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It’s a Thursday and I’m supposed to be reviewing blocking notes and instead I’m in his room in one of his shirts because mine are all in the wash, and Beau comes up from the shower with a towel low on his hips and water still on his shoulders, and he stops in the doorway when he sees me on his bed in his shirt, and his whole face does the thing.

“That’s my shirt,” he says.

“All my shirts are in your machine. This is your fault.”

“I’m not complaining.” He comes across the room slow, and I know that walk by now, I’ve learned that walk, the unhurried predatory ease of a man who’s decided something. “I’m noting. For the record. That you’re in my bed, in my shirt, looking like that.”

“Looking like what?”

“Like I should stop talking.” And he leans down and kisses me, and the towel’s the only thing he’s wearing and the shirt’s the only thing I’m wearing and the review notes slide off the bed onto the floor and neither of us looks at them.

He kisses me until I’m dizzy, until I’ve got a fistful of damp hair and I’m pulling him down onto me, and then he breaks off and looks at me with his eyes gone dark and says, against my jaw, “Turn over.”

It goes through me like a current.

“Bossy,” I manage.

“You like bossy.” He drags the shirt up my back, baring me, his hand following the line of my spine. “You spend your whole life in charge of every room you walk into. Reading everyone. Managing everything.” His voice drops, rough, right against my ear. “Turn over and let me run this one. You don’t have to be in charge of a single thing for the next twenty minutes.”

And God help me, that’s the thing that does it — not the order, the permission, the offer to put down the thing I’ve been carrying since I was nine — and I turn over.

I go to my hands and knees on his bed and I hear his breath catch behind me, that sharp inhale, the sound of this controlled person losing a piece of his control at the sight of me, and it’s intoxicating, the power in it, that I can do that to him just by giving in. He pulls the shirt the rest of the way off and runs both hands down my back, my hips, takes a handful of me and groans.

“Look at you,” he says, wrecked. “Christ, Sloane.”

“Less talking⁠—”

“No.” He drops a hand between my shoulder blades and presses, firm, folding me down onto my forearms, and the new angle pulls a sound out of me I didn’t authorize. “I told you. I’m running this one. You’re going to take what I give you and you’re going to like it.” A pause, and his voice gentles half a degree, the check underneath the dirty, because it’s him. “Unless you don’t. Tell me if you don’t.”

“I do.” It comes out unsteady and certain at once. “I want it. Don’t be careful.”

“Yeah?”

“Beau. Don’t be careful.”

He isn’t careful.

He pushes into me from behind in one long stroke, no easing, just takes, and I cry out into the mattress because it’s exactly what I asked for and more than I was braced for, the stretch and the depth of it, and he stills for half a second with his hands gripping my hips hard enough to bruise.

“Okay?”

“Move.”

And he does. He fucks me hard, one hand fisted in my hair and the other clamped on my hip, pulling me back onto him to meet every thrust, and there’s nothing careful or reverent about it, none of the first-night softness — this is rough and deep and exactly what I wanted, the headboard knocking the wall, his hips driving into me, and the part of my brain that never stops, the reel, the commentary, the surveillance I’ve run my whole life — it’s gone, obliterated, there’s nothing in my head but the want and the give and the sound of us.

“That’s it,” he says, ragged, above me. “That’s my girl. Taking me so well. Look at you — gave it all up, didn’t you, finally stopped managing—” He tightens the fist in my hair, pulls just enough to arch my back, and I moan and he groans like the sound undid him. “This perfect fucking cunt. Made for me. Say it’s mine.”

“It’s—” I can barely get words out, I who always have words “—it’s yours, Beau, fuck⁠—”

“Damn right.” He reaches around and finds my clit, works it rough and fast in time with his hips, and I feel it build like a wave I can’t outrun, the whole thing tightening and climbing, and he doesn’t let up, doesn’t gentle, fucks me through it talking the entire time, filthy and certain — come on, give it to me, I can feel it, let go — and I do, I let go, I come apart on his cock with my face in his sheets and his name torn out of me, clenching around him so hard he loses his rhythm and curses.

He follows me over a few strokes later, buried deep, his whole body going taut and then shuddering, my name in his mouth like a prayer, and he folds down over my back, both of us wrecked, his chest against my spine and his breath hot on my neck.

We collapse sideways. He pulls me back into him, still inside me, one heavy arm wrapped around my middle, his mouth at my shoulder.

“You okay?” he murmurs, when he can talk. The check, again, the after-care woven in without making it a thing.

“I’m—” I have to find the word. There aren’t usually shortages. “Yeah. I’m very okay.”