Title: Sugar and Spice
Author: Nina/TechnicolorNina
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh!
Pairing/Characters: Azureshippping (Anzu/Kaiba).
Word Count: Uh, no idea. It's about ten pages long.
Story Rating: R/M for sexual situations and some adult language.
Story Summary: Kaiba's been a bit . . . neglectful. Anzu decides to get his attention.
Spoilers: Eh. Kaiba is filthy rich? It's post-series, but no spoilers.
Warnings: It's semi-smut.
Notes: . . . none? Enjoy the brain-fry? Oh. Yeah. FUBAR. Acronym for Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Also, written for the prompt "Kaiba with a sweets fetish" on the LiveJournal kinkmeme.
Feedback: There may be something out there that's better than a review containing concrit, but if there is, I haven't found it yet. So if you have two minutes and you wouldn't mind? Please? Arigatou. (And concrit is cool. Flames are not.)
Special Thanks/Dedications: This story is for the anonymous requester on the kinkmeme.

Kaiba sighed, checked his office door carefully to make sure nobody was in the hall, and then stretched, bending first this way and then the other, listening to his spine crackle. At least, he thought, at least it was Friday. He didn't have to come in tomorrow. Have no doubt: Kaiba loved his job. The endless meetings and paperwork he could have done without - not to mention the irritation of recoding after beta-test - but the creative part of the process, sketching the concept art and using all those millions of ones and zeroes to make it come alive . . . yeah. He could get behind that in a big way.

Something hot twisted painfully in his shoulder. He sighed and glanced up at the clock. He had a deadline to meet - the next installment of the Sword in the Dark series wasn't going to recode itself - but he still welcomed the coming weekend. He'd been working too hard, and he knew it. He wondered if Anzu could be sweet-talked into rubbing his shoulders. He was starting to wonder if he had a pinched nerve or something back there. He'd have to make it up to her, of course; Monday and Tuesday had both seen cancelled lunch dates while he tried to figure out why in the hell Anjas - the heroine of the new game - disappeared from the waist down every time she equipped for battle mode, and Thursday he'd stayed at KaibaCorp until almost midnight, running a sim on the final boss, trying to make sure the recode after beta was working properly. Dinner and something special - already sitting in his desk drawer at home - was going to be the order of the weekend. He was not a horrible, abusive, cold-hearted boyfriend, as at least half the tabloids had attempted to make out. He was also not a sappy, pussy-whipped Romeo, as the other half tried to claim. The truth - as with most tabloid stories - was somewhere between the two, but he thought he ought to count himself lucky that Anzu understood the importance of meeting a deadline that half the world was waiting for. Anybody else - and he admitted this only to himself, and only when he was completely alone - probably would have gotten tired of his shit a long time ago and moved on to someone else.

The com-phone on his desk buzzed. Kaiba pressed a button.

"Nosaka-san."

"Anzu's here to see you, Kaiba-san."

Kaiba wished he could rub his eyes to clear the blurriness in them, and then wished he could wear glasses instead of contacts for work without looking like an obscenely tall twelve-year-old. If he didn't lay off the coding every once in awhile, Anzu liked to say, he was going to need bifocals by the time he was thirty. She was probably right. It couldn't be helped. Time and tide waited for no man, and popular video-game deadlines did not wait for proper precautions against eyestrain.

"She knows where the door is."

Anzu did indeed know where the door was, and before too long Kaiba heard her feet, small and graceful even when they were only walking, on the thin carpet outside his office. The door opened, and there Anzu stood in a pair of snow boots and one of his old coats, the bottom hemmed up with safety pins to compensate for the eight inches Anzu didn't have. Kaiba gave her a perfunctory nod. Anzu gave him a look. He caved and smiled at her.

"That's better." Anzu slipped off the boots by the door and then plunked down on his couch. "Are you planning on pulling another all-nighter tonight?"

Her words were neutral enough but there was a set of razor-sharp claws buried in them, and Kaiba knew instantly she was still pissed as a wet cat. Not, he thought, that he could blame her. Had their positions been reversed, he probably would have been pissed, too. He shook his head.

