Phei didn’t stay exactly where he was with his shoulders rested against the dark wood of the double doors, hands slipped into the pockets of his low-slung trousers.

That faint, warm curve at the corner of his mouth was neither smile nor smirk but something far more dangerous: the quiet certainty after he heard the shape of her desire and had chosen, deliberately, to make her give it voice.

Because Catrina had spent her life learning how to disappear inside other people’s expectations like her parents, how to soften her edges until she became background noise and let louder voices and bolder hands take what they wanted while she faded into the wallpaper of her own existence.

He would not let her fade from this; not when the morning light was already painting her like an offering she had placed on the altar herself.

"Look at me," he said but it was not a request.

Her eyes lifted and met his, her eyes lifted to meet his, holding — barely — trembling at the edges like a flame in a draft yet held, the effort showing in the slight tightening at the corners of her mouth and in the way her lashes fluttered as if even eye contact was too much weight for her courage to carry alone.

"You started a sentence, Cat."

She swallowed visibly, the delicate column of her throat working around nothing, her muscles shifted beneath skin flushed pink from more than morning sun while her fingers twitched at her sides, reaching for the hem of her nightie again and finding only air and the helpless curl of her own palms.

"I — I know, I just —"

"You just what?"

The gentleness in his voice was crueller than any sharpness:

Harshness she could have pushed against, resented, used as fuel to armour herself...

...But this patient, velvet-wrapped authority left her nowhere to hide; it simply waited, warm and immovable, for her to become brave enough to stand in the open.

"I can’t — the words won’t —"

Phei pushed off the doors and crossed the room in unhurried steps, barefoot on the cool polished dark, each footfall deliberate while morning light slid over the sculpted planes of his shoulders and chest like liquid gold poured by some indulgent god.

Catrina’s eyes tracked every inch of his approach, wide and dark and helplessly fixed, watching something beautiful and terrifying draw closer and discovering, too late, that running had never been an option she wanted.

Phei stopped in front of her. Close. Close enough that the particular heat radiating off his skin — that low, thrumming warmth that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the power coiled inside him — reached her first, brushing her bare arms like a promise, and her breath hitched as her chin tilted up without conscious thought, her eyes glistening, terrified, starving as they found his.

The proximity was devastating because his mouth was right there and the memory of last night’s kiss still lived on her lips like a brand that had chosen to burn rather than fade.

He raised one hand slowly, letting her see every fraction of his movement, letting her feel the anticipation coil tighter in her stomach before contact ever arrived.

Phei’s fingers settled beneath her chin with the precise, unhurried pressure of a man who knew exactly how much weight a trembling girl could bear. His thumb and forefinger cradled the delicate line of her jaw.

The pad of his thumb rested just beneath the soft of her lower lip — close enough that she could feel the warmth of it radiating into the sensitive skin there, close enough that the lightest shift of her breath would brush her mouth against that steady, claiming touch.

The heat of him seeped into her skin like liquid sunlight, sinking deeper than it had any right to, warming the hidden nerves along her jaw and throat until she felt the echo of it between her legs — a slow, treacherous throb that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the way her cunt was already answering questions her mouth still couldn’t form.

Her shower-slick pussy folds gave a helpless little flutter as she her the first arousal wetness gathered low in her belly.

"Breathe," he said, and she tried.

But the breath came staggered, catching on something in her chest that had nothing to do with lungs and everything to do with the fact that his skin was touching hers again and the ghost of last night’s kiss was suddenly alive and aching on her mouth.

"How are you feeling right now?"

The question was quiet. Unhurried, making conversation at the edge of a precipice while the woman beside him trembled from the height and the view and the knowledge that falling was no longer a possibility but a certainty.

"I — I’m —"

"Honest answer."

"Terrorized," she whispered. "And — and I don’t want you to stop."

"Stop what? I haven’t started anything."

His other hand rose slowly, wanting her to feel every second of the approach, to understand that what was about to touch her had chosen this moment, this place, this trembling girl, and he would not be touching her by accident or mercy.

His fingertips found her arm just above the elbow — bare skin where the sleeve of her nightie ended — and settled there with the lightest, most devastating contact imaginable.

The pads of his fingers were warmer than her skin, slightly roughened from years of power and battle; that contrast sent a shiver racing up her arm before he had even moved; the ghost of contact, the suggestion of ownership — yet her skin sang beneath it like struck crystal.

Every fine hair rose in helpless salute as gooseflesh bloomed in a visible wave that raced ahead of his intent.

Then he traced upward, slow and feather-light, a single unbroken line from the sensitive inner curve of her elbow up the warm silk of her bicep to the delicate hollow where arm met shoulder.

The drag of his fingertips was deliberate, almost reverent, yet every inch felt like a brand being laid down with infinite patience.

Catrina’s skin tightened and pebbled in the wake of that touch.

The sensation of what he was doing to her was so acute it bordered on exquisite pain — not the pain of hurt, but the sinful ache of nerves waking after a lifetime of sleep; the path bypassed her mind entirely and spoke directly to the hidden places between her thighs.

With every slow inch her nipples tightened further against the thin fabric of her nightie, the peaks now visibly straining and aching for contact they had not yet received.

Catrina could feel her inner walls as they gave a single involuntary clench as if her body were already trying to draw something thick and claiming inside it. The wetness began to gather between her folds in a slow, shameful bloom of arousal that made the thin cotton of her panties cling to her skin in a way she both hated and craved, the fabric growing damp and translucent against her swollen, sensitive flesh.

Catrina whimpered in pleasure but the sound was small like a fractured exhale that carried entire paragraphs of surrender in its broken edges while eyes fluttered shut as her head tilted back against the steady cradle of his fingers beneath her chin.

The trembling that had been only in her hands now moved into her shoulders, her chest, the soft plane of her stomach, radiating outward from every point where his skin met hers like ripples spreading across still water after a stone had been dropped with perfect, merciless precision.

Her thighs pressed together in a futile attempt to hide how wet she was becoming, how her untouched clit that knew no man or finger even her own, had begun to throb in time with the frantic pulse beneath his thumb.

"Like that?" he murmured, and she nodded quickly, desperately with her eyes still closed and her lips parted around breaths that came faster now. Her body betrayed her with another fresh pulse of wetness between her thighs, the slick heat there growing impossible to ignore.

His fingers reached her shoulder and paused, lingering on the thin strap of her nightie — not moving it, or hooking beneath it, simply resting there, warm pads of skin against the narrow strip of fabric and the even narrower strip of bare skin beside it.

The deliberateness of not-moving-it was louder than any removal would have been.

The warmth of his fingers bled through the delicate material, warming the skin beneath until the strap itself felt like an extension of his touch. Her breast felt heavier, fuller. The nipple beneath it tightened to an almost painful peak that rubbed against the fabric with every shallow breath she took.

The sensitive bud ached for the heat of his mouth, for teeth, for tongue, for anything. The pulse of blood in that tight bud was a tiny, insistent heartbeat of need that matched the wild rhythm still hammering beneath his thumb at her wrist.

Then he traced back down the same arm, the same feather-light drag from shoulder to bicep to elbow to forearm, slower this time.

His touch trailed heat across skin that was already flushed and oversensitive and burning for more contact than it was receiving. The return journey was worse — or better — because now her skin remembered the path. Every inch he retraced felt like a second claim.

The nerves fired twice as hot, twice as loud.