"I don't know what you mean," she says. Clara's voice, held together by will alone.
"No," I say. "I'm sure you don't."
I squeeze once, slow, and she makes another sound—lower this time, a small broken thing she hates, I can feel her hating it in the set of her jaw—and then I release her and step back.
"Hands and knees," I say.
She goes down. Her skirts pool around her and I push them up—over her thighs, to her waist—and her scent reaches me all at once, warm and thick and soaked, and I stand behind her and breathe it in and feel both cocks throb with the specific weight of wanting that has been building for one month. She has been slick since before the garden, building for hours, her body producing this with nowhere to put it, and the sight of it and thesmell of it does something to my patience that I am aware of and managing carefully.
I press my thumb along the inside of her thigh, through the cloth of her underthings, and stop.
Just the pressure. Her hips try to rock back and I hold them still with my other hand and wait.
"What do you want?" I say.
"Nothing." Strained to the edge of it. "I'm fine."
"Miss Merris." I press fractionally harder and her exhale shatters.
"What do you want."
"I want—" Her jaw works. "I want you to stop."
"Do you."
I remove my hand entirely. The sound she makes is involuntary and immediately suppressed and I have it: the specific note of absence registering before the mind can catch up. I let her feel the cold air where my hand was and stand back.
"Stand up," I say. "Come here."
She stands. She comes. Clara's posture—chin up, hands at her sides—and I take her by the shoulder and turn her to face the desk.
"Bend over."
Something shifts behind the professional face—not Clara's calculation this time but the real face, her face, showing through the seam. Her voice when it comes is not Clara's either.
"No."
Both my cocks throb. Hard, slow, once. The weight of them against my breeches is considerable and I am completely aware of it.
I unfasten my breeches.
Both cocks out—the upper curved and heavy, flushed dark, a bead of silver already forming at the tip; the lower straight and thicker, my balls drawn up full and aching beneath—and I watchher eyes go to them and stay. She tries to look away. They come back. Her lips part on something she doesn't say.
I take her hand and wrap it around the upper cock.
Her eyes drop to it immediately—she can't help it, the same way she couldn't help the glances in the study—and I watch her take in the weight of it, the flush, the bead of silver at the tip, and I watch what that does to her face before she can arrange it.
"There it is," I say pleasantly. "You've been looking at these for five lessons."
Her jaw tightens. Her hand doesn't move. It also doesn't let go.
I press two fingers gently against her lips.
She opens for them before she decides to—the pre-heat again, the same pre-heat that has been making all her decisions today—and I slide them in and feel what I expected to find: the warm wet of her mouth, more than it should be, pooling at the back of her tongue. She realises what I'm doing at the same moment I do it, and she bites down.
Not hard enough to draw blood. Hard enough to be a message.
I look at her. She looks back at me, my fingers in her teeth, her hand around my cock, and there is fury in her eyes and something underneath it that she cannot keep off her face entirely.