"I know."
I pull the cloth aside. The sight of her—flushed and swollen, slick running freely, her thighs trembling faintly where they bracket my hips—does something to me that sits alongside everything else I know right now. I press my thumb through her folds and feel her clench and hear the sound she makes, short and furious and involuntary.
"What do you want?" I say.
"You know what I want." Tight. Barely controlled.
"Say it."
"Don't—"
"Say it." I press my thumb to her entrance and don't push in, and feel her hips rock forward trying to close the distance. I hold them still. "Tell me what you want."
A pause. Her jaw working. "Your fingers," she says. "Inside me."
"Good girl."
The approval dependency lands in her like a hook—I feel her cunt clench around the tip of my thumb at the praise, her whole body pulling toward it—and I press two fingers inside her and feel her go taut. I curl them and find the place that makes her thighs try to close and hold her thighs open with my other hand and work it.
"Still tracking the October logs?" I say.
"Shut—" She cuts off as I curl again. "Shut up."
I work my fingers in long strokes and keep my thumb circling her clit and feel her building—the tightening I know now theway I know the manor. Her hands have moved to my hair. Not pushing my head down. Just holding on.
I unfasten my breeches. Both cocks out, both aching—and I watch her eyes go to them immediately and stay. She tries to look back at my face. Her eyes return. She has never once managed to look away. I find that I want her to keep looking, tonight and for longer than tonight, and I file this with the other things I am not naming.
I remove my fingers. She makes a sound at the loss—involuntary, immediately suppressed—and I press the head of the upper cock to her entrance.
"Both," she says. Immediately. She hates that she said it immediately.
"Upper first," I say.
"Yes. Yes, fine."
I press inside.
The cold of me against the heat of her—always this, always the specific shock of her warmth around my cock, every time as complete as the first—and I feel her take the first inch and the second and the shudder at the third, her cunt gripping me in tight pulses that travel up both shafts. I seat myself fully and hold there.
"Look at me," I say.
She opens her eyes.
"The October logs," I say. "What specifically are you after?"
Her jaw tightens. "You know what I'm?—"
I adjust the vibration upward. One notch. Her breath breaks on a sound I feel in my balls.
"What specifically?" I say.
"The relay sequencing." She grips the desk edge. Her knuckles go white. "October through December. Three-month window. The traffic overlap between?—"
She is describing, in operational terms, the exact sequence that leads to Lena Riley's farmhouse. She is going to find it. She is the best operative I have encountered in six centuries and she is going to find it, and the only question is whether she finds it before or after eight days. I run the vibration up another notch and move.
Long, deep strokes—the curve of my cock finding the angle that makes her grip the desk harder—and I watch her face lose the sentence. She makes a sound instead, raw and involuntary. I drive into her and feel her cunt clench tight on the withdrawal and grip me on the return. Six months and I have not developed a tolerance for the heat of her. I no longer believe I will.
"Between," I say.