By the time his fingers reached her wrist she was trembling openly. Her thighs pressed so tightly together she could feel the slickness between them, the way her folds had parted and grown slippery, the way her clit throbbed with every slow pass of his fingers even though he had not come anywhere near it.

Phei circled her wrist and wrapped his hand loosely around the narrow bone, thumb settling directly over her pulse point.

The simple act of holding her there, of feeling the frantic, fluttering life beating against his skin, made something dark and satisfied uncurl in his chest.

"Your pulse is racing," he said, conversational, as though he were commenting on the colour of the morning sky rather than the proof of how completely she was coming undone beneath the lightest touch he could offer.

"Should I stop, Cat?"

"N-no — don’t — please —"

"Please what?"

The question hung between them like a blade balanced on its edge, gleaming but Phei didn’t push or demand and simply held her wrist in that loose, unbreakable circle, as his thumb stroked once — slow, deliberate, the pad of it pressing just firmly enough to feel the life beating there — and waited while the morning light poured over them both, turning the vast bedroom into a cathedral of gold and shadow.

In the silence that followed he could hear every tiny sound she made: the catch in her throat, the soft wet sound of her swallowing, the almost inaudible shift of her thighs pressing tighter together as if that could hide the way her body was already answering questions she hadn’t yet found the courage to voice.

He could smell her now; the clean soap of her skin, the faint warm musk of arousal beginning to gather between her legs, sweet and heady and unmistakable, the scent of a girl whose cunt had decided long before her mouth that it wanted everything he was offering and more.

The knowledge sat low in his gut like good wine, dark and rich and patient, because he had all the time in the world and she was already his.

She just hadn’t finished saying the words yet.

And he would not rescue her from the saying of them.

Not when the reward for her courage was going to be so very, very sweet.

She couldn’t answer.

Her mouth opened and closed and nothing came out that qualified as language — just breath and fragments, syllables that dissolved before they could form words, her body running so far ahead of her voice that speech had become a luxury she could no longer afford.

The golden morning light caught the wet shine of her parted lips, the rapid flutter of her lashes, the way her chest rose and fell like she had been running through fire.

Phei released her wrist and drifted; not upward this time, but sideways, a slow claiming glide that spoke of ownership before contact even arrived.

His palm settled against her waist through the thin fabric of her nightie, fingers curling around the narrow curve where her ribcage tapered, the heat of him bleeding straight through the delicate material like sunlight through gauze.

His thumb found the soft plane of her stomach and pressed — once, warm, deliberate in a slow, possessive pressure that sank into the sensitive skin beneath and sent a liquid shockwave straight down to the aching place between her thighs.

"P-Boss~"

She gasped, the sound of his namely nearly torn from somewhere deep, and arched into him on pure reflex, her body moving before her mind could catch it.

"How about this," he said, his voice dropping lower. Warmer. The voice he used when he wanted a woman to feel the words in her spine rather than hear them in her ears.

"Does this feel good?"

"Y-yes — Boss —"

His thumb moved in a slow hypnotic circle on her stomach through the fabric. Small. Patient that it should have been innocent and was categorically not, because the pressure was precise, the placement was deliberate, and his thumb was drawing patterns on her body that her nervous system translated as a direct promise of where else those same patterns could be traced, slower, wetter, deeper.

Every lazy rotation made the thin nightie rub against her skin.

The friction whispered across her lower belly and sent sparks racing downward until her clit throbbed in helpless echo.

Catrina’s skin burned under the slow drag of fabric, every pass of his thumb leaving a trail of tingling heat that spread outward in widening ripples, her nerves lit up so sharply she could feel the individual threads of the nightie catching and releasing against her overheated flesh.

She could feel herself growing wetter with every pass, the slick heat gathering between her folds, her panties clinging to swollen flesh she had never let anyone see, let alone touch.

Her hips shifted involuntary and tiny rock forward that she caught halfway and tried to pull back, her body swaying toward him and correcting and swaying again in a rhythm that had nothing to do with balance and everything to do with the fact that she was soaking wet and standing three inches from the man responsible and her body had opinions about the distance that her dignity could no longer overrule.

The skin of her lower belly tightened and fluttered under the circling pressure, gooseflesh rising in a visible wave that chased the path of his thumb while the heat between her thighs grew heavier, thicker, the wetness there spreading until she could feel it coating her inner lips and beginning to soak through the thin cotton in a warm, shameful patch that made every tiny shift of her hips drag the fabric against her swollen, aching clit.

"You’re shaking," Phei observed.

"I k-know —"

"Do you want more?"

A whimper. High, thin, breaking in the middle.

"Cat. Do you want more?"

"Yes — yes, please, Boss, I —"

His hand slid from her waist. Down over the curve of her hip with the unhurried certainty of a man mapping territory he already considered his.

Phei’s palm flattened against the fabric stretched across the swell of it, fingers tracing the arc with slow proprietary warmth that sank through the nightie like a brand. The sound she made was not a whimper this time.

It was a moan — low, shuddering, pulled from somewhere behind her ribs, the sound of a body that had been building pressure for weeks and was finally being touched by the hands it had imagined every sleepless night.

The touch was still over fabric, still technically innocent, yet it felt more intimate than anything she had ever experienced; his palm spanned the full curve of her hip, fingers curving possessively around the side, and the heat of him seemed to reach straight through to the slick, hidden core of her, making her inner walls flutter and clench around nothing.

"Good," he murmured. "That’s good. You’re doing so well."