“Fredrik…please.” She softens her gaze to the point of frowning and I fight not to be putty in her fucking hands. “The way you were with me all the times before—you were different. Sometimes rough, other times you looked at me before you took me as if you were fighting something inside. Something predatory, primal.” She moves her little hips on my lap with purpose. I can’t breathe. “You were always holding something back with me. And now…,” she leans inward and slides her tongue between my lips once. I can’t see through my tingling eyelids. “…now you treat me with such frailty.”

“Would you prefer that I didn’t?” I ask with a purpose of my own—I want to make her feel guilty so she’ll drop this. “What, you don’t like it?”

She pulls away from my lips and tilts her head dejectedly to one side. “No, no, I do.” She rests her hands on my shirt-covered chest. “Sometimes I feel like I could come just when you touch me. I never want you to change. I need you to be the way you are. The way you make me feel…I’ve never felt it before.”

“Then what does it matter how I was with Seraphina?” I tilt my head in the same manner, looking up at her. “Why do you care?”

“Curiosity, I guess.” She shrugs and somehow even that is sexy to me. “Maybe I want you to—”

A streak of jealousy shoots through me all of a sudden and she notices the change right away.

“Cassia,” I say trailing my fingertips down the softness of her bare arms, “You say you’ve never felt it before, the way you feel with me—have you been with other men?”

Her face falls and she looks downward at her hands now resting between her panties and my stomach. She doesn’t look ashamed. She appears as blank as she did when I asked her a few nights ago where she got the scars on her back and she couldn’t recall.

Her eyes meet mine with reluctance.

“Not that I can remember,” she says. “Never when I lived in New York. But before that—I don’t know.”

“Can you remember anything before New York?”

She shakes her head and now looks ashamed.

“Come here,” I say, cupping the back of her head and pulling her toward my shoulder where she rests the side of her face. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Fredrik?”

“Yeah?”

“If I had been with other men, would you still keep me here with you?”

My hand stiffens in her hair and I press her tightly against me, wrapping the other hand around her back.

I don’t know.

“Yes,” I tell her. “It wouldn’t matter to me,” I lie.

With any other woman other than Seraphina, it wouldn’t matter to me who or how many men she has been with. But Seraphina was different. She wasn’t a virgin when we met, but I knew by her refusal to talk about her first time, that it was someone she needed to forget. Seraphina called me her ‘true first’. She despised men. I was the only man she could ever love. The only man she would ever let touch her. Seraphina killed men for touching her—if I didn’t get to them first. But I was the only one. Until Marcus at Safe House Sixteen. And I killed him ten days after I found out.

Cassia raises her body from mine and looks into my eyes smiling soft and coyly. And again with purpose, she presses herself against my hardness below and I lose my breath. A low, guttural growl rumbles quietly through my chest.

“Cassia,” I say, ready to hoist her off of me, tucking my hands underneath her thighs, “we shouldn’t do this right now.”

What has gotten into her? Not that it bothers me—quite the opposite—but I get the feeling she’s jealous of Seraphina and is trying to take her place in all ways, not just in my heart.

She frowns.

“Don’t do that,” I say.

“I’m sorry, I just—”

Reaching around her with one arm firmly around her waist so she doesn’t fall, I grab the iPad from the coffee table and toss it on the floor. Seconds after, I swipe away the files I had been reading about Kelly Bennings and Paul Fortright in Seattle. Photographs and sheets of white paper scatter about the accent rug. I lean over forward and Cassia instinctively grabs me around the neck to keep from falling backward, and I fit my hands about the upper legs of the coffee table, pulling it closer.

I lay her down on it on her back.

“What are you doing?” she asks with curiosity but no insecurity —she has an idea of what I’m doing.

“Whatever I want,” I say, fitting my fingers behind the elastic of her panties and pulling them off.

Grabbing her ankles, I prop her feet on the edge of the table.

Her eyes grow wider.

My dick gets harder.

Her thighs fall apart before me, spreading like butterfly wings. I help her hold them still, grasping them with both hands, until she holds them still on her own.

“If you swear to me you’ll never ask about Seraphina again”—I slide my middle finger between her nether lips, up and down twice before spreading her apart. She gasps.—“I’ll do this for you. Anywhere you want me to do it. Whenever you want me to do it. And often when you least expect it.”

Her fingers curl firmly around the sides of the table, white-knuckling the grain. Her chest rises and falls with little pants that make me hungrier for her.

I lean over and drag the tip of my tongue between her wet lips and she shudders and gasps.

“But you have to fucking swear it.”

I lick her again and push my index and middle fingers deep inside of her. Her head pushes back, arching her neck against the coffee table, her long blonde hair stark against the dark grain.

“I swear it.” She shudders.

With my fingers still inside of her, I flick my tongue against her clit.

“Not very convincing, love.”

I pull completely away from her, letting my back fall against the oversized leather chair, my long legs fallen open, leaving me the perfect view of her exposed naked body. My hands drape casually over the chair arms.

“I swear it, Fredrik! I swear it!”

“Don’t raise your head,” I tell her.

She lays it back down.

“I’ll never ask about her again,” she goes on pleading and it just makes me want to put more than my fingers or my tongue inside of her, but I won’t.

“Hmmm,” I say, glancing upward at the ceiling, biding my time. “I’m still not sure I can believe you. I mean, you did promise me once before—”

“I swear it, Fredrik—I’ll never even speak her name again.”

That gets my attention.

I raise my back from the chair and brush my hand against her thighs, only grazing the warmth between her legs to get to the other side.

“Say you promise,” I say gently.

“I promise,” she says in a shivering whisper.

I stick my middle fingers inside of her, sliding them in and out carefully. A series of soft moans escape her. I play with her for a little while. Because I like to touch it. I could touch and probe her for hours and never get bored.

More gasps, sweet and cock-throbbing, each and every time.

Finally, my head falls between her trembling thighs and I lick her with furious intent, working my fingers inside and out at the same time. Cassia gasps, clutching the edges of the coffee table. Her stomach sinks in and she sucks in her breath to breathe in pants, revealing the outline of her ribs.

I hear keys jangling in the front door, but I don’t stop.

All I care about is sending Cassia into a delirious fit, splayed out right here in my living room.

“Oh, Fredrik! Please don’t stop…”

I don’t plan to, love.

I suck her clit repeatedly into my mouth, pressing my lips hard against her pelvic bone.

I hear another gasp, though it’s not coming from Cassia. I only stop when her thighs clamp around my head and she looks toward the living room entrance with an expression of horror.

Greta is standing there with her mouth agape and eyes wider than Cassia’s legs had been.

Without raising my body, I look across at her and say, “Do you mind waiting outside for about”—I figure it out in my head quickly—“a couple more minutes?”