS personnel accompanied Dr. Lyons through multiple research sites, ensuring the safe transport of the artifact and the security of her proprietary findings.”

“Proprietary findings,” Gwen repeated. “That makes it sound like I discovered a new toothpaste flavor.”

“Would you prefer ‘groundbreaking scholarly conclusions of immense historical significance we’re not allowed to talk about’?”

“I’d prefer something that doesn’t make me sound like a press release.”

“You’re literally in a press release. That’s what I’m writing.”

Arthur laughed. He hadn’t been this relaxed in years, which was impressive, considering the state of him. At least he’d finally conceded to a country doctor stitching him up at the cottage this morning. I’d practically dragged Arthur into the kitchen chair for that. The man had eight ghost operators, a private jet, and his father’s entire security apparatus at his disposal, and he still needed his best friend to make him sit down for medical attention.

“Keep it vague,” Arthur said. “The authentication is real-ish and will be on file soon enough. Everything else stays out.”