"I was only going to stay until around eight-thirty. I should be able to finish re-coding the Mirror Dungeon by then. I can worry about rendering it again on Monday." The Mirror Dungeon, a fiendishly difficult section sure to leave even veteran gamers like Mutou screaming for mercy, had proved to be fucked beyond all playability in the beta version.

"Only eight-thirty," Anzu mused, and Kaiba did not like the tone in her voice. They didn't fight often - usually the ability to stand back and laugh at the ridiculousness of the whole situation defused any lovers' spats before they could get anywhere close to well underway - but this time, he thought, a fight was going to be unavoidable, and if he didn't want her not speaking to him, he should probably let her win it. The fear of losing her altogether was a small demon he would not allow to come to the front of his mind. "Did you know one of the first warning signs that someone's cheating is a sudden change in work schedule?"

Kaiba sat up straighter, his few noble reserves gone by the bye. He was not high-strung as a rule, not a man ready to scream about insults if someone looked at him cross-eyed, but he did have buttons that could be pushed, and Anzu knew the location of each and every one of them. His lips thinned out. He was many things - and many of those things were not nice - but of all the things he was not, unfaithful probably topped the list. He wouldn't have put up with that kind of bullshit from Anzu, and he would ask nothing of Anzu that he wouldn't ask of himself. Therefore, there was no woman on the side. QED.

"You. You actually. You actually think I would - that I could - "

"You are," Anzu said, and yes, this was going to be a fight, all right. There were a lot of cracks he was willing to let go - like Anzu's gentle chiding about his eyes - but that, that was definitely over the line. And then -

"Nobody said anything about you cheating with a human being. It's that damned computer you're so entranced with."

"Anzu, I have a deadline to meet, and - "

"A deadline keeps you from taking half an hour for lunch?"

"It can, yes." He turned his eyes back to his screen. "I told you I'd make it up to you this weekend. I'm not coming in tomorrow. You know that."

"Did it ever occur to you that maybe I'm tired of being a weekend girlfriend?" Anzu's tone was gentle, but firm. No, even trying to win this argument wouldn't work. "I don't like being a fucktoy."

Kaiba felt his eyebrows go up, although he kept his eyes trained on his screen. They did not, by unspoken mutual agreement, use that word to refer to what they did or did not do in private. She didn't use it because she thought it was vulgar; he didn't use it because - and he had admitted this to her - he thought of it as a word applicable to prostitutes, not people in a long-term relationship. He opened his mouth to point out what she'd said, and then realised that was what she wanted; she wanted him to be thinking in those terms.

"The game's being released in eight weeks," he reminded her. "After that you'll have all the me you can stand."

"And that's supposed to make me feel better?"

Kaiba shrugged. She'd known what she was getting into with him the first time they sat down to talk about where their tentatively friendly cups of coffee were going. He valued her friendship a great deal more than she probably would have believed, and later, her love; he had also made it clear that nothing could get in the way of his taking care of Mokuba, and missing the deadline could do that. One deadline would not send KaibaCorp spinning downward into bankruptcy, but it would make the company look bad, and above all else he must maintain the company's good name and reputation. The late nights and missed lunches were a sacrifice he was willing to ask of himself, and had Anzu been thrown into this blind he might have felt badly for her, but she'd known something like this might come up, and he said so.

"That doesn't make it better, Seto. You're not the one trying to figure out when to get things done and whether or not they can be finished based on whether or not your significant other does or doesn't call. And turn that thing off. I'm tired of you shutting me out."

His eyebrows went up again. She was ordering him around? Absolutely not. But being stubborn didn't seem like the most beneficial course of action - especially not with two days of rare free time laid out in front of him - and so he saved his progress and closed the laptop's screen. He looked up, prepared to sit patiently through whatever tirade had been building up for the past six weeks, and that was when he really sailed off the edge of the world.

