Page 12 of After Hours

She was afraid this was about to become terribly disappointing. Thatshewas about to disappointhim,and she wasn’t sure she was going to recover from that.

Not to mention the fantasies she’d been having of him that had gotten her through these last six months.

Romily sighed. “I get it, you want me to be servile. Cry and beg and do whatever you tell me, though I’ll never be good enough. So you can tear me into little pieces.” She shook her head. “Been there, done that.”

She expected his temper, then. She expected him to explode, but he didn’t.

He only watched her.

“I’m not into humiliation,” he told her in that gruff voice, laced through with certainty. She had the wild thought that this was what integrity sounded like. “Not being good enough isn’t on the table. You’re already good enough or why would I want to fuck you this badly? The only thing you need to do is what I tell you to do. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

Romily heard a ragged sound. It only distantly occurred to her that she’d made it.

“Can you do that?” Zachary asked. He let his thumb dip into her mouth and grunted when she dared to suck on the tip of it. “Because I have a feeling that if you can, you and me are going to burn this place to the ground.”

That part of her brain that was warning her off was loud, but her body was louder. And it wanted him in ways that she couldn’t begin to understand.

It wanted him in ways that made her feel bold. Bright.

“What happens if I change my mind?”

“You say stop. And we stop.” He shook his head. “He did a number on you, didn’t he?”

She tried to smile, but didn’t get there. “He did a lot of things.”

Zachary leaned in then, and she couldn’t have begun to describe that look on his face. So intent. Sosure.He cupped her face in his hands, his blue eyes so intense they felt like they were inside her, too.

Like he was already deep, deep inside her.

“I like control,” he told her. “And I think that you like giving it up. But there is not one part of me that wants to take advantage of that part of you. The point is to exchange it. So you get to surrender, and I get that control, and we both get off so good and so hard that we’re never quite the same afterward. And neither one of us is diminished. Sound good?”

“That sounds improbable,” Romily said, because she might as well confess to this man. She might as well tell him everything, because he already seemed to know things he shouldn’t. Somehow that felt safe to her. “Impossible, actually.”

“Oh little bird, you have no idea,” he said then, “how very, very long I’ve wanted to get my teeth into you.”

All she could do was shake her head. “I can’t tell what part is real and what part you’re just saying.”

His forbidding mouth curved. “Just remember, all you have to do is what I tell you. When I tell you. Deal?”

Romily wanted to say yes more than she had ever wanted anything else, but she shook. She shook and shook. And she stared up at him, his hands still on her face and a whole world in his gaze that she wanted so badly to understand.

To feel.

“I saw the way you watched me.” His voice was a low, dark thread of sound that seemed to tie her up where she stood, longing and afraid and filled with need. “I know exactly how much you want my cock in that greedy little pussy of yours. You want me so much that just the idea of it made you come. Twice.” He leaned a little closer. Just a little. “Let me fuck you, baby.”

And that, too, came out an order.

Romily found herself nodding, her gaze glued to his.

Zachary shook his head, those blue eyes lighting her up from the inside out. “You’re going to have to say it.”

She couldn’t possibly. She really would die.

But he wanted her to say it. So she did. Because he suddenly seemed crucial to her staying alive and better yet—feelinglike this, like every cell in her body wasampedandreadyand fully present in this.

“I want you,” she whispered. “To fuck me. Please.”

“Good girl,” he murmured, and it was shocking, how everything inside of her seemed to shiver into joy. Into sheer delight that she could please him.

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