Page 42 of Nine Months to Bear
“Right and wrong are constructs.” His lips hover just above mine. “The body knows what it wants. Yours is screaming right now.”
I know exactly what I want. Do you?
His words echo in my head. Involuntarily—at least, that’s what I’ll testify if this matter ever went to a courtroom—I reach out to touch him. I gasp at the hard length of him against my palm.
Stefan Safonovabsolutelyknows what he wants.
And somehow, it’sme.
His lips find the sensitive spot below my ear. It might as well be a button to power me down. With one touch, my resistance crumbles like sand.
I don’t know how it happens, but his desk is suddenly beneath me. Papers go everywhere as he lifts me onto it. I glimpse a document with my clinic’s letterhead at the top, a quick reminder that this moment has a purpose and Stefan wouldn’t be here if it didn’t make financial sense.
Then he sweeps everything onto the floor, and none of that matters anymore.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I lie as his teeth graze my collarbone.
“Wrong. This changeseverything.” His fingers trace the edge of my lace bra. “If it takes, you’ll be carrying my heir. My blood. My legacy.”
The word “heir” sends an unexpected jolt through me. It’s a stark reminder of what this is really about. Not just sex, not just pleasure, but potentially creating life. The actual purpose of our arrangement all along.
“You knew this would happen,” I whisper as he unclasps my bra.
That’s a loaded statement, half-true and half-not. There’s no way he could know—no way he could anticipate decisions I didn’t even know I’d make. But somehow, it still feels like he knew this would happen.
“It’s my job to know things.” His eyes, when they meet mine, are feral with desire. He cups my breast. Tweaks my nipple enough to make me moan. “I knew you’d agree. But how good you feel right now? That exceeds all expectations.”
My laugh turns into a gasp as his mouth replaces his hand. This is madness—complete professional and moral suicide—but I can’t stop my fingers from fumbling with his belt buckle. Can’t stop the way my back arches, offering more of myself to him.
When he pushes into me, the feeling is so overwhelming that I cry out. Not from pain—though there is some; it’s been so long since I last did this—but from the sheer intensity.
My body stretches to accommodate him, and something about the burn of it, the fullness, feels like a metaphor for how he’s invaded every aspect of my life.
He growls—an actual growl—when he’s fully seated inside me. His pupils are dilated wide.
I get it now, how the clinic could never recreate this. What beaker could contain him? What test tube could bottle up the way he’s looking at me right now? It took tens of thousands of years of evolution to bring him and me here together right now.
It’d take another ten thousand to rip us apart.
His fingers dig into my hips hard enough to bruise. My body responds with a shudder of recognition:Yes, this is what we are beneath the veneer of civilization.
We’re animals. Just fucking animals.
“Look at me,” he commands.
I didn’t even realize I’d closed my eyes. When I open them, the fire in his gaze takes my breath away. He’s barely moved, just joined our bodies, and already, I feel the precipice approaching.
“I want to see your face,” he snarls. “When you come apart for me, I want to fucking see it.”
“Someone is confident,” I gasp.
That dangerous half-smile appears. “Should I not be?”
Any answer I’d give goes up in smoke when he starts to move. Each thrust pushes me further across the desk, scattering pens and papers, until his hand cradles the back of my head, protecting me from hitting the wall.
The gesture is unexpectedly tender. The first thing he’s done that wasn’t pure, violent Viking behavior. It undoes me more than anything else that’s happened.
“What did you come here to tell me?” he asks, his rhythm never faltering. “You never finished.”
