“Just his body?” Mike’s own body was as powerful and commanding as the one she’d made up – and never more so than at moments like this, when he was riled up beyond belief – but he mustn’t be allowed to know that.

“And his cock,” she said. “I begged him to let me watch his cock while we fucked. God, he was thick. You can probably tell that, though.” She ran a patronizing palm over his short hair. “You can probably feel what he did to me.”

He cranked into an entirely new gear at those words. Proving mode. Every muscle had hardened, along with his expression and his thrusts. He’d set his insecurity aside, overcome by the burning competition he felt toward this made-up rival. Those were the three acts in this filthy play they put on together – suspicion, humiliation, reclaiming.

“You think I’m not enough for you?” he demanded, taking her roughly with a dozen deep pumps. “This dick’s not big enough for you?”

“Let’s just make this quick. I’m sore.” She let her tone imply more. Make it quick – like you’d know how to make it any other way. She slid her fingertips to her clit.

Just make it quick. She smiled to herself, remembering the vacation they’d taken to San Francisco after they’d been dating for two years. That first evening, Mike had made love to her for no less than an hour, woken her up twice in the night for more, and left her smirking and a touch raw the next day, in no doubt of what he was capable of. He’d proposed to her that afternoon, one knee sunk into the sand beside the bay, blue eyes full of hope and fear in the sunshine.

That – a marathon of sex preceding the proposal – should have been her first tip that he was a little different sexually. Skewed in such a way that his worthiness was wired to his cock, with not quite the right voltage conversion. After they’d gotten engaged, he’d gone through that brief but potent period of irrational jealousy, one that had grated on her terribly, made her feel hurt and distrusted and nearly had her giving back the ring.

But in the wake of her ultimatum and his confession, she learned that the jealousy didn’t make his blood boil – it made his dick hard. He hadn’t wanted reassurance that she wasn’t cheating. He’d craved the fearful rush that maybe, just maybe, she was.

She stroked his neck, so in love with this quirky man. Though now wasn’t the time to tell him so, not when insecurity had him this hard and frantic between her thighs.

“You should have seen him,” Sam said, urging his hips with her own. “God, I wish you could have. I should make you watch so maybe you’d get a clue how to fuck me.”

He answered with a pained sound, as though she’d struck him with more than her words. It gave her a moment’s pang, but she trusted their game. A bit more intensity with her fingers had the heat and tension gathering, a tangling knot of pleasure in her belly growing tighter, tighter.

“He was just so, fucking, big. So deep. And I wish I could have stayed there the whole night. He could’ve gone that long. Next time you’re out on a case,” she promised, “I’ll have to find him again. Maybe bring him back here.”

“Not in our bed.”

“Yes, right here.” She stroked the pillow under her head and the sheets at her side. “Then every time I let you fuck me I’ll remember how much better it was with Nick.”

“You used a condom, at least?” His voice was a needy whisper.

“Oh, he offered. But I said no. No, I wanted to feel him that way. Inside me – like proof I really had been with someone like him.”

Mike groaned. Proof was one of his trigger words – a verbal spur that jabbed his heart, a tight hand that stroked his cock. He had others as well: ruined, dirty, wrecked. His reaction had her arousal sharpening in turn.

“I wish you could have seen it. I really do.” She’d taken to repeating that notion, a veiled signal she hoped he might pick up on. Maybe I’ll just let you watch was the hidden message. Though for all she knew, he’d loathe the idea of actually going there, and that was fine. And for all she knew, it’d blow his mind clear into the next county. She was starting to suspect she was capable of it, herself. So she kept planting the seed, waiting to see if Mike would water it.

“He make you come?” he panted.

She laughed, a derisive, pitying noise. “So many times. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that good, coming on such a big cock. God, I just felt… owned.” Another trigger word, and Mike’s thrusts grew rougher. “He just owned me with his body. I was begging for him: Nick, Nick, Nick,” she whispered in his ear. “Fuck me, please. Fuck me like my husband can’t. Show me what a real man feels like.”

Sensing he was nearing the end of his rope, she touched herself with purpose. She kept talking, as though the thoughts were what was edging her toward release, and not the hard, needy motions of her husband’s gorgeous body and the exquisite expression on his face, that ecstatic psychological torture.

“Oh, it’s got me close, just remembering his cock.” She watched Mike’s cock surging, and her imaginary male faded to a faceless shadow, no match for her real-life lover. “So big,” she murmured. The pleasure had her body hot and angry, aching for relief. She wanted to touch Mike, and feel his damp skin against her fingertips, taste the sweat gleaming there. But for the game’s sake she kept herself aloof, a limp, grudging vessel.

In lieu of her hands, she let her gaze stroke his strong arms, tight stomach, pistoning hips, flashing shaft. “So big,” she muttered again, and when the pleasure flared and burst in her clit, it was from thoughts of one man alone.

Mike surrendered a dozen harried thrusts later, back arching to bathe his chest and shoulders in warm lamp light, his hips grinding her thighs with the sweetest twinge of pain.

After a few steadying breaths, he collapsed beside her.

Now she was allowed to smile fondly, to stroke his face and kiss him and admit whose name had been at the tip of her tongue as she’d come.

“Baby,” he muttered, then laughed softly.

She pressed her lips to his temple. “Good?”

“So good. Always.”

“I love you.”

He wrapped her in powerful arms and she locked a leg around his hip. “Not half as much as I love you,” he said.

And she let him believe such a thing, because there were no words available to mankind that could ever express how much she adored him.

CHAPTER TWO

Mike woke late – nearly ten thirty, the alarm clock told him.

The smell of coffee had wafted up from the kitchen, and he pictured Samira cross-legged on the couch in her pajamas, with a book or magazine propped on a pillow in her lap, her mug’s steam lit all pearly by the morning light. She’d go jogging later, as she did most Saturdays, and her unwashed hair would be wild and wavy, her face bare. She never looked prettier than she did on weekend mornings, and Mike had taken the mental snapshot so many times he could shut his eyes and relish every detail.

He smelled sex in the sheets, a scent darker and more exotic than the coffee in the kitchen. Fucking hell.

He rolled onto his back, remembering last night’s game with a flush of fond, sheepish arousal, and a grin curled his lips. He and the other guys in Narcotics liked to one-up one another with evidence of whose long-suffering girlfriends and wives were the best. The women who waited up until two a.m. keeping dinner warm, who always covered for forgotten family birthdays in the midst of messy, endless cases, who never failed to record a single game.

Mike couldn’t exactly crow about his own wife’s beyond-the-call-of-duty cred. Well, boys, he imagined saying, every few weeks my wife stays out late and brags about fucking another man, then makes me come so hard it’s a miracle I haven’t had a stroke. How about those Steelers?