Just Grant

Dawn does not make the penthouses look any more innocent.

Light comes in hard off the river side of the glass and turns the stone floors pale gold. Grant stands at the terrace door with coffee he does not need and a body he does not trust yet. Twenty points of claimed attention move through the two units like a weather system only he can feel. Mary in the foyer chair, dozing upright. Jaz on the stair. Eve at the lot feed. Tessa asleep where Jaz put her, curled small, no longer a hole in the map. The four unclaimed are a dull absence behind the guest-suite door.

Jaycee is awake.

He knows it before he looks. She is in the other unit, on the long sectional, sitting forward with her elbows on her knees. When his attention so much as brushes her, she stills the way a dog stills when it hears keys.

Lily’s voice carries faintly through the cut wall, then stops. A moment later Lily appears in the opening, hair messy, expression carefully neutral.

“She’s asking again,” Lily says. “Not with her mouth this time. She wrote a note. She asked me to ask you if she should stop asking.”

Grant tries to smile. It comes out tired.

“Send her in.”

Lily nods and disappears. Mary’s eyes open without her head moving.

“You’re going to test your new body on the first girl who begs for you?”

“I’m going to see if I can touch someone without breaking them.” Grant sets the coffee down. “That’s different.”

“It isn’t,” Mary says. Then, quieter: “Door stays open. I’m not leaving the floor.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to.”

Jaycee comes through the cut wall barefoot.

Someone has given her clean clothes that do not belong to her: one of Grant’s shirts, too nice for the way she used to live, hanging off her shoulders, and a pair of dark shorts that make her look like she got dressed in a hurry and then thought about it too much. The backwards cap is gone. Her hair is clean from taking a shower. There is a faint mark on her wrist from Kyle’s last night of ownership that the claim did not bother to erase. She stops three steps into the room and waits, eyes on him, mouth already soft. Cleaned up, Grant notices she is actually pretty.

“You told me to sleep,” she says.

“I did.”

“I slept. I ate. I didn’t get in the car. I didn’t touch anyone. I did everything you asked.” A tiny swallow. “I can still feel where he was in the back of my mind. Almost like a distant memory, but I don’t want him there. I only want you there.”

Mary makes a sound that might be a sigh and looks away toward the foyer, which is as much privacy as she is offering.

Grant crosses to Jaycee. His new strength is a problem immediately. He puts two fingers under her chin and has to think about softness the way he used to think about not slamming a car door. Her pulse jumps against his knuckles. Through the bond-map the rest of the penthouse brightens by a degree, twenty women noticing that their owner has put his hands on one of them.

“If I hurt you,” he says, “you let me know.”

Jaycee’s smile is quick and almost grateful.

“You won’t. Or—if you do, I’ll like it. I don’t care if you hurt me. I am yours.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“I know.” She leans her cheek into his palm. “Please do whatever you want to me.”

He kisses her.

She opens for it instantly, no sign of resistance, just heat and a small noise in her throat. She tastes like toothpaste and the leftover sweetness of whatever Lily found in the pantry. Grant keeps the kiss gentle for as long as he can. Then her hands slide under the hem of his shirt and flatten on his stomach, and the new strength answers whether he wants it to or not. He picks her up without thinking. One arm under her ass, the other around her back. She weighs nothing to him. Jaycee gasps, then giggles against his mouth, startled and wet.

“Oh my god.”

“Yeah.”

He carries her to the platform bed. The sheets are still twisted from his ninety minutes of sleep. He sets her down like she is glass and follows her onto the mattress, kneeling between her thighs. Her shirt has ridden up. He pushes it the rest of the way and she lifts her arms to help, her exposed breasts small and flushed, nipples already hard. He takes one into his mouth and she arches with a moan. She tries to keep quiet for Mary’s sake and fails.

“Yes Grant…”

His hand spans her ribs easily. Too easily. He drags his palm down her stomach, hooks the shorts and the underwear together, and pulls them off in one motion that would have been clumsy yesterday and is clean now. Jaycee’s hips lift for him. She is already slick. When he parts her with two fingers she is hot enough that her breath goes out of her.

He works her open slowly because he does not trust himself yet. His thumb on her clit, two fingers curling, watching her face for the line between pleasure and too much. Jaycee’s thighs tremble around his wrist. She grabs at the sheets, then at his shoulder, then gives up and just holds on.

“Please,” she whispers. “Please, I waited. I kept asking because I need you. Please.”

He takes his fingers out and she makes a helpless offended noise that turns into a moan when he puts his mouth on her instead. He licks her lower lips, flat-tongued and unhurried, then sucks her clit until her whole body tries to fold in half. The map spikes. Somewhere through the wall Tessa shifts in her sleep. Lily goes still. Magdalena’s attention turns like a compass needle. Grant feels all of it and keeps eating Jaycee anyway, holding her hips down when she tries to grind up too hard, because if he lets her set the pace he is going to forget he can crack her bones.

