Chapter 26: Power Play Exhibition
The champagne bubbles were sharp on her tongue, a bright, clean counterpoint to the animal musk hanging in the air. Sergio took the glass from her, his fingers brushing hers, and drained it. He set it down with a soft click that echoed in the quiet room. His gaze never left her face, studying her as if she were a complex line of code he was finally deciphering.
“More,” he repeated, the word a solid thing between them. He traced a path down her throat with his thumb, over the pulse hammering there, then lower to where his come was starting to seep from her. He brought his wet thumb to his own lips, tasting them both. “Show me.”
He didn’t let her dress. He scooped her discarded clothes into one hand and kept the other firmly on her bare arm, steering her out of the strategy room and down the narrow corridor to his private suite in the motorhome. It was a utilitarian space: a bed, a console, a window blacked out by the night. He locked the door.
“Enzo will knock at eight,” Sergio said, his back to her as he tossed her clothes onto a chair. “That gives us,” he checked the glowing green digits on the console, “eleven hours.”
He turned. The hunger on his face was stripped of its earlier performative aggression. It was simpler now, deeper. It scared her in a new way. He crossed the room and took her face in both hands. His kiss was slow, exploratory, a silent question. She answered with her tongue, her hands coming up to grip his forearms.
He walked her backwards until her legs hit the edge of the bed. He broke the kiss, his breath ragged. “Lie down. On your back.”
She complied, the cool sheets a shock against her heated skin. He stood at the foot of the bed, just looking, his eyes traveling from her tangled hair down to the dark curls between her legs, still glistening. He stripped off his own remaining clothes, his cock already hard again, thick and eager.
“He was right about one thing,” Sergio said, his voice low. He climbed onto the bed, kneeling between her legs. He didn’t enter her immediately. He pushed her thighs apart, wider, and lowered his head. “I should taste what’s mine.”
His mouth was on her before she could react. His tongue, broad and flat, licked a slow, torturous path through her swollen folds, gathering the mixed wetness of her arousal and his own release. He groaned against her, the vibration making her hips jerk. “Fuck, Alma. You taste like us.”
He ate her with a single-minded intensity that erased everything else: Enzo’s rules, the phantom scent of cigar smoke, the world outside the locked door. He used his lips, his teeth, his tongue, until she was writhing, her fingers fisted in his hair, pulling hard. “Please,” she gasped, a word she’d refused to utter before.
“Please what?” he murmured, not stopping, his tongue circling her clit with merciless precision.
“I need you inside. Now.”
He rose above her, his weight settling into the cradle of her hips. He notched the head of his cock at her entrance, still slick from his mouth. He pushed in, a slow, inexorable invasion that made her arch off the bed. It was different like this, face-to-face, with nowhere to hide. He filled her completely, stretching her, and held there, buried to the hilt.
“Look at me,” he commanded, his voice raw. “When you come, you look at me.”
He began to move, a rolling, deep rhythm that was less about force and more about connection. Each thrust brushed a spot inside her that made her vision blur. He supported himself on one elbow, the other hand coming up to trace the faint, silvery line of the appendix scar on her lower abdomen. He bent his head and put his lips to it, a kiss on the flawed canvas of her.
“Mi corazon,” he whispered against her skin, the Spanish endearment rough and tender. Then, with a sharper snap of his hips, “You take my cock so well, you perfect fucking cunt.”
The filthy praise, paired with the earlier tenderness, unraveled her. Her orgasm built not as a sudden explosion but as a rising tide, inevitable and overwhelming. She clutched at his back, her nails digging in, her legs locking around his waist to pull him deeper. She held his gaze as the wave broke, as her body clenched around him in a series of pulsing, milking contractions that stole her breath and her sight.
Watching her come undone shattered his control. His rhythm fractured into ragged, pounding thrusts. “Tell me,” he gasped, his face a mask of agonized pleasure. “Tell me it’s more. Say it.”
“It’s more,” she sobbed, the truth ripped from her. “Sergio, it’s—“
His mouth crashed down on hers, swallowing her words as his own release tore through him. He drove into her one last, shuddering time and spilled, a hot, endless flood that seemed to go on forever, his whole body trembling with the force of it. He collapsed onto her, his head buried in the crook of her neck, their hearts hammering against each other in a frantic, slowing syncopation.
A long time later, he shifted his weight. The room was quiet, just the hum of the motorhome’s systems. He pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “Enzo’s going to kill me.”
“We,” she corrected softly, her voice hoarse.
He lifted his head, looking down at her. In the low light, his eyes were dark pools, serious. “What happens tomorrow? In the media pen?”
She knew what he was asking. Would she be his assistant, cool and untouchable? Or would this new, raw thing show in a glance, a touch, a mistake? She ran a hand through his sweat-damp hair. “I do my job. You do yours.”
“And this?” His hand splayed possessively over her stomach.
“This stays here,” she said, gesturing to the room, the bed, the space between their bodies. “Until the door locks again.”
He nodded, a grudging acceptance of the necessary lie they’d have to live. He rolled off her and onto his back, pulling her with him so she lay draped across his chest. They were silent for a while, listening to each other breathe.
Outside, the first sounds of the paddock awakening began to filter through the insulation: a distant garage door rolling up, the cough of a scooter. Their stolen night was bleeding away into the harsh, public day. Sergio’s arms tightened around her.
“Alma,” he said, the name a quiet anchor in the gathering dawn.
“Alma,” he said, the name a quiet anchor in the gathering dawn.
She knew what it cost him, that quiet. The world demanded a perpetual roar from Sergio Dorbenson, but here, in the grey pre-light, he was just a man holding onto something he didn’t yet understand. His fingers traced the line of her spine, a slow, absent motion. The paddock’s morning symphony was tuning up outside, a distant orchestra of hydraulics and shouted Italian.
“We should shower,” she murmured into his chest, though she made no move to leave the warm hollow of his body.
“In a minute.” His hand slid down to the curve of her ass, possessiveness returning in a gentle knead. “Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else.”
The request surprised her. She lifted her head to look at him. His expression was open, unguarded. It was more vulnerable than anything they’d done with their bodies. She settled back down, her cheek against his sternum. “I failed my first driving test,” she said. “Panicked parallel parking in Brussels. Cried for an hour.”
A low chuckle vibrated through him. “You’re shitting me.”
“I am not. The examiner smelled of onions and failure.”
He laughed fully then, a real sound, deep and uncalculated. It changed his face when she looked up again. This was the theft, she realized. Not the sex, not the rule-breaking. These slivers of a man no one else saw. He opened his mouth to reply, but the moment shattered.