“Should we go back upstairs?” she said huskily.

“I want you here.”

He eased her back against the desk and then urged her to sit upon it, pushing his keyboard and an ashtray out of the way. When his monitor almost went off the far side, he didn’t care.

Willing the door to the office shut, the light from the hall was cut off and darkness took ownership of the room except for that pool of blue light—

Shit, he thought. The door. He shouldn’t have closed it with his mind. However, at least Marisol, in her state of increasing arousal, didn’t seem to notice.

“You’re going to have to be quiet,” he drawled as he rested both sets of fingertips on her thighs. “You mustn’t disturb anyone.”

“How do you know you’re not the one who’ll be gasping?” she countered.

“Because this is not going to be about me.”

With that, he jerked out the second drawers on both sides of the desk and spread her legs, putting her feet on the ledges he had made for her. Then he sank down onto his knees.

She started to pant before he even began stroking up the inside of her thighs.

“Remember,” he said as he brushed his lips on one of her knees. “You wouldn’t want to wake anyone up.”

Sweeping his hands toward her core, he did not touch her. Yet. He unfastened the lowest button of his shirt. And then the one on top of that. And then the next…

He wanted to go all the way, but in the unlikely event someone knocked, or worse—and unheard of—walked in, he needed to spare her modesty.

The shirttails were terribly accommodating as he parted them and moved them out of the way, the twin swaths content to stay back on either side of her hips.

And there she was, bare and wide to him.

“Mmm,” he purred as kissed his way from her knee to the edge of what was becoming so very aroused for him.

Looking up, he smiled. She had braced her hands on the blotter and was leaning her body back, but keeping her head forward so she could watch him.

Assail extended his tongue and was done with any preamble. He licked up the center of her, flicking the top of her sex. Then he sealed her with a kiss.

The groan she tried to stifle made him smile, but then he had work to do. Sucking her in, then licking at her, he took his time, enjoying the feel and taste of her, the warmth and the rush—and greedy for even more, he spread her knees farther apart, his hands locking on, squeezing.

The lapping sounds were loud in the silence of the room—and so was her breathing. And both got their volume turned up as he started flicking at her, his tongue a darting, dancing tease that had her hips jerking back and forth as she rode his face.

When she came, her palms squeaked on the blotter and she went into an arch that banged the monitor into the wall.

He gave her no time for recovery, though.

Such a cruel taskmaster he was.

THIRTY-ONE

On the leather couch at the Pit, Vishous came around to the sound of an ESPN 30 for 30, the announcer giving the background on a piece about…Ric Flair, the old-school wrestler.

V opened his eyes with an effort disproportionate to how much his lids weighed. Fuck. He’d used less energy bench-pressing in the damn gym.

The foosball table was the first thing he could properly focus on. The wide-screen TV behind it was the second. The third was the two males standing in the kitchen, their bodies close together, their heads leaning in, their conversation at such a soft whisper, he could hear nothing of it.

Butch and Rhage each had a drink in their hand: The former was rocking a tall glass of something that was brown, but most definitely not of the Coke/Dr Pepper/Pepsi variety. The latter had a mug the size of a bathtub, and V knew without sniffing the air that that was Swiss Miss without the marshmallows, made with milk, not water.

Still, all of these details about where he was and who and what was around him were not relevant. They were more pass-throughs for his brain, the thin mint, not the entrée.

Pain was more the point of his existence, and as his state of consciousness picked up more and more steam, memories of holding Jane in his arms and losing her again, hit him sure as if a slayer were standing above him and beating him with a lead pipe over and over until his skull did not so much cave in as get pulverized.

Whatever drug they had given him was wearing off by inches, not yards, and he was frustrated with this—although why exactly, he wasn’t sure. Sobriety was just going to mean more suffering.

Jane, he mouthed. Jane…

When there was a hot streak down his cheek, he wondered who was dripping candle wax on him—

A pair of bizarrely pupil-less eyes popped in front of him so unexpectedly, he jerked back, his head bouncing off the leather cushion behind him.

Lassiter was the last person in the fucking world he wanted to see, the blond-and-black horror with the big mouth exactly what the doctor did not order.

“Shut up,” V mumbled. “Go ’way—”

The angel put his forefinger up to his lips. Shh. All is well.

Jane is gone! V wanted to scream. She is fucking gone and I don’t give a fuck about you or anybody on this—

Lassiter reached out and put his hand on V’s forearm. Shh. All is well.

The fuck it is!

As the male squeezed, V looked to the kitchen and wondered why Butch and Rhage weren’t acknowledging their unwelcomed visitor. Then again, the pair of them were as sick of the Lassiter show as he was—

All at once, the world went on a spin around him, as if he were a funnel and everything was draining into him.

The next thing he knew, he was surrounded by green grass and milky sky as he lay flat on the Sanctuary’s lawn. And for no good reason, he wondered why he was always landing on the grass now, instead of inside his mother’s private quarters. Before, he had always arrived in that courtyard.

Maybe because she was no longer here? Whatever.

“Lassiter,” he croaked. “What the fuck is your problem.”

Sitting up, he rubbed his eyes and discovered he was in front of the Treasury…and the fallen annoyance—angel, that was—was nowhere to be seen.

After a moment, he noticed that the door to the vault was open—which was wacked. That thing was always closed.

V got to his feet and ambled over because he couldn’t think of anything else to do in the midst of his agony, and besides, he was nominally curious as to whether his legs would hold his weight. Huh. They did.

When he got to the doorway, he almost didn’t look in, but something told him to shift his eyes—

There was a figure across the way, its back to him, its head down as if it was looking at something in a case—

Short blond hair. Lithe body. Female. Very female—

“Jane,” he groaned, thinking it was an apparition that had showed up to torture him.

Except it turned around on a spin.

Shock on a familiar, beautiful face made the world spin again.

“Jane!”

Even though this had to be the cruelest joke Lassiter had ever played, V went with it, racing across the shallow space and slamming his body into what certainly appeared to be his shellan’s.

“Vishous?” she said, as if she were equally confused.

He palmed the back of her head, and closed his eyes, and as he kissed her, he prayed that this was not some figment of his imagination, a product of grief meeting the drugs they’d given him.

“I thought I’d lost you,” he said hoarsely.

As he spoke the words, he realized that was true not just with her getting shot, but with the distance that had grown between them.

Jane’s arms squeezed him hard, as if she knew he needed to feel that. “Never,” she returned through her tears. “You’ll never lose me…”

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care right now—just kiss me again!”

* * *

—

As Jane held on to her mate with desperate strength, she knew she was probably making it hard for Vishous to breathe, but she needed visceral reassurance that she was alive and so was he.

Oxygen was just going to have to take a backseat for a minute.

“Oh, God, I thought you were gone,” he mumbled, his voice reverberating with emotion. “I can’t believe you’re here. What happened? Why are you—shit, I…don’t have a fucking clue what I’m saying.”