Chapter 9: Slow Burn in Silk Sheets
The desert sunrise was a slow bleed of gold and violet across the bulletproof glass. Inside, the room held the quiet of a held breath. Dominic lay on his side, awake for hours, watching the light creep across Zara’s sleeping face. The twin, steady rhythms from the monitor on the nightstand—now a permanent, silent sentinel with its display turned toward him—were the only sound. Each peak on the green lines was a knot in the rope that had pulled him back from an abyss he couldn’t name.
She stirred. A soft sigh escaped her lips as her eyes fluttered open, finding his immediately in the dim light. No disorientation. Just recognition.
“You’re watching me sleep again,” she murmured, her voice husky with sleep.
“Someone has to,” he said, the words gravelly. He didn’t smile.
Her hand emerged from the silk sheets, finding the rough stubble along his jaw. “I’m right here.”
He turned his head, pressing a kiss into her palm. The fear from the backyard was a live wire under his skin, a current that hadn’t shut off. Words felt useless. They were crude tools for the seismic shift happening inside him. He needed touch. He needed proof. He needed to feel the life in her, to map it with his hands and seal the memory into his bones.
His calloused hand slid under the soft cotton of her nightshirt, riding up the curve of her waist. Her skin was warm, impossibly soft. He moved with an uncharacteristic slowness, a reverence that made her breath catch. His thumb found the lower swell of her breast, then the tight peak of her nipple, hardening instantly under his circling touch.
“Soft enough for you, mamacita?” he growled against the shell of her ear, the old endearment a rough caress in itself.
In answer, she arched into his hand, a low whimper escaping her. “Dios, yes.”
He shifted, his body covering hers with the careful, calculated weight of a man handling something precious. He nudged her thighs apart with his knee, settling between them. The sheets were a tangled pool around their hips. He kissed her, not with frantic passion, but with a deep, consuming thoroughness that spoke of possession and a desperate, abiding gratitude. His tongue swept into her mouth, tasting her, claiming the breath from her lungs.
His hands were everywhere. They slid the nightshirt up and over her head, discarding it. The dawn light gilded her skin, the gentle new curve of her stomach. He bowed his head, taking one nipple into his mouth, suckling deeply until she cried out, her fingers tunneling into his short-cropped hair. He worshipped her breasts with his mouth and hands, lavishing attention on each until she was twisting beneath him, her hips rising off the mattress in a silent, urgent plea.
“Dominic,” she breathed, his name a prayer.
He moved lower. His lips and tongue charted a course down her trembling abdomen, kissing the place where their children grew. He hooked his thumbs in the waistband of her panties and drew them down her legs, slowly, letting the cotton whisper against her skin. The air in the room was cool, but her heat reached for him.
He settled between her thighs, his broad shoulders pushing her legs wider. The first, intimate scent of her—musky and sweet—hit him, and a raw sound vibrated in his chest. He didn’t tease. He buried his face in her cunt.
His tongue was flat and demanding against her folds, lapping up her wetness before zeroing in on her clit. He sucked the swollen bud into his mouth, flicking it with the tip of his tongue in a relentless, knowing rhythm.
“Fuck, Dom!” she screamed, her back bowing off the bed.
He gripped her hips, holding her down, eating her pussy like a man starved. Every lick, every suck was a denial of the flat green line, an incantation against silence. Her pleasure was a sound, a taste, a tangible thing he could devour. Her thighs shook around his head. Her cries piled on top of each other, crumbling into sobs as he drove her ruthlessly toward the edge. He slipped two thick fingers inside her, curling them, finding that spongy place that made her see stars. He fucked her with his fingers while his mouth worked her clit.
She came with a shattered scream, her cunt clamping down on his fingers in rhythmic, fluttering pulses. He rode it out, gentling his mouth but not stopping, drinking every drop of her release until she was a trembling, oversensitive mess, pushing weakly at his shoulders.
He rose over her, his own need a painful, rigid weight. He shoved his boxers down just enough to free his cock, thick and veined and leaking. He guided the broad head through her drenched folds, collecting her wetness, pressing against her entrance.
Her eyes, dark and glazed, locked on his. “I need you inside me. Now.”
He pushed in. One slow, inexorable inch, then another, filling her stretching warmth until he was buried to the hilt. They both groaned, a shared, gut-deep sound of completion. He was sheathed in her, surrounded by her heat, her heartbeat, her life.
He began to move. Deep, rolling thrusts that shook the bedframe. Each drive in was a claim. Each withdraw a promise of return. He braced himself on his forearms, his face inches from hers, refusing to let her look away.
“You. Stay. Here,” he grunted, punctuating each word with a thrust that hit her cervix.
“I’m here,” she gasped, her nails scoring down his back. “I’m right here, baby.”
The pace increased. The careful control snapped. It became primal, a frenzied coupling of two people trying to climb inside each other’s skin. The slap of skin on skin, the creak of the bed, their ragged breaths and filthy, murmured words filled the fortified room.
“This cunt is mine,” he snarled, pistoning into her. “This life is mine. You don’t get to offer it up.”
“Yours,” she sobbed, her legs locking around his waist, taking him deeper. “Always yours. Fuck me harder. Make me feel it.”
He obliged. He hammered into her, the sweat dripping from his brow onto her chest. The angle shifted, and he hit a spot that made her vision whiten. She came again, her internal muscles milking his cock in violent waves, and that was all it took. With a roar that was part agony, part deliverance, he plunged deep and erupted, pumping his release into her in hot, endless spurts.
He collapsed, his immense weight catching on his elbows at the last second to keep from crushing her. He stayed buried inside her, his face buried in the sweat-damp column of her neck, their hearts slamming against each other’s ribs in a frantic, disordered harmony.
Slowly, the world seeped back in. The monitor’s steady blips. The expanding sunrise. The scent of sex and jasmine and them.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand, rattling against the wood. Once. Twice.
Zara’s hand, which had been tracing the knobs of his spine, stilled. He didn’t move.
It buzzed a third time, insistent.
With a sigh that came from the marrow of his bones, Dominic withdrew from her warmth and rolled onto his back, grabbing the phone. The screen glowed in the dim room: BRIAN.
He swiped to answer, bringing it to his ear. “Yeah.”
Brian’s voice was tense, stripped of all its usual levity. “We need to talk. Face to face. The garage. Thirty minutes.”
Dominic’s eyes found Zara’s. She was watching him, the aftermath of their lovemaking still flushed across her skin, but her gaze was clear and sharp. She’d heard enough.
“We’ll be there,” Dom said, and ended the call.
He dropped the phone on the bed and looked at the ceiling, at the familiar patterns of cracks in the plaster he’d never bothered to fix. The fortress had been breached. The fight they’d paused was now knocking at the door.
Zara’s hand found his on the sheets, her fingers lacing through his. She said nothing. She just held on. On the monitor, two green lines continued their relentless, faithful dance.