Her full breasts rose and fell with slow breathing beneath a silk top that had ridden up during the night to expose the toned flat plane of her stomach, the fabric bunched just beneath the lower curve of her chest, and Phei could see, from the corner of his eye without turning his head, the soft dark shadow of her pussy through the thin material, the faint clit pressing against the silk in a way that made his cock twitch once in the warm dark beneath the sheets.

Fantastic. His dick was making executive decisions before he’d even opened his eyes. Somewhere in the corporate structure of his body, his brain had been demoted to middle management and his cock had assumed the role of CEO with immediate effect and zero severance package for the outgoing leadership.

He didn’t look away from Valentina either.

Phei didn’t pretend he wasn’t drinking in the way her stomach moved with her breathing and the way the bunched fabric framed the lower curve of her chest like an accident that knew exactly what it was doing.

She was astonishing — in the warm, close, real way of a woman sleeping three inches from him who trusted him enough to let her shirt ride up and her leg tangle with his and her guard drop to absolute zero.

’I did something right,’ he thought. ’Somewhere in the absolute ten years disaster of my life, I did something right. Because she’s here. They’re all here.’

And Patricia...

’...gods.’

Ms. Patricia Bloom sleeping beside someone was witnessing the collapse of professionalism itself — the structural failure of composure, the quiet demolition of every wall the woman had spent her career building between herself and vulnerability.

She rested on her side facing his side, one arm loosely around his waist as though sometime during the night she had unconsciously decided he belonged there and had never corrected the decision.

Her hand sat low on his hip, fingers curled against bare skin where hip met thigh, and whether the placement was accidental or the work of a sleeping subconscious that wanted what it wanted, the result was the same:

Patricia Bloom’s fingertips were resting approximately two inches from his cock with nothing between her hand and him but warm air, and his cock was aware of this with the hyper-alertness of a guard dog that had heard a noise and was now sitting up very straight.

Sleep softened her in devastating ways and the sharp composed beauty she carried during daylight hours — the maturity, the authority, the teacher — had melted beneath morning light into something warmer, gentler, achingly feminine.

Loose strands of hair rested against her face and the bare curve of her shoulder. Her lips were slightly parted.

’Are they doing deliberately.’

Because, like other, the collar of her sleep shirt had slipped, exposing the full, heavy swell of one breast nearly to the nipple, the fabric barely holding, barely covering, the warm golden light pooling in the hollow of her collarbone and spilling down into the deep shadowed valley between her tits with the leisurely greed of something that knew exactly what it was illuminating and intended to enjoy the view.

Phei understood, looking at her, why ancient men wrote poetry instead of behaving rationally around women they loved. Because Patricia Bloom sleeping in his bed with her hand on his hip and her breast nearly bare and her face soft and unguarded was the kind of sight that made a man want to build things — empires, monuments, entire civilisations — for no other reason than to have something worthy of laying at her feet when she woke up.

He looked at her hand on his hip. The careful curl of her fingers. The unconscious possessiveness of it.

The way her thumb rested against his skin like it had every right to be there.

’She trusts me.’

Three words. Simple. But they landed somewhere behind his ribs with a weight that would bruise, because Patricia Bloom had once admitted to him she did not trust easily, did not trust quickly, without calculating the cost of betrayal first and deciding she could survive it — and she had placed her hand on him while she slept like his body was the safest location in the world.

He was going to spend the rest of his life making sure she was right about that; not because he was noble or heroic or any of the other words people used when they wanted to sound impressive.

But because she’d chosen him with her guard down, and that kind of trust was the most expensive thing anyone had ever given him, and Phei Ryujin Tiamat did not waste expensive things.

And then there was Delilah.

Delilah slept like a girl who had finally been allowed to stop pretending.

She’d ended up at the foot-end of the bed — not because she’d been exiled there, but because Delilah had arrived last and had been too shy to claim a spot closer to him, too nervous to wedge herself between women who’d been sleeping beside him before she came.

But her body had migrated during the night the way all their bodies had — drawn toward his warmth along the invisible gravity that sleeping women apparently generated around him, her arms wrapped loosely around his shin like she was holding something she was afraid would be taken away.

Her chestnut hair fanned across the white sheets in warm waves that the morning light turned to dark honey.

She wore a silk slip — thin, champagne-colored, the straps so delicate they looked like they existed solely to fail — and it had ridden up during the night until the hem barely covered the swell of her ass, the fabric gathered around her hips and the full dramatic curve of her thighs exposed to the golden light.

The Ryujin Tiamat bloodline had built her generous — heavy tits that his present women pressing against the silk where she lay on her side, the deep shadow of her cleavage visible even from this angle, her waist dipping in sharply before flaring into hips that belonged in someone’s prayers.

Her lips were slightly parted in sleep, her face soft, her cognac-gold eyes closed, and the faint tracks of dried tears streaked her cheeks because Delilah had cried a little before falling asleep, quietly, facing away from the others, overwhelmed by the simple fact she had not got her space alone with him gain.

Phei had noticed and said nothing but instead he had just reached down in the dark and placed his hand on her head, fingers threading through her hair, and she’d gone still — then pressed her face against his leg and held on tighter.

’You disobeyed your father for me,’ he thought, looking at her sleeping form. ’You built a shrine of mine in your room. You loved me when loving me was the stupidest possible thing you could do and that bastard beat you for it. And you still showed up when I took you.’

She deserved everything he had. They all did. But Delilah — Delilah deserved to never feel that.

Together, the five of them occupied the massive bed in a tangle of silk and limbs and warmth — bodies pressed together, legs intertwined, arms draped across him, breathing synchronised into the slow deep rhythm of women who had fallen asleep feeling safe and had stayed that way through the night.

The sheets were twisted from hours of unconscious migration, pulled and bunched and wrapped around bodies that had moved toward his warmth the way flowers moved toward light — instinctively, inevitably, without deciding to.

And the warmth was everywhere and surrounding him from every direction.

The soft heat of sleeping bodies beneath silk. Maddie’s weight on his chest. Patricia’s hand on his hip. Sierra’s bare back catching gold. Valentina’s thigh against his. Delilah’s arms around his shin.

Their slow breathing; the expensive scent of five different women’s skin and hair and sleep, all of it mixing in the warm air above the bed into something that smelled like belonging.

He lay there and let it happen. Let the warmth sit on him, the weight of five sleeping women press him into sheets that cost more than his entire childhood and didn’t feel guilty about any of it, not even slightly, not even for a second, because guilt was for people who hadn’t earned what they had and Phei had paid for every single thing in this bed with blood and pain and years he wasn’t getting back.

’This is mine. These are my women are mine. This morning is mine. And anyone who tries to take it is going to discover exactly what happens when you reach into a dragon’s hoard and try to remove something he loves.’