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He didn’t answer. His mouth was busy.

I propped myself up on one elbow and looked down, and the sight nearly finished me before I’d even properly started. He was stretched out along the mattress between my legs, propped carefully on his right forearm, the left arm tucked in close to his body. Protecting the ribs. Even then, even doing this, he was thinking about how to move so it wouldn’t hurt, and something about that undid me more than the heat of his mouth did.

His eyes came up and found mine over the flat plane of my stomach. Hazel gone dark. Not sleepy anymore. Watching me watch him.

Then he sank down slow and deliberate until I felt the back of his throat, and my head dropped against the pillow with a thud.

“Christ,” I managed. “Ash, your ribs.”

He pulled off just long enough to tell me they were not my problem right now in the same clipped, no-nonsense tone he used when correcting a bad line change, and then he took me back in and I lost the argument entirely.

My dragon was not purring this time. My dragon was somewhere past language, a low burning coil in my gut that wanted to grab and hold and never let go, and I had to fist both hands in the sheet to keep from doing exactly that. I wanted to put my hands in his hair. I wanted to pull him up and put him on his back, and take him apart the way I had before, but I could see the careful way he was holding himself, the slight hitch every time he shifted his weight, and I wasn’t going to be the reason he couldn’t skate in Game Five.

So I lay there and let him.

It was harder than any hit I’d ever taken.

He was good at it in the way he was good at everything, economical and precise, with no wasted motion. His tongue worked the underside on every upstroke while his hand wrapped around the base of me where his mouth couldn’t reach, tight and slow, a counter-rhythm that had me shaking within a minute. When I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and reached down, he let me touch him, let me push my fingers into his short hair and hold on, but the second I tried to guide him, he slowed down.

Made me wait.

Made it clear whose idea this had been.

“You’re killing me,” I said, and it came out half French, half English, my accent thickening the way it always did when I stopped being able to manage myself.

He hummed around me.

I felt it everywhere.

I looked down again because I couldn’t not. The scar through his eyebrow, the two-day stubble scraping the inside of my thigh, the flush riding high on his cheekbones. Ash Thorne, who didn’t trust easy smiles or men like me, who’d punched me and meant it, had woken up before me and decided this was what he wanted to do with the first quiet minutes we’d had since everything caught fire.

That thought went through me like a current.

“Ash.” My voice was wrecked. “I’m close. I’m going to—”

He didn’t pull off. If anything, he went deeper, his hand tightening while his eyes came up to hold mine one more time, and I understood that this was the answer to the question I hadn’t been able to ask.

He wasn’t just letting me have this.

He was choosing it.

I came with his name caught somewhere in my chest, my whole body pulling tight and then letting go all at once, and he took it until I was shuddering and empty and half convinced I’d died.

He eased off slowly and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before laying his cheek on my hip, careful of his left side, breathing hard.

I got my hand back into his hair and simply held it there.

It took another minute before my brain started functioning well enough to remember that Ash had received absolutely nothing from the arrangement except the apparent satisfaction of reducing me to incoherent French before breakfast.

“Come here.”

He lifted his head, immediately suspicious. “Why?”

“Because unless you’ve developed telepathy overnight, I haven’t had a chance to return the favor.”

Understanding crossed his face, followed almost immediately by amusement. Ash shifted carefully onto his good side before shaking his head. “No. That wasn’t a trade, Max.”

“I didn’t say it was.”