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I have to win this.

I think about Troy’s heavy weight on me, the rough, impersonal sex with my husband that’s nothing more than a chore to be endured. The basement, the rancid smell of it, the days I spent in darkness. Anything that isn’t the slow, devastating drag of Zevran’s tongue.

Except none of it works. Troy’s ghost evaporates the second Zevran presses harder.

He finds a rhythm and breaks it just as I start to anticipate it, building me up and then easing off, like he can read exactly how I’m losing myself in him and he refuses to let me go anywhere without his permission. I hear myself making sounds I don’t recognize, broken, breathless, and shameless, and I can’t quiet them.

“Good girl,” he murmurs against me, and the vibration of his voice through my nerve endings nearly finishes me right there. “Let me hear you.”

“I don’t feel anything,” I gasp out, a blatant lie, even as my back arches off the bed and my fingers leave the sheets to find their way into his hair, pulling him closer instead of pushing him away. My body has stopped listening to anything my mind has to say.

“Liar.” He groans low in his throat, and the sound rolls through me like thunder. “You’re so fucking sweet. Are you tight for me, printsessa?”

Two fingers slide into me, slow, deep, and devastating, curling in a way that has me crying out. I’m climbing toward a shattering finish that’s building too fast and too hot to stop, even if I wanted to.

“Zevran.” His name leaves me on a shattered cry. “Zevran!”

His pace doesn’t slow. If anything, it sharpens, like his name on my lips is exactly what he’s been waiting for. The slick, relentless drag of his tongue and the exquisite curl of his fingers has my whole world narrowing down to this bed, this man, and this impossible, building pressure that’s about to break me wide open.

It hits me without warning. An overwhelming wave that starts somewhere deep and breaks all at once. I come apart with a cry I don’t recognize as my own. My whole body locks, then shudders, then locks again, and Zevran doesn’t let up. He doesn’t slow. He works me straight through it with his mouth and his fingers until I’m shaking and gasping, clutching his hair so hard it must hurt.

I’ve never felt anything like it. The pleasure doesn’t just crest and fade the way I thought pleasure was supposed to work. It keeps breaking over me in pulsing, electrical waves, again and again.

Something in me that’s been clenched tight for eight months has just been forced open, and I don’t know how I’ll ever be the same again.

Zevran eases off slowly, pressing one last, almost tender kiss to my inner thigh, and lifts his head to look at me.

His mouth is wet and shining with me. His eyes are dark and pleased, a man surveying a battle he’s thoroughly won. Satisfaction is stamped across his face. He moves up and settles beside me, propped on one elbow, looking down at me like I’m a prize he’s just claimed.

He watches me for a moment, a calculating look moving behind those pale eyes, and then his mouth curves into a wicked smile.

“Was that up to your husband’s standards?”

His words burn across my flesh, but I’m too utterly undone to do anything but lie there and let them melt around me. I’m floating somewhere too high and too warm for the insult to reach. Not once in eight months of marriage, not in all the years before it, has a man made me feel like Zevran just did. I didn’t think I was made for pleasure like this, but a smoky-voiced Russian just proved how wrong that assumption was.

I’m vaguely aware of the mattress shifting as he gets up, unhurried and completely unbothered by the shattering pleasure he just pulled from my body. The bathroom door clicks shut behind him.

I lift a shaking hand and touch my own throat, my heated cheeks. My fingers are trembling violently. I press them to my lips and laugh, a small, disbelieving huff of sound that has no business escaping me right now.

I lie there in this bed in his shirt, touching my own face like I’ve never met myself before, letting the wonder of it wash over me until my breathing finally slows.

Was that up to your husband’s standards?

I laugh again. Troy could never dream of making me feel so fulfilled. So indulged. So…

…cherished?

I push that dangerous word away instantly. I feel soft and pink and fuzzy from the top of my head down to the tips of my toes, but that was hardly Zevran’s intention. He wanted to prove a point. A proud, masculine point that he knows my body better than I know myself, and though I may have gotten the handcuff key away from him, he still has the upper hand.

What a way to prove a point.

A mischievous smile that has no business being there dances over my lips. Perhaps I should disobey him more often.

I gather up the sweatpants he stripped from my body and pull them back on. The bed is in complete disarray, and I quickly straighten the comforter and pillows, smoothing out all the evidence that anything happened in this room beyond a professional and his asset sleeping off a difficult rescue.

I’m careful about it, the same way I straighten the apartment before Troy gets home. Putting the laundry away, hanging a towel he’d left crumpled on the floor, erasing every small sign of my activities.

If there’s nothing left to see, there’s nothing to explain.