She comes on his tongue with her wrist in her mouth, muffled, shaking, wet against his chin. He does not stop until she twitches and pushes at his hair.

“I need you inside me,” she says, wrecked. “I don’t want your mouth. I want you to have me completely.”

Grant strips without ceremony. He is hard enough that the air hurts. Jaycee looks at him and her eyes go wide in a way that is not fear exactly.

“Okay,” she says, looking intensely into his eyes. “Okay I’m ready.”

He nods. Lines himself up. The head of his cock parts her and even that first inch makes her breath hitch. He sinks in by degrees, watching her face, feeling her tightly clutch and flutter around him as she takes more. Halfway she grabs his forearm.

He waits. Sweat ticks down his spine. His strength wants to drive. He does not let it. When she nods he gives her the rest in one long press until his hips meet hers and she is stretched around him, mouth open, no sound coming out.

“Jaycee.”

“I’m good. I’m so good. Move.”

He fucks her.

Not the way Kyle’s crew used her in the back of a Ford. Not frantic. Deep, measured strokes that drag over the spot that makes her eyes lose focus. The bed is expensive and still complains. Jaycee’s legs wrap around him and then fall open again when she cannot keep them up. Every time he bottoms out she makes a punched little ah that gets wetter. He can feel how small she is now in a way he could not yesterday. His hands on her waist almost meet. He has to keep reminding his fingers not to close.

“Harder,” she begs. “I can take it. I want to feel that you’re stronger. I want it in me.”

He gives her harder.

The first real thrust knocks a cry out of her. The second makes her grab the headboard. He sets a rhythm that would have winded him before and now does not bother him at all. Skin slapping. Her perfectly-shaped small tits moving. Grant hooks one of her legs over his elbow and the new angle makes her swear, high and broken, as he drives into her.

“That’s—fuck—Grant, that’s—”

He puts his thumb back on her clit and rubs her in tight circles while he fucks her through it. Jaycee comes again with her whole body seizing, her hungry pussy milking him in hard pulls, a wet sound every time he pushes back in. He does not last long after that. The strength does not help with control in this direction. He buries himself to the hilt, drops his forehead to her shoulder, and comes with a groan he cannot keep down, pulsing his warm seed into her in thick throbs while she keeps whispering “Yes, yes, I’m yours, fill me up. Don’t pull out.”

He stays.

For a minute there is only breathing and the distant city and Mary pretending very professionally not to have heard any of that.

Jaycee’s hand finds the back of his neck. Her voice is hoarse and sweet and claimed.

“You didn’t break me.”

“I came close to thinking about it.”

She smiles against his jaw. “You can think about it. Just don’t stop.”

He pulls out slowly. She winces, then looks down between her thighs at the mess of them and makes a small satisfied sound, like a box just got checked. Grant sits on the edge of the bed and feels the map settle. Twenty women. One of them dripping on his sheets. Four still unclaimed in the suite. Two men in a Ford who have no idea what just happened thirty floors up.

Mary appears in the doorway, eyes on the ceiling for one second too long, then on his face.

“Well,” she says. “You didn’t break her. Congratulations.”

Jaycee does not cover herself. She looks at Mary the way claimed women look at each other when the owner is in the room: not shy, just comfortable.

“He was careful,” Jaycee says.

“I heard how careful.” Mary’s mouth ticks. Then, to Grant: “Jose started the Explorer and turned it off again. They’re still down there. The four in the suite heard enough to stay put. Tessa asked if she should bring you water.”

Grant rubs a hand over his face. The strength is still there. The map is still there.

“Water,” he says. “Then clothes. Then we deal with the lot before the lot deals with us.”

Jaycee sits up, wincing happily, and kisses his shoulder like she has been allowed a privilege.

“Can I stay in this room?”

Grant glances at Mary. Mary’s look says your circus.

“For now,” he says. “You don’t leave the floor. You don’t go in the guest suite unless I send you. And if any of the other girls get a stupid idea, you tell Mary or me.”

Jaycee nods, smiling.

“Yes, Master.”

“Just Grant…please.” He stands. His legs steady. Her words, more than the sex, still feels wrong.

“Yes Grant. Sorry…” She says as she bow her head and her eyes dart to the floor deferentially.

Through the glass the Explorer sits in the morning lot like a tooth that has not been pulled. Grant feels twenty women moving around in different rooms around him. He can feel exactly where they are and what they are doing.

He does not know what claiming more will do.

He knows what twenty just did.

And he knows, walking toward the kitchen with Jaycee’s eyes on him and Mary’s silence at his back, that the next problem is not going to wait for him to take a shower.