Page 26 of Reckless Heir
"You let him talk to you," he says against my hair. His voice is rough.
"I didn't let him?—"
"You exist," he says. "Here. In that dress. In this room. That's enough." His hand moves from my hip to the hem of the red dress, gathering the fabric slowly, pulling it up my thigh. "I'm going to remind you of something. And they're going to witness it."
They.The Regents. Watching from the choir stalls with their careful masked faces.
"Aleksei—"
"Tell me to stop and I will." His breath is at my ear. His voice drops further. "But you won't."
I don't.
The dress pools at my waist. His hand is warm against the back of my thigh — just the back, just the outside, the kind of touch that could be incidental if not for the context. Then his fingers trace inward, across the curve of my hip, along the edge of my underwear. He doesn't pull the fabric aside. He traces the line of it, back and forth, patient as a question mark. The cold chapel air hits where the dress no longer covers and the contrast between the stone and his hand makes me shiver.
He feels the shiver. His mouth drops to the curve of my neck.
"There," he says against my skin. "That."
His fingers dip beneath the fabric.
The first touch is light — not tentative, nothing Aleksei does is tentative, but exploratory. Reading. His middle finger traces the length of me, finding the shape of what he's dealing with, and I grip the stone altar with both hands because the cold of it is the only thing anchoring me to the room. He discovers what his presence has already done — that I'm wet, that I've been wet since his hand closed around my wrist in the nave, that my body made its decision about this well before my mind was consulted — and the sound he makes is low and rough and entirely private.
"Whose?" he says. Quiet. Against my hair.
The Regents are very still.
His finger circles my clit — slow, deliberate, the gesture of a man who has decided to take his time and is taking it. He doesn't rush to the obvious destination. He maps the territory around it first: the folds, the sensitivity, the places that make my hips twitch and the places that make me hold my breath. He'slearning me in real time, in front of five silent witnesses, and the methodical quality of it — Aleksei doing what Aleksei does, gather data, test response, refine method — is somehow more devastating than if he were simply trying to get me off.
"Tell them who you belong to."
His middle finger slides inside me.
One finger, and I'm already gripping the altar hard enough to feel the stone grain under my nails. He moves it slowly — in and out, a rhythm that isn't a rhythm yet, just him learning what the inside of me feels like and what it does when he curls his knuckle forward. When he finds the spot that makes my back arch without permission, he pauses.
"There," he says. Not a question.
He adds a second finger.
The stretch of it, the fullness, the specific pressure of two fingers curled forward inside me while his thumb finds my clit — the combination is precise in a way that makes me wonder, distantly, if there's anything in his life he doesn't approach like an engineering problem. He works me with the same focused patience he brings to telemetry data and race strategy: find the variable, isolate the variable, apply pressure until the system responds.
The system is responding.
"Aleksei—"
"I know." His voice is at my ear, low and rough, and I can hear the control in it fraying at the edges. "I can feel it. You're close."
I am. The orgasm is building low in my pelvis, a coil tightening by degrees, fed by his fingers inside me and his thumb on my clit and the five masked faces watching from the choir stalls and the specific shame of being displayed like this, wet and open and coming apart on a stone altar while a man in a mask catalogues my responses for an audience.
The shame should kill the arousal. It doesn't. It feeds it. The two things have gotten tangled somewhere in the past six weeks and I can no longer separate them — the humiliation and the heat, the performance and the wanting, his voice at my ear and the cold stone under my palms and the sound of my own breathing coming faster now, shallower, less controlled.
"Aleksei, I'm going to?—"
"Yes." His fingers don't change pace. His thumb doesn't change pressure. He has found exactly what works and he's staying there, steady and relentless, holding me at the edge with the precision of someone who wants to feel me fall. "Let them watch. Come for me."
I do.
The orgasm hits in a wave that starts where his fingers are and radiates outward — through my pelvis, up my spine, into the places I've been holding tense since October. I make a sound that isn't a word and isn't quiet and I don't care anymore, don't care about the Regents or the ceremony or the performance of composure, because his hand is inside me and his mouth is at my neck and my body is doing exactly what it has wanted to do since the first time he looked at me across the penthouse and saidmine.
