Chapter 17 Starlit Confessions #3
His fingers curled against my scalp, pressing me deeper, and his hips moved in short, shallow pulses that he could not seem to stop, chasing the heat of my mouth with the instinct of a man who had stopped being entirely rational several minutes ago.
The wolf was fully present now in the way he moved, in the low urgent sounds coming from somewhere deep in his chest, feral and unfiltered and aimed directly at my spine.
Then his grip shifted.
He caught me under the jaw with both hands and pulled me up his body in one long, fluid motion, the easy strength in his arms leaving no ambiguity about what he wanted.
I came willingly, crawling up the length of him until we were face to face in the moonlight, and the expression he wore stopped me completely.
“I need to see you,” he said. “All of you. I need you looking at me.”
“I'm here.” I pressed my forehead to his. “I'm not going anywhere.”
His exhale came out ragged with relief and want in equal measure. He stroked me slowly, deliberately, watching my face while he did it with the focused attention of someone collecting information he intended to use for the rest of his life.
“There,” he said softly, almost to himself. “There you are.”
I pressed my mouth to his throat to keep myself from saying something irretrievable. Then I moved lower.
I worked across his collarbone with lips and tongue, down the slope of his chest, tasting the faint salt of lake water still on his skin and something underneath it that was purely and specifically Ronan.
His stroking hand found a rhythm that made it difficult to concentrate.
“Don't stop,” he said above me, his free hand pressing flat between my shoulder blades. “Don't you dare stop.”
I had absolutely no intention of stopping.
I pressed my face into the curve of his arm when I reached it, into the dark hollow of his armpit where his scent was concentrated and animal and overwhelming in the best possible way.
The wolf in him lived here, in this particular heat, in the musk of exertion and want and something old and wild that no amount of civilization ever fully covered.
“Gideon.” Broken syllables. A whispered devastation. “What are you doing to me?”
“Learning you,” I said against his skin. “Every part of you.”
I pressed my lips to the hollow of his arm fully and felt him shudder from shoulder to hip, a full-body tremor that his wolf could not contain, and the low sound he made was “mmnhh, fuck, yes” all run together into one helpless exhalation.
His grip on my cock tightened involuntarily and I groaned against him, the sound muffled by the warmth of his skin, the vibration of it drawing another ragged noise from his throat.
“You're going to unmake me,” he said, with the particular wonder of a man discovering a thing he had no defenses against.
“Good.” I looked up at him from where my face was still pressed against his arm, watching the moonlight work across the planes of his face, watching his pale eyes track down to mine with an intensity that felt like gravity. “I want to be the thing that unmakes you. I want to be the only thing.”
His expression cracked open at the seams.
“You already are.” The words came out rough and certain and without any of the deflection he usually wrapped around honest feeling. “You have been since you looked at me like I was worth looking at. There is nobody else, there has not been anybody else since you walked into my life.”
I kissed my way back across his chest, up his throat, and found his mouth while his hand kept its steady.
“You are the only good thing,” I said against his lips, “that my magic has ever found on its own.”
He made a sound against my mouth that was almost a sob and kissed me harder, his hand stroking faster, and I gripped his shoulders and held on.
“Tell me what you need,” he said. “Tell me and I'll give it to you. Everything. Whatever it takes.”
“You,” I said, simple and absolute. “Just you.”
His thumb swept across the head of my cock and I gasped.
“Then you have me,” he said. “All of me. Every broken piece of me. Yours.”
Then the hand stroking me stopped.
In the half second before I could register the loss of it, Ronan moved, and the casual, breathtaking ease of what he did with his strength should have alarmed me.
Instead it pulled a sound from my throat that had no precedent in my vocabulary.
He gripped my hips in both hands and turned me over as though I weighed nothing.
I was on my stomach before I had finished processing that it was happening.
“Ronan.” My voice came out low and shaken and entirely without objection.
“Stay.” My body obeyed before my mind had a vote on the matter.
His hands were on my back, spreading wide across the planes of my shoulder blades, sliding down my spine with a possessive thoroughness that left trails of warmth in the cool night air.
