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"Inside me." I wrap one leg around his hip. "Now."

He reaches between us and positions himself, then pushes forward in one long, deep stroke that bottoms out inside me. I cry out against his shoulder, and my nails dig into his back, and his arms tremble as he holds still and lets my body adjust to the fullness.

He starts to move, and the rhythm he sets is slow and grinding, each thrust pressing deep and holding before pulling back. I can feel every inch of him, every ridge and vein, and the friction builds a different kind of pressure than his mouth did, something deeper and more aching that radiates outward from where we're joined.

"Look at me," he says.

I open my eyes. His face is inches from mine, and his expression is raw in a way I've only seen once before, in a hotel room where neither of us offered a last name. He watches my face while he moves inside me, reading every response, adjusting angle and depth based on the sounds I make.

"Deeper," I whisper, and he folds my knee up toward my chest and changes the angle, and the new position opens me so wide that I feel him pressing against my cervix with every thrust. "Yes, right there."

His pace increases. The headboard taps the wall in a steady rhythm, and my breasts move with every stroke, and his hand finds one and kneads while his hips keep driving forward. I grip the sheets with both hands and meet his thrusts with my own, rolling my hips to take him deeper, and the sound of our bodies together fills the room.

"Harder." I pull him down against me and bite his earlobe. "I won't break."

He drives into me hard enough to shove me up the mattress, and I brace one hand against the headboard and push back. His hand slides beneath my hips and tilts them, and the next stroke hits something that makes my vision blur and my breath stop.

"There." I'm gasping. "Right there, again."

He repeats the stroke, and I feel the orgasm building from a place so deep inside me I didn't know it existed. My thighs shake around his hips, and my fingers claw at the sheets, and his name comes out of my mouth in pieces.

"I want to feel you come around me," he says against my jaw, and his voice is fractured, barely held together. "I want to feel it."

I shatter. My whole body locks and shakes, and I clench around him in rhythmic pulses that pull a sound from his chest I've never heard before. He follows me over two thrusts later, burying himself deep and holding while he comes with my name broken between his teeth.

He collapses onto his forearms, careful to keep his weight off my chest, and his face drops into the hollow of my neck. His breathing comes in ragged pulls against my skin, and I can feel his heartbeat hammering through his ribs and into mine.

We stay like that. His body covers mine, and my legs wrap around his hips, and neither of us moves. The lamp throws a warm circle across the bed, and somewhere down the hall our son sleeps beneath a paper crown.

His thumb traces the curve of my hip. "You're still shaking."

"I know."

"Good shaking?"

I press my lips to his temple. "Complicated shaking."

He lifts his head and looks at me, and I brush the hair back from his forehead. His face has lost the tension I've come to expect from him, and the man looking down at me is younger and softer and closer to the one I met at a gala I almost didn't attend.

He rolls onto his side and pulls me with him, and we lie face-to-face with our legs tangled together and his hand resting on the curve of my waist. His thumb draws slow circles against my skin, and I trace the edge of the chess knight on his ribs.

"Stay," I say.

"I'm not going anywhere."

I mean tonight. I mean forever. I don't say the second part because I'm not ready, and he doesn't push, and the silence between us is full enough without words.

I fall asleep with my forehead against his collarbone and his hand in my hair.

When I wake, the lamp is still on, and Alexei sits on the edge of the mattress with his shirt open and Leonid's folder in his hands. He's already watching me when I open my eyes, and his expression carries the weight of a decision he's already made.

He opens the folder, removes a stack of documents, and holds them out to me.

Every page has my name on it.

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ALEXEI