Anzu had taken to wearing one of his old coats almost as a matter of course; they were heavier, warmer, than most coats available in the ladies' section, and she liked the last ghostly remnants of his cologne still clinging to the collars that folded up to keep her neck and ears warm. But they were good for something else, something he'd used them for more than once, and that was concealment - and she'd certainly had enough of that to do when she walked in.

She wasn't naked - Anzu was above things that slutty, that in-your-face - but she hadn't left much to the imagination either. The bottoms were perfectly decent, a pair of the billowy cotton things he tended to associate with Anzu's rehearsals, the kind that cut off at mid-calf and made the average male mind - well, Kaiba's mind, anyway - wonder what it would be like to run his hands over the exposed skin, the muscles beneath forming it into such an attractive shape, and feel Anzu's hands in his hair when he did. The top, though . . .

It looked like she might have borrowed it from Nosaka, the purple-haired girl once dubbed "Ribbon" by her classmates. Kaiba had winked at her practice of wearing tank-tops with sheer long-sleeved blouses overtop, because she didn't do it often and managed to look professional while wearing them, but that might have to end if it turned out Anzu's current costume came from his secretary. She hadn't bothered with a tank-top underneath, and the bra was definitely not the kind her mother would have bought her as a teenager. It was, in fact, so almost-not-there that he had to wonder if it served any function beyond looking . . . well . . . sexy. But. But, he reminded himself. He had work to do. Business before pleasure, as he had been lectured by Gozaburo on many occasions. The game would not debug itself. Two days off, starting at eight-thirty tonight.

Anzu slipped neatly between his chair and the edge of his desk and sat down astride his lap.

Only a little further to go. He might even get done by eight, if he continued on undistracted. The deadline. And. And. There was a further argument to be made here, and Kaiba tried to reach it, to grasp it with his mind. Silky fabric slid against his arm, almost certainly one of the tops Nosaka was disposed to wear. Yes. That.

"Do you have any idea how many people could walk through that door right now? Get off, Anzu."

A pair of arms slid around his neck. Anzu's eyes, when they looked into his, were serious.

"Miho-chan's leaving at seven-thirty. Honda-kun's picking her up. Because, Seto, when Honda-kun says he's taking her out at seven-thirty, he means seven-thirty. He doesn't mean he might be there at seven-thirty, or might not show up until ten o'clock, or might call at seven-twenty-five to say he can't make it after all." The grin that surfaced on her face was absolutely predatory. "And anyway, it's locked."

A tickle of fear, cold as the January snowflakes outside his window, touched the top of his spine and then trickled down it like ice water. He had seen Anzu angry before, although as a rule her anger was not directed at him. Usually it was accompanied by dark red spots high up in her cheeks, and if she was really angry, even tears. This clear-eyed, serious Anzu was new to him, and he had no idea how to deal with her. He had the feeling that this Anzu could not be soothed by his leaving at eight instead of eight-thirty, or placated with the promise of his undivided attention and a long back rub after her next show. This was what it felt like to be the rodent in a game of cat-and-mouse. And he couldn't let her put him in this position, because -

Kaiba jumped. Anzu hadn't bothered wearing gloves, and the hand against his chest was cold even through the fabric of his shirt. He had grown used to wearing what people everywhere called a poker face - it was a necessity in the business sector - but the best poker face in the world, hell, in the universe, would not be able to hide the rapidity of his heartbeat from her fingers.

"Anzu." His voice wavered, and he steadied it with a deep breath and a large effort of will. "Anzu. I have a total of twelve weeks to completely recode a game that went FUBAR in beta-testing. A third of that time is already gone. I spent a lot of overtime here this week so we could spend the weekend together, and I need to get this finished. Before I leave. Because - "

Anzu's mouth pressed against his, half-open, and Kaiba felt a wave of dismay as something sharply sweet slipped between his lips, a butterscotch announcement of a candied kiss. He was, in general, what Mutou and his geeky boyfriend would undoubtedly have called "vanilla" - no whips and chains for Kaiba Seto - but there was something about the taste of caramelled sugar on Anzu's teeth and tongue that drove him absolutely out of his mind. He reached up blindly, a last-ditch effort at pushing her away - The deadline, Seto, his mind screamed, the deadline! - and his hand caught her breast instead.