He was cataloging me the way I had cataloged him, but where I had been careful and tender, Ronan was deliberate in a way that felt ancient.
“You have no idea,” he said, low and reverent and rough all at once, “what you look like right now.”
“Tell me.”
“Mine.” The word was immediate and unambiguous, and the sound that left my throat in response was not dignified and I did not care at all.
He pressed his lips to the knob of my spine between my shoulders, then lower, working down each vertebra with an attention that wound me tighter by degrees.
His hands curved around my hips, my waist, memorizing the shape of me with palms that were hot and certain.
The moonlight laid silver across both of us and the grass was soft beneath me and the lake made its small, patient sounds a few feet away, indifferent to the fact that I was being taken apart by the most careful and merciless hands I had ever had on my body.
He reached the small of my back and paused.
I felt his breath, warm against my skin, felt the way his grip on my hips tightened fractionally.
The wolf was very close to the surface. I could feel it in the quality of his stillness, in the low, continuous sound he was making that was not quite a growl and not quite a groan and was entirely both.
“I need to taste you,” he said, in the voice of a man reporting a fact about the weather. “I need it. My wolf needs it. If you want me to stop you need to tell me now.”
“If you stop,” I said into the blanket, “I will never forgive you.”
He spread me open with both thumbs and buried his face between my cheeks and I made a sound that scattered birds from the canopy twenty feet away.
The heat of his mouth against me was staggering.
Thorough and wet and absolutely without apology, his tongue tracing and pressing and coaxing until my hands were fisting in the blanket and my hips were pushing back against his face with a shameless urgency I could not have stopped if I had wanted to.
He worked at me like a man with no other objective in the world, like this was the singular task his existence had been constructed around, alternating between long, slow strokes that made me shiver from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet and focused, insistent pressure that pulled broken syllables from my throat on every exhale.
“Ronan, please, please don't—”
He groaned against me, the vibration traveling inward, and the sound he made was the wolf giving its full and enthusiastic opinion of what it had found.
“You taste like mine. You taste like you were made for this. For me.”
“I might have been,” I managed, which was the most honest thing I had ever said.
He made a low, pleased sound and went back to his work with renewed focus, his thumbs keeping me spread and his mouth mapping territory with the patient, ravenous attention of something that intended to breed and was making certain the ground was thoroughly claimed before it did.
The wolf knew what it wanted. The wolf had apparently known for some time and had been waiting with a patience that was now completely exhausted.
I was shaking. The full length of me trembling against the blankets, my cock pressed between my stomach and the ground with a desperate ache that had moved well past urgency into something that felt almost meditative.
“I can feel that,” he said, lifting his head for a moment. His voice was wrecked entirely, dark and thick with arousal.
“Then you know,” I said breathlessly, “that I want more.”
He pressed a kiss to the base of my spine, then another lower, then his mouth returned to its occupation with a thoroughness that made me groan his name into the blanket in a long, shaking exhalation.
His hand slid beneath me and wrapped around my cock, stroking slow while his tongue worked, and the combination reduced my capacity for coherent thought to something roughly equivalent to white noise and want.
I pushed back against his mouth and forward into his fist and he let me, held steady while I found my own rhythm between his hands and his lips, while I came undone in the moonlight with the forest watching and the lake reflecting every star overhead in its dark and patient mirror.
“Ronan.” A plea.
“I've got you,” he said against me. “I have you. You're safe.”
He pressed a kiss to the base of my spine, then another lower, then his mouth returned to its occupation with a thoroughness that made me groan his name into the blanket in a long, shaking exhalation.
His hand slid beneath me and wrapped around my cock, stroking slow while his tongue worked, and the combination reduced my capacity for coherent thought to something roughly equivalent to white noise and want.
I pushed back against his mouth and forward into his fist and he let me, held steady while I found my own rhythm between his hands and his lips, while I came undone in the moonlight with the forest watching and the lake reflecting every star overhead in its dark and patient mirror.
Then he went still.
“Gideon.”