Chapter 17 Starlit Confessions #4
“Don't stop.” My voice came out wrecked and muffled against the blanket.
“I'm not stopping.” He stroked his thumb across me again and I felt it this time, felt the unmistakable slickness he had found, felt the warmth of it, the impossible, baffling warmth of my own body producing something it had no biological reason to produce. “But you need to feel this.”
He pressed two fingers against me, gathered the slick that had gathered at my entrance, and held them in front of my face with a patience that was maddening.
I stared at the glistening on his fingers in the moonlight and felt the bottom drop out of my understanding of my own body.
“That's not possible,” I said. “I'm not an omega. I'm not even a wolf. I'm a witch.”
“You're my tether.” The certainty in his voice was absolute and unhurried.
“And the bond is doing what bonds do when they're this strong.” He turned his fingers in the silver light, studying the slick with the expression of a man whose wolf was currently, visibly, losing its mind with satisfaction.
“It isn't exclusive to omega wolves, Gideon. The tether changes the body it claims. Your magic read what my wolf needed and answered it.”
“That's—”
“Extraordinary?” His mouth curved, slow and devastating. “Yeah.” He pressed his lips to the small of my back. “It is.”
He turned me over again with that same casual, breathtaking strength, flipping me onto my back in one fluid movement that left me blinking at the stars overhead.
His face above mine was all moonlight and want, his pale eyes luminous with the wolf fully awake behind them, his hair disheveled from my hands and his own.
“I want to see you while I take care of you,” he said. “I want to watch your face.”
He shifted down my body and lifted my thighs over his shoulders with a deliberateness that left no ambiguity about his intentions, and I felt cool night air against the slickness he had found, felt exposed in a way that bypassed self-consciousness entirely and arrived directly at something that felt uncomfortably close to vulnerable.
“Ronan.” His name in my mouth was unsteady.
“I have you.” He pressed his lips to the inside of my thigh. “Trust me.”
He brought his mouth back to my entrance and I understood then why the wolf in him had gone so quiet and purposeful.
He was tasting the slick my own body had made for him, and the sound that came from his throat was so low and reverent and proprietary that it sent a shiver from my tailbone to the nape of my neck.
“You made this for me,” he said against my skin, a statement of fact rendered in a register that was barely human. “Your body made this for me.”
“Apparently my body has opinions,” I managed, which was not my most articulate moment.
“Your body,” he said, lifting his head to meet my eyes with an expression that was going to live in my memory until the day I died, “is the most honest thing about you.”
He worked two fingers into me slowly, the slick easing his way, and I stopped being capable of clever responses entirely.
“There.” Low and satisfied and absolutely wolfish. “There it is.”
He worked me open with a patience that felt like deliberate cruelty, thorough and searching and utterly without haste, his mouth returning to supplement his fingers in ways that had me making sounds I did not recognize as belonging to me.
The slick was building, warmth gathering in response to every stroke of his fingers, my body producing more of it with an enthusiasm that suggested it had been waiting for exactly this specific permission to do so.
“You're getting wetter,” he observed, almost conversationally, except that his voice had gone so dark and rough with want that the observation landed like a live current against my skin.
He drew his fingers out slowly, and I heard myself protest the loss of them with a sound that had no dignity whatsoever.
But Ronan did not go far. He shifted up my body with the unhurried certainty of a man who knew exactly what he was doing, until his face hovered above mine in the moonlight, and he brought those same fingers to my lips.
“Open.” Quiet. Absolute.
I opened.
He pressed two fingers into my mouth and I tasted myself on them, tasted the slick my own body had made for him, warm and faintly sweet, and the sound that came from Ronan's chest was the wolf commenting directly on what it was witnessing with its full and unambiguous approval.
His pale eyes tracked every movement of my mouth with an intensity that made my skin feel lit from the inside.
“You have no idea,” he said, barely above a whisper, “what you do to me.”
I curled my tongue around his fingers and watched his composure fracture down the middle.
He pulled his hand from my mouth and wrapped it around his own cock in the same motion, stroking himself with a slow, deliberate grip that made every coherent thought I had been attempting to hold onto evaporate entirely.