Anzu's fingers were cold but nimble as ever, and by the time she pulled away for air his dress shirt was unbuttoned all the way to his belt. Kaiba tried to tuck the melting candy into his cheek so he could protest and failed. Anzu led his hand to the buttons on the blouse. Kaiba considered - very briefly - using the hand to push her off of him, and then decided to hell with it. He was beaten, and he knew it. He could at least lose with grace.

The buttons were easy, and when the blouse hung open he reached around Anzu's sides to unhook the bra. Then he changed his mind. If she wanted to play with him, she'd find herself up against a much tougher opponent than she'd anticipated. He ran a single thumb over her lace-covered breast instead and watched her shiver from more than just cold.

Kaiba was busy kissing the side of Anzu's neck when she reached for the bag of hard candy he kept stashed in a desk drawer, and so he completely missed her demonstration of how to unwrap a cinnamon candy one-handed. She jerked his chin up with one hand - and when, he wondered, had she gotten so borderline violent about sex? - and kissed him again, so possessively it couldn't help being just a little exciting. Kaiba heard a click and dismissed it. He tasted the cinnamon on her lips and tried to steal the candy out of her mouth. Anzu turned her head, and when he tried to turn it back, a set of fingers on his belt distracted him. She couldn't do more than unzip his dress trousers, but she still had more than enough space for what she wanted, and Kaiba thought he might actually have shown the whites of his eyes for a second or two before they closed when she touched him with a single teasing fingernail drawn down his length.

I've heard of winning by any means necessary, but this is starting to get ridiculous.

And yet. He was really in no position to fight. He was in hock to his ears with Anzu, pinned to his own chair in a building devoid of people, fully hard, and oh dear god was she really going to try feeding him a peppermint when the taste of cinnamon and melted butterscotch was all through her mouth? More punishment for the first part of the week? He turned his head - there were some things he just wouldn't let even Anzu do - and saw her taunting pout just in time to know he was about to pay dearly.

Somehow he'd known deep down that letting her have her way with him was going to result in her getting up to leave halfway through, but he hadn't quite believed it until she did it. He stood up to follow her and fell back into the chair before he'd even gotten past the halfway mark. His eyes, when Anzu turned to look at him, must have been easily the size of tea saucers, blank zeroes of shock.

"You. You handcuffed me. You little bitch."

The smile Anzu favoured him with was beyond infuriating. She shrugged.

"And this is different from the rest of the week how?"

Her hand was undoing the lock, turning the doorknob, other hand doing up the buttons of her blouse with expert fingers. Had he thought he knew what real panic was? No. Real panic was sitting here handcuffed to his own fucking office chair, with his fly undone and the taste of Anzu and butterscotch still on his tongue, and watching her walk out with the key in her hand. Worse - he had the phone, so he could call someone to come get him out of this mess, would not be sitting here all weekend . . . but how was he supposed to explain to his rescuer, or to the men and women who would be in his meetings on Monday? Don't mind that red brush-burn ring on my wrist, my girlfriend got a little upset this weekend and cuffed me to my chair. No. Absolutely not.

"Wait! Anzu!"

He hadn't even known he was going to call for her until her fingers relaxed on the doorknob. Her face turned toward him.

"Mmm?"

He had no idea what to say to her. It was in neither Kaiba's genetic makeup nor his upbringing to beg, and yet he had the idea that was exactly what she wanted. He raised his hand three inches - all the slack the chain would give him - and raised his eyebrows. Anzu raised her own in return. Kaiba resisted the urge to shout at her. It would do him no good. Anzu turned back to him fully, put her hands on her hips.

"You want out?"

"Yes."

Anzu's eyebrows rose a little higher. Kaiba licked his lips and sighed. "Please."

Anzu didn't move. "Then say 'I promise I'm going to stop acting like this game is the end of the entire fucking world, and start keeping the appointments that don't have to do with it.' And mean it."

