Page 47 of Under Her Protection

"You provoked me on purpose," Leo said.

"Yes."

"So I would fuck you harder."

"Yes."

"So you could prove you were not submitting."

"Yes."

"You are a piece of work."

"I know."

"Good."

Two fingers, in, not gently.

Vivienne's back came up off the rug an inch and stayed up. Her hand tightened in Leo's hair. Her mouth opened, and the sound did not come out, because she was not going to give her a sound, not yet, not this one. Leo set a rhythm that was rough, because Vivienne had asked for rough without asking in words, and because Leo had understood her without words, and Leo, propped on one elbow above her, was watching her face as she moved inside her. Not amusement. Not tenderness. The same attention she gave a room she was responsible for. Vivienne met Leo's eyes and did not look away.

Leo added a third finger.

Vivienne's teeth found her own lip.

"Say it," Leo said, low.

"No."

"Say it."

"No."

"Say—"

"Harder."

Leo obeyed. Vivienne, watching her face, understood it was not the command she had responded to. Her fingers worked Vivienne in a rhythm that was less a rhythm and more a decision. Vivienne's thigh came up around Leo's hip. Vivienne's other hand came down to her own breast, because she was not going to wait for Leo to get back there, and Leo, registering the hand, smiled a little against Vivienne's neck.

Vivienne felt the smile.

She did not let her face show that she had felt it.

The heat built. It built in a direction Vivienne knew. It built in a direction she had not permitted herself to visit in a year and had not shared with anyone in the visiting. The pad of Leo's thumb found the Vivienne’s clitoris, worked it, and the spiral of it began, not fast, hard, hard enough that Vivienne's vision went thin at the edges. Her body, under Leo's hand, was a body she had not fully acknowledged was hers in weeks; it was a body that was being asked a question and was answering, and the answer was going to be unmistakable.

She permitted herself, for a breath, to look at the woman who was doing this to her. The line of Leo's bare strong shoulder in the firelight. The muscle in Leo's forearm. The sweat at the hollow of Leo's throat. The small, unguarded, concentrated attention on Leo's face. Leo was not performing. Leo was working. Leo was working at Vivienne's pleasure the way Leo worked at a room, and Vivienne was going to have to live, from now on, with having seen Leo work on her body. Fucking her. Hard. Her head came back on the rug. Her hand, in Leo's hair, did not let go. Her body, on the floor of her own living room in her own house, was doing a thing she had not permitted it to do in so long, but she was choosing it now. With Leo.

“I want you to come for me,” Leo said, very quiet, close to her ear.

And Vivienne, on her back, with three of Leo's fingers inside her and Leo's thumb on her and Leo's breath at her ear, came.

She came hard.

She came with a sound, one sound, a single low sound in the back of her throat, because she was a grown woman and she did not pretend the sound was not going to happen. She came with her whole body rising off the rug for a breath and coming back down. She came with a wetness that broke past Leo's hand, past the rug, onto the pale stone of the hearth, and Leo, above her, did not move her hand, did not pull away, did not, for three whole seconds, breathe.

Then Leo eased her fingers out, slow, and set her palm flat on Vivienne's stomach, and rested her forehead against Vivienne's collarbone, and breathed out once, shaken, which Vivienne heard and did not remark on.

Vivienne lay on the rug for the length of a minute and waited to be a person again. Her hair was out of its pin. Her pulse was loud under her jaw. There was a wet mark on the pale stone of her hearth that someone was going to have to clean, and Vivienne had in her lifetime cleaned no marks and was not going to begin tonight.