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I come. Hard. My body arching off the desk, my hand in his hair, his name in my mouth. He does not stop. He works me through it with his tongue and his fingers and that low, rumbling growl and when I finally go boneless he stands and his mouth is on mine and I can taste myself on him and he is pulling at his belt with one hand while the other grips my hip.

“Nina.” His voice is rough. The formal edges worn away. “I need to be inside you. Tell me yes.”

“Yes.”

He frees himself and I feel him against me, hot and thick and I look down and my breath catches because he is large. So large.

He pushes inside me in one slow, controlled stroke and I dig my nails into his shoulders because the stretch is overwhelming, the fullness borders on too much, and he holds perfectly still. His forehead drops against mine. His eyes are closed. His jaw is tight. His skin is radiating heat like a furnace.

“Tell me,” he says.

“Move.”

He moves.

It is not gentle. I don’t want gentle. I want exactly this: the most controlled man I have ever met losing that control with his hands gripping my hips and his mouth on my throat and every thrust pushing me across the polished surface of a desk he probably acquired in a century I wasn’t born in. He is strong. His hands hold me like I am something precious and irreplaceable and he is taking me apart anyway.

“You are,” he says between strokes, his mouth against my ear, “without question, the most extraordinary thing I have ever touched.”

His hand slides up my body. Rests at my throat. Not squeezing. Holding. His thumb traces my pulse. He is feeling my heartbeat again, measuring it, cataloging it while he moves inside me, and I realize with a distant, pleasure-drunk clarity that he is memorizing this. Every second. Every sound. Filing it away in whatever ancient system he uses to keep track of everything he values.

“Say my name,” he says.

“Silas.”

“Again.”

“Silas.”

His hips snap harder. His growl deepens. I feel it building inside me again, the pressure, the heat, and I feel something else. Him. Growing thicker inside me, a swelling at the base that is not subtle and is not stopping.

His knot.

I know what it is. I’m an omega. I know the biology. And he told me what I am to him, and I chose this, and my body does something my brain doesn’t authorize: it pulls him deeper. I lie back. He lifts my legs to his shoulders, and I take him all the way and the lock catches.

We both go still.

Full. I am completely, impossibly full of him. His knot is seated inside me and I can feel it pulsing, hot and thick, and his whole body has gone rigid and his eyes are open and gold and looking directly into mine and he is inside me in a way that no one has ever been. Locked. Connected. His.

He thrusts one final time and comes. I feel it. Hot and deep and his body shudders against mine and the growl becomes something ancient and resonant that fills the study and vibrates in my bones. And it triggers me. The knot and the heat and the sound and the look on his face, which is a man who has waited more than a century and a half for something and just found it. I come again, clenching around his knot, and his hands lock around my thighs and we ride it out, burning together.

“Breathe,” he says. He leans forward and his hand cups my face. His thumb traces my cheekbone. Gentle. Unbearably gentle, after everything. “Breathe, Nina.”

I breathe. He pulls my legs apart and leans down. We are forehead to forehead. His breathing is uneven. His scales are fading slowly. His eyes are still gold.

I take stock. My blouse is open. My breasts are bare. My skirt is around my hips. I’m lying on a desk with a dragon locked inside me and trust documents from 1847 scattered on the floor and I have known this man for less than a day.

I feel wrecked. I feel extraordinary.

I do not feel a single ounce of regret. My body knew before my brain caught up, and my brain, having now reviewed the data, agrees completely. Insane circumstances. Correct decision.

“I have been employed here,” I say, “for approximately twenty-two hours.”

He makes a sound that is almost a laugh. Almost. His mouth brushes mine.

“Twenty-two hours and twenty-three minutes,” he says. “I was counting.”

We are going to be locked together for a while. I know this. He knows this. His knot is pulsing gently inside me and his hand is stroking my hair. The fire is popping in the hearth and the trust documents from 1847 are on the floor and I am on the desk of an ancient, billionaire, gold dragon who is still inside me. My omega is quiet for the first time since I arrived.