Chapter 706 | Say Please

Chapter 706: 706 | Say Please

The thing about Petra Lang is that she kissed the way she ran board meetings.

She committed forward with total conviction that the outcome she wanted was the one the universe owed her, and if the universe disagreed, she would restructure its quarterly projections until it came around.

Her mouth moved on mine with a focus that would’ve been intimidating if I hadn’t been sitting in a reading chair that probably had its own insurance policy, with the most expensive girl at Halloran grinding down on my lap in silk shorts so thin I could feel her heat through them like a space heater somebody had accidentally shaped into a woman.

She tasted like mint toothpaste and the jasmine tea she drank while she built emerald barriers at midnight instead of sleeping. When I bit her lower lip, the way Sloane liked to bite mine, Petra made a sound.

It was a whimper.

Petra Lang whimpered into my mouth, and it was so wildly different from every version of her I’d ever seen that it took me a full second to file it anywhere. This was the girl who corrected grammar during combat exercises.

This was the girl who once told Camille Ortega her rivet technique lacked aesthetic refinement while Camille’s palms still glowed hot enough to scar metal. That girl whimpered because I bit her lip, and the sound landed somewhere behind my sternum and went off.

I pulled back far enough to see her face. Her eyes had gone glassy and huge, until they hardly looked like hers. The lamplight sank into the green and turned it liquid, and the color deepened the longer I looked. Her lips were swollen and parted, and her chest rose and fell against mine through a camisole that had given up its structural responsibilities sometime in the last forty seconds.

Both straps were down. One hung loose off her shoulder, and the other had slid past her bicep.

She blinked slowly, like someone trying to remember how eyes worked. Her focus drifted somewhere past my shoulder and came back to my face with visible effort.

"I need you to understand something," I said. "I’m going to ruin that voice you use. The boardroom one, that makes people sit up straighter when you walk in. You’ve been wearing it at me for twenty-two days like armor. By the time I’m done with you tonight, you won’t remember how to make it. You’ll try. It won’t work. And you’re going to have to deal with that in real time."

Petra’s throat worked. She opened her mouth, closed it and opened it again, and nothing came out the first time, because her brain was still catching up to what I’d said while her body was still catching up to what I’d done thirty seconds ago, and the two weren’t syncing. Then she lifted her chin and squared her shoulders, which only pushed the camisole lower and made the whole structural situation more visibly hopeless, and delivered seven words in the flattest tone she could manage.

"You can certainly try, Belmont."

God, I loved this woman’s spine. Loved it, specifically. The distinction mattered.

I got both hands under her thighs and stood up out of the chair in one motion. Her legs wrapped my waist on reflex and her ankles locked behind my back, and a sharp gasp escaped her, because the lift pressed her center flat against my stomach through the silk and whatever expensive lace lived under it. The gasp got louder when I walked her three steps to the bed and dropped her on the duvet.

She bounced once. Her black hair fanned over the white pillowcase like spilled ink, and the camisole rode up past her navel, baring a strip of pale stomach that caught the lamplight and held it. The shorts had ridden high enough that I could see the lace edges of something underneath, dark emerald, the same color as her barriers.

Matching. Of course. Petra Lang matched her underwear to her Aspect color, a detail so aggressively on-brand that I filed it in the permanent collection.

"You’ve been wearing emerald lace for twenty-two days," I said. "To coordination meetings with me. In Dravid’s class with your planner open and your ankles crossed."

The flush started at Petra’s jaw and climbed through her cheeks to the tips of her ears, a shade that contradicted everything her posture was trying to say.

"That is none of your concern."

"It’s absolutely my concern." I knelt on the bed between her legs. "You wore emerald lace the day you signed a federal document with my name on it. You wore it tonight when you opened the door in cream silk, knowing what that camisole does to your chest. And you’re wearing it right now while you look at me with those eyes and pretend you’re angry."

"I am angry."

"Your hips moved before you finished that sentence."

Her mouth snapped shut. She looked down at her own body, at the way her pelvis had tilted toward me without checking with her brain first, and the flush on her skin went from pink to scarlet.

I leaned in and pressed my mouth to her stomach just under the navel, where the camisole had retreated. Her skin jumped under my lips. She was hot there and tasted faintly of the botanical cleanser that cost more per ounce than Dralun’s coffee fund. I kissed lower. Her breathing broke apart above me.

"Belmont."

Lower. My lips found the waistband of the silk shorts and followed it across her hip, and her hand landed in my hair with a grip that gave two instructions at once, neither of which was stop.

"You left for twenty-two days." Her voice cracked on the number. "I counted every single one. I conjured barriers every night because my hands needed something to do that was not calling you."

I pulled back enough to see her face. She stared down at me from the pillow with her hair everywhere and the camisole bunched under her breasts, and her eyes were bright with something older than tonight’s anger. It belonged to a twelve-year-old girl standing between parents who showed love through invoices and courier packages.

"I know," I said. "And I’m going to make up for every one of them."

I hooked my fingers into the waistband of her shorts and drew them down. Petra lifted her hips without being asked, which told me exactly how far the boardroom voice had already retreated. The shorts slid down her legs and off her feet. The emerald lace underneath sat high on her hips, sheer enough that the lamplight turned it see-through at the edges where it stretched over her skin.

Petra Lang wore sixty-dollar underwear the way other people wore armor.

I lowered my head and pressed my mouth to the inside of her thigh, three inches above the knee. She jerked. I kissed higher. A sound started low in her chest and came out of her mouth as half a gasp and half a plea, and she strangled it before it finished. I kept going, working up the inside of her leg in open-mouthed kisses that left her skin flushed and damp, and when I reached the place where thigh became hip, I stopped.

"Say please."