Kaiba stared at her. "That's not fair."

Anzu shrugged a single shoulder. "Look who's talking."

Yes, it was true, he'd used similar tactics in business deals . . . but that was different. He'd never, to the best of his knowledge, left anyone with an erection so hard it almost hurt. There was playing dirty, and then there was playing dirty. This was the kind of playing dirty even he wouldn't have touched.

"Anzu, I almost never cancel on you. Be - " The word tried to escape him, his cock intruding on his brainspace. "Be reasonable."

"If you'd be on time, I'd be reasonable."

"You know I can't just dictate when problems are going to come up."

Anzu shrugged again and pushed open the door. Kaiba felt his eyes widen.

"Anzu!"

The door clicked shut behind her. Kaiba threw his head back, frustrated beyond belief. Yes, all right, he'd had to cancel more than usual lately, but really. He made it up to her. Always. She was acting like it didn't bother him, too. And fair enough, he'd mostly chosen to live this life. But it wasn't like every single day of the year saw him fixing the problems caused by letting a team of newbies do the initial coding instead of overseeing it himself. He didn't think twelve weeks should be such an issue. And now she'd walked out on him, left him cuffed to a chair with an unsolvable predicament on his hands - metaphorically, of course -

His coat was still draped over the arm of the chair. She'll freeze, he thought, and was instantly furious - at who or what he wasn't entirely sure. At Anzu, for leaving him this way, for walking out wearing an outfit in a Japanese January that belonged in a Brazilian August, for tearing down his walls and forcing her way in to him in the first place. At Mokuba, who had conceived the entire game series that was surely going to be the death of him. And at himself, for being so damned weak, for letting a mostly-dressed girl reduce him to a quivering pile of hormones in two minutes flat, for being twenty-four years old and acting like a fucking teenager.

The LED on the com-phone flashed red. Kaiba picked up the receiver. Surely it wasn't Nosaka. Couldn't be. Mustn't be.

It was worse, of course.

"You're just fucking with me, aren't you?"

"Mmm." A pause. "Did you know Miho-chan keeps those little gummy-orange candies in her desk? There's a whole bag of them here."

Kaiba's eyes were wide and betrayed. He and Anzu had been dating for almost six months before they'd done anything involving nudity, and when Anzu had questioned him after their second time together - one good, one absolutely mind-blowing - he'd clung to the old name-rank-serial-number routine for all of about ten minutes before breaking down and whispering his secret in her ear. She'd locked her arms around his neck and kissed him, and her mouth had tasted like a watermelon lollipop. That particular chat session had quickly turned into the third time, if he remembered correctly, and Anzu had from that day to this never used his strange preference to taunt or manipulate him. On the contrary, special occasions - like the charity dinner-dance they'd attended at Christmas - were likely to see her neck and shoulders dusted with powdered sugar instead of talc, and she'd taken to wearing candy-flavoured lip gloss when she came to visit him at work, a sweet promise of later pleasures. He'd been at first mystified, and then gratified. Anzu was incredibly laid-back about most things, and she was perfectly happy to indulge his weird little fetish as long as said indulgence didn't involve the insertion, into certain intimate areas, of anything marketed primarily as food.

Now, though, Anzu's inside knowledge and his own eidetic memory were ganging up on him. His imagination - far bigger and in far more active use than most of his old classmates at Domino High probably would have ever believed - was providing a perfectly clear picture of Anzu sitting at Nosaka's desk, maybe with her little bare feet propped up on the desk, that devil-may-care streak of her he loved so much, not just eating Nosaka's damned candy oranges but savouring them, scraping the sugar off with her teeth, licking clean the bits she'd missed in long and leisurely catlike swipes of the tongue, nibbling the barest bits of the gummy part with her front teeth. He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly it hurt, shook his head once - hard - and then opened them. Usually it worked. Now it didn't.

"Anzu, I'm serious. Let me out."

"Mmmmmm."

If Kaiba hadn't been holding the phone between his ear and shoulder - an old and absent habit that went back to trying to answer e-mail, help Mokuba with his English homework, and take a conference call all at the same time - he probably would have slammed his hand on the desk in frustration.

