When he dropped to his knees and pushed her skirts up, several sample strips tore free and slid down around them like failed blessings.
"Mavrek," she warned, because the wall behind her held twenty years of his private work and some late sane part of her recognized the danger before the rest of her did.
"Aye."
He kissed the inside of her thigh and shoved her underclothes aside.
Warning apparently filed and ignored.
His mouth on her cunt in the closed studio was different from daylight in the workshop. No windows now. No need to swallow sound. The knowledge hit her before his tongue did, and when it did hit she let the sound go instead of breaking her own teeth holding it back.
That was information.
Mavrek groaned at the noise and licked her harder. One hand held her thigh open while the other slid behind her, fingers digging into her ass and pulling her into his mouth with a greed stripped of all his prior composure. The sample boards at her back scraped and shifted every time she moved. One cracked cleanly under the shoulder he had pinned there.
Iva had meant to care. She really had. Then his tongue found the exact place that made caring temporarily impossible, and the room narrowed to grit under her palms and the sound of herself being much louder than she ever allowed.
He took that too, as if her volume were another form of proof.
When she came the first time it was with her head thrown back against the wall and a shout she would have died rather than make in the workshop. Mavrek kept licking her through it, shameless and patient and mean enough to prolong it until her knees trembled and another pinned strip slid down across his shoulder.
"Again," he said into her skin when he rose.
Sweat, dust, sex, argument. His cock strained hard against his trousers, obvious and unforgiving. Iva got one hand betweenthem, fumbling at the fastening because she wanted him naked and inside her immediately and perhaps also because some savage piece of her needed to return the loss of composure in kind.
He helped by rucking the cloth down just enough to free himself, thick and flushed and already wet at the crown. Bigger in the close dusk of the studio than she remembered, which should have been impossible and yet there it was, one more unfairness.
"You look offended," he said.
"I am evaluating the engineering."
He barked a laugh at that, brief and wrecked. Then he turned her, one hand between her shoulder blades, and bent her over the worktable.
The studio smelled of ground minerals and sex. Her cheek landed in a spill of chalk dust. Somewhere near her left hand a sample board still lay wet enough to transfer blue pigment in a cold stripe across her palm. Mavrek shoved her skirts up over her hips and gripped the back of one thigh hard enough to leave a print.
"Tell me if you need slower."
He was still that man. Even now. Even furious and hard and half out of his mind with wanting because she had been right about pigment. The care threaded through the roughness and made it worse.
"Get on with it," she said.
The answering thrust punched the breath out of her.
He took her from behind with the blunt certainty of a man who knew exactly how much he could ask and intended to ask it all. Her body, already worked open by his mouth, still jolted at the stretch. He was deep at once from the angle, striking somewhere inside her that made her hands claw uselessly at thechalked tabletop. One of the sample strips smeared under her wrist with a wet squeak.
Mavrek swore and pulled almost out, then drove back in harder.
The sound she made was wholly without decorum.
Good. Let decorum drown.
He fucked her in the mess of the workday, in the grit and dust and sweat, one hand braced beside her head and the other sliding between her thighs to her clit. Each thrust jolted the table into the wall. Behind her, more of his pinned experiments tore loose.
She could feel one folded card trapped under her shoulder blade and another ground to pulp under her hip where he held her down and took her with that same impossible blend of attention and force.
"This is what you wanted?" he said, voice ragged at her ear.
She could barely think, much less lie. "After I was right?"