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The heat between us was no longer two separate temperatures.

She lowered her mouth to mine, and the world outside—everything—all of it went quiet.

There was only this.

Only her.

The next kiss was slower, deeper, the kind of contact that didn’t rush toward anything because it had already arrived.

My hands moved down her back, tracing the line of her spine. She arched into it, the sound she made muffled against my mouth.

I rolled her beneath me.

She moved with me willingly, the bed narrow enough that it pressed us together from chest to thigh.

Her legs parted to accommodate me, and the heat between us was immediate and overwhelming.

I braced above her and looked down.

Her hair spread across the bed padding, her skin flushed, her chest rising and falling in a rhythm no tactical assessment had ever recorded.

She reached up and pulled me down by the back of my neck.

The kiss was open, deliberate, entirely without the guarded quality that had defined every interaction between us.

I lowered my mouth to her throat.

She turned her head, and the sound she made when my teeth found the tendon there was not quiet.

My hand moved down her body, slower now.

The inside of her thigh.

The dip of her waist.

The curve of her hip.

She lifted into my hand immediately.

She was wet when my fingers found her. She was shaking. Her hand gripped my wrist, not to pull away but to hold me there, and the sounds she made were no longer controlled. They were raw, unfiltered, the sounds a person makes when every defense they’ve built has finally been set aside.

I added a second finger, and her back arched off the bed.

The response between us was strong enough to be unmistakable, but it was still only response.

Biology could react.

It could not decide.

We already had.

She panted, chest heaving, the air between us heavy with anticipation. I looked up, meeting her dazed eyes as her cunt gave one last lazy flutter around my fingers.

For a few seconds she only breathed.

Then her eyes opened.

“Veyr.”