"Anzu, you're being - "

"You know how to get out."

"And I already told you once. I can't schedule problems."

"You can schedule your reaction to them."

"I only have so much time to get this done, Anzu!" Now he was shouting. Damn it. He'd been doing pretty well, on the whole, about not raising his voice to her. He was trying to change the way he reacted to stress, he really was, but she wasn't making it easy for him.

The LED blinked out. Panic returned. It was swiftly replaced by a kind of exhaustion sleep could not repair. He'd had a sixty-hour work week, two teleconference meetings that had meant getting up at obscenely early hours because both calls had involved the American release of the game he was starting to wish he'd never heard of, and now he'd topped it off by getting Anzu so royally pissed at him he'd be lucky if she even spoke to him this weekend. The rest of his plans? So much dust in the wind now. He tried to raise his hands to massage his temples - anything to stave off the headache that would surely not be long in coming - and wanted almost to scream for frustration when only one of them moved. He rubbed his free hand over his eyes, instead.

"I give up. This is shit."

A pair of hands settled on his shoulders. Kaiba jumped and tried to turn the chair, but without both hands to steer it, he might as well have not bothered. The thumbs on the hands rose, pressed at the base of his neck, and rubbed small circles there. The pain in his left shoulder, a small, heated knot of tension like a squirming nest of snakes, unlocked and dissolved. Kaiba fell back into the hands, not caring if they belonged to Anzu or some weird burglar or Mohandas Gandhi. The hands stopped their caresses and dropped down the front of his shoulders to turn into a pair of arms crossed loosely around his neck and chest.

"I win," Anzu's voice said, and in it Kaiba heard both playfulness and a heavy measure of concern.

"Like hell you do. I wasn't talking to you." He paused. "How did you get in here, anyway?"

"I think you need a healthy dose of humanity, Seto. You're getting to that shut-out point. I walked right in the door. You just didn't notice."

"Let me out of this." He let the handcuff chain clank and wondered vaguely where she'd gotten such a thing. He'd retrieved things from all odd corners of Anzu's flat in the past thirty months or so and had never come across anything more exotic than a vibrator (still in the original plastic, with the receipt still attached, after two years), and he definitely didn't keep handcuffs in the room he'd started thinking of lately as theirs. He decided questions in that direction would probably give him answers he didn't want, and so chose not to ask.

"I can't."

The edges of panic, sliding in again. Had she borrowed the stupid things, maybe, and left the key with whoever had given them to her?

"What the fuck do you mean, you can't?"

"The key's in your pocket, and you've moved since I put it in there."

He gaped at her openly. Of all the -

"I was going to just tell you where to find it over the com-phone, but you sounded pissed-off enough to drop it, and we'd never find it in the carpet without a vaccuum cleaner. It's small." Anzu cried when she was angry; Kaiba had a tendency toward fine motor-skill tremors that left his hands shaking violently when he was, as the old cliché went, seeing red. He had to admit - assuming, of course, that she'd had a good reason to pull something so stupid in the first place - that her return in lieu of the information was probably the smarter course of action. Anzu's hand snaked between the side of the chair and Kaiba's thigh. He tried to move enough to let her fingers wiggle into his pocket. Her fingers fluttered over both sides of the fabric, and then withdrew with a small silver key pinched between two fingers. Anzu held it up. Kaiba reached for it. She pulled it away.

"Anzu - " He could feel himself going beyond angry, and she could feel it, too; he could see it in her face. She put a hand on his shoulder to calm him. He closed his eyes. "Anzu, we've been over this. I can't - "

" - schedule problems, I know. And if it were up to you, they'd never happen at all, but since they did it's going to be absolutely unavoidable for you to skip lunch just this once. I know."

"I'm sorry."

"If you were really sorry, you'd do something about it."

"I can't promise anything. You know that. All I can do is try to get this shit fixed as fast as I can so we're not dealing with it for the next two months. I'm looking at the long-term here."

