Dex sat in his chair, and pulled her down on his lap situating her so she was straddling him, eliminating every inch of space between them.

Then his lips were on hers, and he kissed her like he was done being careful.

One hand fisted in her hair, the other locked on her lower back, holding her in place while he rolled up into her in short, controlled thrusts. Every movement sent another pulse of heat through the matebond until she was breathing ragged.

He pulled back just enough to look at her, his chest heaving. His eyes had a focus that had nothing to do with duties or his mother and everything to do with the woman on his lap whose hips had just shifted in a way that made his breathing change.

“Serena.” His voice was rough. “I need you. Right now.”

Her face heated the second he said it. The heat was immediate, total, climbing her neck and flooding her cheeks with the blush that Dexmon could feel through the matebond and that undid him every single time because the shyness was genuine and the genuineness was the thing that made his wolf pace.

“Dex, the door,” she whispered.

“No one will come in.” His mouth found the spot beneath her ear that made her spine dissolve. “Just relax for me. I’ve got you.”

His hands moved to the zipper on the back of her training suit, and he pulled it down in a single, fluid pull.

The suit came off her shoulders and down her body. He stood with her still in his arms, and placed her on his desk, pulling the training suit the rest of the way off.

In a blur, he unzipped his trousers.

She felt him press against her, blunt and hot, and her breath caught.

He eased into her without breaking eye contact. The gold in his eyes holding hers the way an anchor holds a ship, steady and deliberate and refusing to look away.

She winced. The burn was sharper than she expected, her body resisting him the way it always had, because she was sorer than she had realized from all the training, and the soreness was making itself known with specificity.

“So tight for me,” he breathed, the words leaving him in a rasp that vibrated against her throat. “Hold on, baby.”

He pulled out slowly, then pushed back in all the way until he was fully seated. The fullness of him drew a gasp from her mouth.

Her arms flew around his neck. Her body tensed. The stretch was consuming, a pressure that sat on the exact line between overwhelming and necessary.

“Fuck.” The word was quiet, reverent, carrying the specific sound of a man whose mate was wrapped around him and whose mate’s body was holding him like it was built for the purpose. “Squeeze me just like that and hold on tight.”

His hands found her hips. The grip was firm, possessive, the grip of a man who was done being gentle and was about to demonstrate what done looked like. His hips drove into her in a rhythm that started measured and abandoned measurement within four strokes, the pace building with the specific escalation of a man who could feel her pleasure through the matebond and was chasing it with his own.

She was sitting on his desk, holding onto him, and he was in complete control.

The burn climbed into something brighter. Something that sat on the line between too much and exactly enough, and the line was moving, and the moving was taking her with it.

Soft sounds spilled from her lips, involuntary, the sounds of a woman whose composure had been stripped away by friction and fullness and the specific way Dexmon Drakenfell touched her when he was inside her.

“Good girl.” His breath was ragged against her throat. “Keep making those sounds for me while you take my cock. Just like that.”

She could feel how close he was through the matebond. A coiling tension in his core that mirrored the one building in hers, and the feedback between them was turning every nerve ending she had into a live wire. His pleasure fed hers. Hers amplified his. The loop was building toward a threshold that neither of them could control and neither of them wanted to.

His thrusts grew harder. Faster. The desk creaked beneath them with a sound that said it had been built for paperwork and was being repurposed for activities that exceeded its design specifications.

The pressure in her core had gone past the point of return. Every muscle below her ribs was clenching in a slow, involuntary wave that she could feel building toward a break she was powerless to stop.

“That’s it.” His voice dropped into command. “Cum for me, baby.”

White-hot pleasure ripped through her. Her body convulsed, walls clenching tight around him in deep, fluttering waves while the only thought in her head was his name. The orgasm tore through the matebond at full volume, and Dexmon received it like a man receiving an avalanche, the force of her pleasure crashing into his own building edge and shattering it.

He groaned, deep and broken, spilling into her in long, pulsing waves while his arms crushed her against his chest and his face buried in her neck and his breathing came apart in fragments that sounded like her name repeated in a language that existed only between them.

Two bodies wrapped around each other on a desk that had survived the encounter and was filing a structural complaint.

Serena’s forehead dropped against his shoulder. Her breathing was ragged. Her body was trembling with aftershocks that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with the man still inside her.

He kissed her temple. Her cheekbone. The bridge of her nose.

“Mine.” Kiss on her forehead. “Mate.” Kiss on her mouth. The same words from earlier, the same sequence, bookending the conversation and the crisis and the sex with the two words that Dexmon Drakenfell used to tell Serena Frostborne that the world could burn as long as she was in his arms when it did.