“Sweet-talker.” She hauled his shirt over his head and kissed him again, threading her fingers through his hair.
He moaned against her lips and wedged his hips between her thighs. “Off,” he murmured, hooking one finger beneath her bra strap. “Everything, off.”
Her shoes hit the floor. She and Knox moved in concert, tugging at buttons, pushing and pulling fabric, their fingers meeting only to part again, sliding and seeking. There was as much discovery as memory in the reunion, a thousand sighs and moans and secret places neither of them had ever had time to touch before.
When she was naked, caged in his arms, trapped between the cool ceramic and the heat of his body, she stopped. Each panting breath pushed her breasts against his chest as she traced his jaw, the bow of his mouth, even his tongue when he parted his lips. “Don’t move.”
He tensed beneath her touch, his fingers curling around the shelf behind her until it groaned, as she pushed her thumb deeper into his mouth and reached for his belt buckle with her free hand.
“Nina,” he rumbled.
She slipped her thumb free and dragged it down the center of his chest. “Hmm?”
His muscles flexed beneath her hand. “Can I move yet?”
“No.” His belt fell open, and she caressed the warm leather for a moment before unbuttoning his jeans. “Kind of busy here.”
She held his gaze with a challenging stare as she pushed the denim down, sliding the fabric and his underwear off his hips, freeing his cock. But she only brushed the back of her hand over his hip bone, then dragged her nails across his stomach.
Knox sucked in a breath. The shelf creaked dangerously. His eyes all but commanded her to touch him, but he stood rigidly unmoving. Just as she’d asked.
She wrapped her fingers around him.
“Fuck.” His hips jerked, a tiny fracture in control before he froze in place again. “You like this game, don’t you?”
Even as he uttered the words, his erection grew hotter, harder. More insistent. Nina stroked him once, then lingered to circle her thumb around the head. “Do you need a safe word, Captain, or just a little mercy?”
“I need you,” he growled.
Desire pulsed through her, as if his words had elicited an echo from her core, and she gave in. She braced her arms on his shoulders, gripped his sides with her legs, and slowly levered herself up until the head of his cock nudged between her thighs. She hovered there, trembling more from denial than strain, then whispered one single word against his temple. “Yes.”
The shelf behind her snapped. Knox lifted her before the wood hit the floor, spinning to press her back against the wall.
With a groan of naked gratitude, he drove into her. The intensity of it stole her breath, and she managed a single ragged gasp before he did it again, and again, and again, until Nina decided she didn’t need oxygen, after all. Just this.
His mouth found her ear. He rasped her name with every thrust. A chant. A plea. The rough wood paneling bit into her back, but she could barely feel it over the mounting pleasure. She clung to him, her nails pricking his shoulders as he fucked her harder, faster—
She came with a hoarse cry, every muscle clenching so tight it almost hurt.
His hand slammed into the wall next to her head, cracking the paneling. He buried his face against her throat, the sting of his teeth closing sharply over her pulse twisting with the pleasure as he drove into her once, again, and then—
“Yes.”
It shouldn’t have been possible for it to get better, but it did. Nina wrapped Knox in her arms and held him as he shuddered. She rubbed her cheek against his jaw until he slowed and stilled, his fingers sliding over the sweat-slicked skin at the small of her back. They stood there, locked together, breathing each other in.
For the first time, it didn’t feel like a stolen moment. It felt like …
“Do you believe in fate, Knox?”
He smiled against her cheek, and held her tighter. “I might be starting to.”
* * *
Looking at his own soon-to-be-firebombed doppelganger should have been a somber and morbid affair. Instead, Knox found himself digging his teeth into his lower lip to hold back utterly out-of-character laughter.
“I know it looks ridiculous now,” Nina muttered. “But give it forty-five minutes at eleven hundred degrees Celsius. It would probably convince you, even though you know