skin and follow them with her heated gaze. For once, there’s no conflict in her dark eyes when she looks at me. Simply desire. This woman looks at me like she’s not sure if she wants to start at the top or the bottom, but she’s most certainly going to get to every inch, given enough time.
She leans down and presses a line of kisses from my sternum to my lower stomach. Soft. Sweet, and yet not sweet at all. “Do your shipments often come up short?”
I exhale. “Mining for information?”
“Not really.” She drags her tongue over my hipbone. “Just seems like something you’d want to handle yourself.”
As tempting as it is to shut down this line of conversation, I have the strangest desire to make her understand. “When you run a territory, you can’t drop a nuclear bomb for every little transgression.”
She pauses and looks up at me. “You’re the nuclear bomb?”
“Yes.” I give in to the urge to stroke my fingers over her temple. “Sara and their team are more than capable of handling things like this, and it allows the threat of me to be maintained.” I should leave it there, but I find myself continuing. “They don’t deserve my personal attention; it wouldn’t do for them to get ideas.”
“Bringing a shotgun to a knife fight.”
I give a tight smile. “Yes, something like that.”
She’s still watching me closely. “But why not do that? It’d stop any dissent in its tracks. People would fall all over themselves to prove their loyalty.”
While she’s not wrong, it exhausts me just thinking about it. “I am feared, Aurora. With good reason, and by design, but it doesn’t change the fact that it wears on a person to see terror in the eyes of every person they come across.”
“But your people love you.” She sits back, trailing her fingers down my thighs. “Your employees for both businesses worship the ground you walk on.”
“They still fear me.”
She opens her mouth, stops to reconsider, and finally shrugs. “Power has a price.”
“Yes.” Suddenly, I’m tired of talking. What does it matter if I’m feared by nearly everyone I encounter? What does it matter if my mother didn’t rule the same way? Oh, our people respected the threat she could bring to them if they crossed her, but they loved her in way that couldn’t be feigned. The times I’ve been home since leaving Sabine Valley, I’ve found my sister inspires that same kind of feeling. An intrinsic difference between us, yet another reason I would have been ill-suited to be heir. I don’t have the gift of setting people at ease while still commanding their loyalty.
I am only the way I am.
I lean back and give Aurora a long look. “Put your mouth to good use, Aurora.”
She doesn’t hesitate. She simply lowers her mouth and presses delicate, soft kisses to my hips, my thighs, before finally working her way to my pussy. I like the look of her mouth on me. I like the look on her face even more. She’s as blissed out by giving this as I am at receiving it. For fuck’s sake, she moans at the first taste of me.
How am I supposed to remain unaffected after witnessing that?
I fist her hair in my hands and spread my thighs wider. It’s tempting to ride her face, to hold her in place as I chase my own pleasure, but I want to see what she’ll do given a little freedom.
She doesn’t disappoint. Aurora parts my pussy with her thumbs and traces her tongue over every inch of me. Like she’ll never get another chance and she wants to memorize every second of this. She spears me with her tongue and then moves up to focus on my clit. Again with those teasing little licks, pushing my desire until I’m shaking in an effort to hold still. That’s when she pushes two fingers into me and twists her wrist to find my G-spot. She strokes it lightly as she picks up her pace on my clit, quickly finding the rhythm that has my thighs shaking.
She winds me higher and higher, until my control snaps. “I need—” I tighten my grip on her hair and roll my hips, fucking her mouth. She makes a happy sound, and I belatedly realize this was her goal all along. To push me until I took what I wanted.
Gods, this woman is a gift.
I drag Aurora up my body and kiss her. It’s tempting to keep going, to