"Why can't you just look at the short-term for once, then? Keep the long-range in mind and take the close-up view, too?"

"That would involve wearing bifocals." He paused long enough for Anzu to give him a rimshot if she wanted to - she didn't - and then continued. "I can try. I can't promise I'll be able to change anything, but I can try."

"For real," Anzu said.

"For real."

He couldn't see her face - she was still standing mostly behind him - but he could feel her smile. "Good enough. For now. Don't make me chain you to the damned desk chair next time, will you?"

"Absolutely not."

He heard a click, and set immediately to massaging his wrist - sometimes he wondered how the fuck Mutou could stand wearing wristbands all the time, even those loose paper things at concerts drove Kaiba crazy - while Anzu unlocked the cuff around the arm of his chair. Then she plunked down in his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck from the front this time.

"There were no oranges, were there?" It didn't sound like a question, not the way he said it, but it was one. It had taken until now to hit him - even Kaiba's logic was no match for rampaging hormones - but Nosaka rarely ate candy, and almost never gummy candies. She claimed they killed her complexion. Anzu smiled against his neck. Her mouth ghosted up the edge of his jaw.

"You tell me."

Anzu's lips pressed against his, and even before she parted them he could taste flavoured confectioner's sugar and ersatz citrus.

Yes. Yes, please. Kaiba's fingers wound into Anzu's hair, pulled her closer, deadlines forgotten. Her tongue traced the edge of his lip. His eyes closed and still he tried to pull her nearer, closer, skin to skin. The sheer blouse got in his way and he worked the buttons as quickly as he could, realising even now that popping them off would necessitate finding them later. Anzu's hands slipped into the waistband of his dress slacks.

"It might be a good idea to take this somewhere else," Kaiba murmured against her skin. "I've got the sofa."

To anyone else Kaiba's proposition would have sounded ludicrous. The "sofa" was in fact a two-person loveseat, and even Mokuba - who tended toward the Mutou Yuugi end of the height scale - was too tall to stretch out on it. What only those in Kaiba's inner circle knew was that the loveseat was also one of the keys to his having survived as long as he had in the business world. When an intercontinental teleconference was going to necessitate being at the office at three in the morning, he simply pulled the cushions off the sofa, set the alarm on his mobile, and slept on the cot hidden underneath. He'd originally bought it for late-night cram sessions when Mokuba had been too young to walk home alone after one of his friends' mothers dropped him at KaibaCorp after school, but it had still been in perfectly serviceable condition when Mokuba turned thirteen and started going home on his own. It had become Kaiba's secret weapon in the battle to get a decent-sized American consumer base built up. Anzu knew it was there, although they'd never used it for more than sleeping. Kaiba had no problem with changing that.

"I think I like you exactly where you are." Anzu had managed to squirm into Kaiba's chair just enough to lift her hips without falling. The purple dance-bottoms gave way to a pair of black lace panties. Kaiba had to tilt his head back to look Anzu in the face; she was kneeling on the edge of the seat, gripping the arms of the chair for balance, and her position had given her an artificial six inches over him.

"This isn't fair."

"Oh?"

"In case you haven't noticed, my shoes are the only things I'm not wearing." It was true - he'd kicked them off in favour of a pair of house-slippers at a quarter to six, when the last of the overtimers had gone and left only him and Nosaka in the building. Anzu let her hands come to rest on his shoulders again, this time just inside the edge of his undone collar.

"Lean forward."

"You'll fall."

Anzu gave him a look. "Dancers don't fall. I resent that. Now lean forward."

Kaiba did, hands on her waist just in case. Anzu slid the dress shirt down as far as she could.

"Seto, you're going to have to let go."

He did, but carefully, carefully - if she fell he'd rip his shirt keeping her from going backward, but that was all right. Better a ripped shirt than an Anzu who'd broken her neck on his desk. He could replace the shirt.

