His breath paused. “Catalina.”
“The dream,” I said. “Show me.”
He didn’t ask twice.
His hand was still in my hair. The other came up off his side and found my hip. He turned us once, walked me three steps backward without breaking the kiss, and then I was against the desk. The edge of it landed at the back of my thighs. He lifted me onto it. I didn’t have time to be embarrassed by the noise I made when my hips met the wood.
He pulled back half an inch.
“Tell me to stop and I stop.”
“Don’t stop.”
His mouth came back to mine. The hand at my hip slid to my thigh, up the outside of my leggings, found the waistband. Hewaited there. One beat. Asking without asking. I lifted my hips a fraction. He took my boots, then worked them down my hips and off, set everything on the floor beside the desk in a small ordered pile.
He went to his knees.
It happened that fast. One second he was leaning over me with his mouth at my jaw, the next his hands were under my knees and my legs were over his shoulders and the desk was cold against the back of my thighs and Dominic Graves was kneeling in a night-watch room looking up at me from between my legs.
His pupils were blown wide, the black of them wrong for the light. His mouth was wet from kissing me. His breath against the inside of my thigh was hot. My skin had been cold a minute ago and registered every degree.
He was hard against the front of his pants. I could see the line of him through the fabric.
“May I,” he said.
Not a question. A formality.
Dragons were going to undo me.
“Yes.”
His hand came up. Two fingers traced the inside of my thigh. The lightness was deliberate. He was checking, making sure I hadn’t changed my mind in the half second since I had said the word.
I put one hand into his hair and pulled.
The sound that came out of him was rough and unsteady. Then he set his mouth at the inside of my knee and started working his way up.
He took his time.
The inside of my thigh, then higher, an inch at a time. Open mouth. Then teeth. Then the drag of stubble across skin. He breathed against me before each move, and the heat of his breath landed first, and then his mouth, so that every contact arrived twice.
His hand spread me open.
His mouth landed exactly where it was supposed to.
The sound I made wasn’t language.
He worked me with his tongue. Slow. Deliberate. The flat of it first, broad and warm and unhurried. Then the point. Then a tight circle drawn at a pressure I wouldn’t have known how to ask for. He learned what I was doing under his mouth and adjusted. Every adjustment was small. Every adjustment was correct. The man who had spent two weeks reading my body across a corridor was reading it now from six inches away, his mouth on me, his tongue moving in patterns that responded to every shift of my breathing.
I was already so wet. Soaking. I had been like this since the dream. He hummed once, dragon-low, in the back of his throat, when he tasted exactly how wet I had already been for him, and the vibration moved up into me and pulled a sound out of my chest that I would’ve sworn wasn’t in my repertoire.
He hummed again. Deliberate.
His fingers came up.
One first. Slow. He pressed in to the second knuckle, paused, watched my face, pressed deeper. He went all the way in. The stretch was real. The slick was easy. I took him without resistance. I whimpered, small and broken. He didn’t look away from me. His eyes stayed slitted. His mouth hadn’t stopped working. I clenched around his finger and felt him register it. The smallest tightening of his jaw against me.
A second finger. He waited again, watching me, until my hips moved against his hand without my permission. Then he curled them.