He was fully, magnificently hard, thick and flushed and devastating in the silver light.
“I have been trying,” he said, his voice rough with the effort of speaking at all, “to be careful with you.”
“Stop being careful,” I said.
His hand stilled on himself for one suspended moment.
Then he brought his free hand to my jaw, tilted my face up, and leaned down to kiss me with a thoroughness that rearranged something fundamental in my architecture.
His mouth moved against mine while his fist worked his own cock in long, unhurried strokes, and I felt the pre-come already beading at the tip when his wrist brushed my stomach, felt the warmth of him, the weight, the particular gravity of a man building himself toward something he intended to finish.
He broke the kiss and looked down at me with eyes that had gone almost entirely wolf.
“You were made for this,” he said. “For me.”
“Then stop making me wait.”
He pulled back onto his knees above me and brought his fist up to his mouth, holding eye contact while he spat directly onto his cock with a bluntness so purely animal that it bypassed every civilized synapse I owned and landed somewhere prehistoric and immediate.
He worked the spit down his length with slow strokes, spreading it alongside the pre-come already there, and I watched his hand move over himself and felt the slick gather at my entrance in response as though my body understood what was coming and was doing its frantic best to prepare.
“Ronan.” My voice had gone completely to ruin. “Now.”
“Tell me what you need.” He pressed the broad head of himself against my entrance and held there, not pushing, just present, just the blunt insistent weight of him poised at the edge of everything. “Say it out loud. I want to hear you ask for it.”
Every remaining wall I had came down at once.
“I need you inside me,” I said. “I need you to breed me, I need to feel you, please, Ronan, please—”
He pushed forward.
The stretch was enormous and slow and devastating and absolutely, irreversibly right, and the sound that left my throat was not a word in any language but it carried every relevant syllable of what I needed him to understand.
He pressed inward with steady, relentless patience, inch by impossible inch, watching my face the entire time with the focused reverence of a man engaged in something sacred.
“You're taking me so well,” he said, low and wrecked. “Look at you. Look at how well you take me.”
My hands found his forearms and gripped.
He bottomed out with a final, rolling press of his hips that made us both go still.
“Move,” I said. “Please move.”
He withdrew slowly and drove back in and I cried out to the open sky above us, to the stars wheeling in their ancient indifferent patterns, to the moon watching from its cold remove with its silver light painting everything sacred and strange.
His rhythm built from careful to purposeful to urgent and relentless, each thrust carrying the full conviction of the wolf's breeding instinct, deep and claiming and absolutely without apology.
He hooked my leg higher over his hip and the angle shifted and I stopped being able to form words entirely.
“Ronan, there, there, don't stop—”
“I've got you.” A growl threading through the words now, the wolf and the man speaking together in the same register. “I have you. You're mine. Say it.”
“Yours,” I said immediately.
He groaned and buried himself deep and held there, shaking, his forehead dropping to mine while we breathed the same air in the silver dark.
“Nobody touches you after this,” he said. “Nobody comes for you. Not Silas, not anyone. I will burn down every last thing standing between us before I let anyone take you from me.”
“That,” I said, pulling him down into a kiss that tasted like promise and starlight and slick and want, “is the most romantic threat anyone has ever made on my behalf.”
He laughed against my mouth, a genuine, helpless sound that cracked the intensity just enough to make it human, and then he started moving again and the laughter dissolved into something else entirely.
He started moving again and the laughter dissolved into something else entirely, his hips finding a rhythm that built like weather, slow and inevitable and gathering force with every stroke.
The grass was soft beneath me and the moonlight was indifferent and generous and Ronan above me was the most consuming thing I had ever experienced.
Then I decided I wanted more of him.
I pressed both hands flat against his chest and pushed.
He let me move him. He understood what I was doing, rolling onto his back and taking me with him so I ended up seated astride his hips with him still buried inside me.
“Oh,” he said, looking up at me. Just that. A single exhaled syllable of discovery.
I rolled my hips forward and watched his face go slack.