His worry turned out to be entirely unnecessary. Anzu slipped his shirttails neatly out of his belt, unfastened the last two buttons at the very bottom, folded the shirt carelessly over her arm, and then dropped it to the floor, where her loose folds quickly became obsolete. His belt was the next to go. He had to shift his hips to let her pull it out all the way, and this time she did lose her balance. Kaiba pulled her down into his lap before she could do more than raise one hand to balance her weight. Anzu landed heavily against his chest, and he planted his feet to keep the entire damned chair from going over backward. Anzu let out a sigh that was unmistakeable as anything but exactly what it was: Anzu was impressed. And hopefully, Kaiba thought, at least a little bit turned on. The teasing act was starting to get old. He kissed her again, hot and unschooled and with nothing to recommend it but passion (but it was a good kiss, for all that, the kind that made life interesting when they came out of nowhere), and Anzu responded in kind.

With his belt gone they had a bit more room, and once Anzu had caught her breath, she got back up on her knees.

"Where do you think you're going?" If she left him here again, not just with an undone fly but half-naked now, defenses as far down as he ever let them go . . . no. She wouldn't. She wouldn't. Even Anzu, who had first handcuffed him to a chair and then taunted him with candy oranges eaten just outside his line of sight, would not be that cruel.

Nor was she. He cried out as her hips shifted, settled down over his, and then rocked gently, pulling him deeper, drawing them as close to each other as the laws of physics would allow. He could feel Anzu's hands in his hair, stroking back the one stubborn tumbled lock that fell into his eyes no matter what he tried to do with it, and one of them slipped down from his head, caressed his neck, planted itself on his shoulder for balance. Kaiba slid his own hand into the fine strands of hair at the very base of Anzu's neck, ran his fingers upward, tilted her head for more of that delicious sugary taste. Anzu obliged readily, hips still rocking gently, like a boat at anchor in a light breeze.

He had no room to maneuver and neither did she; any attempt at something more energetic would probably tumble her out of the chair and straight backward onto the hard and unforgiving edge of his desk. And so Kaiba waited long enough for a pattern to establish itself, sweet kisses gentle touches a caress down his back, and then let one of his hands trail down her stomach, over her pelvis, down to that sweet spot between her legs, the very small one that made her cry out and jerk her hips with absolutely no thought whatsoever. He planted his other hand firmly between her shoulderblades to keep her from falling backward and let the ball of his thumb glide over that tiny nub. Anzu gasped and threw her head back. Kaiba kissed her breast and tasted the powdered sugar she'd hidden at the very edge of the bra she was still wearing. The hand between her shoulderblades crept down, found the hook of the bra, and released it. The straps slid down Anzu's shoulders. He turned his head and licked her breast like a kid with an ice-cream cone, felt her shudder and twist and moan.

In spite of his best efforts, he came first; he was a pushover, something he would never admit to anyone and something Anzu was too kind to point out. He was, however, a good lover - a fact created more by his own curiosity than any actual desire to be one, he had to admit that at least to himself - and when Anzu collapsed into his arms, she was shaking.

"Feel better?"

Anzu's breath against his chest was fluttery and uneven. She nodded numbly. Kaiba ran his fingers through her hair.

"We should go home," she whispered. "It's late."

"Home?" Kaiba had been under the impression they were supposed to go together.

"Well. You know. Your place."

"Oh." Right. "Sorry. I think my brain's a little fried."

Anzu's laugh was as uneven as her breath. "It's fine."

"Well – "

"Mmm?"

"You definitely got my attention."

Anzu's laugh was a little firmer as she reached languorously over the side of the chair for Kaiba's shirt. "That was the point."

"I just hope I didn't burn you out for tomorrow."

"What's tomorrow?" It was easier to get the shirt back on; it didn't have to be tucked in now, only buttoned up.

"Les Misérables in English. Our names hit the top of the waiting list on Tuesday."

Anzu's eyes widened. "You're kidding."

"I'm not. We're in the twelfth row."

"Best seat in the house."

Kaiba paused in the middle of buttoning Anzu's flimsy violet blouse. "It's not. We're in separate seats."

Anzu laughed, and Kaiba kissed the last of the sugar from her lips.