Chapter 12
Absolutely Soaking
IVY
He says it quietly, to himself as much as to me, and I feel it everywhere.
The rope is warm against my skin, and softer than I expected. The harness sits across my shoulders and chest with a weight that is its own kind of comfort. I am held. I have chosen to be held. There is an enormous difference between those two things.
Alistair crouches in front of me.
Both hands on my face—thumbs against my cheekbones, chin tilted up—and he looks at me for a long moment in the candlelight.
He kisses me, slow and deep and warm, and I lean into it as much as the ropes allow, which is not very much, and the warmth of it moves from my lips downward in a slow deliberate wave.
His hands travel from my face to my throat, my collarbones, the rope, finding the skin between the bindings with a lightness that raises every hair on my body. Goosebumps chase his fingertips across my shoulders, down my arms, up the back of my neck.
“Open,” he says.
I open my eyes. I hadn't realized I'd closed them.
He wants to see my face. He always wants to see my face. I give it to him—holding his gaze while his hands move—and I understand, not for the first time, that being truly seen by this man is its own particular kind of surrender.
He finds my collarbone with his tongue, the curve of my shoulder, the upper swell of my breast. His mouth closes around my nipple and pulls.
“Oh fuck,” I breathe. The rope shifts with my involuntary movement and the friction of it against my skin sends a jolt straight between my legs. “Oh—Alistair —”
“Mm,” he says, against my skin. Deeply, infuriatingly pleased with himself.
Alistair’s hand slides between my thighs, and I moan. He finds me warm and slippery and swollen, and the sound he makes—low and satisfied, like a man arriving somewhere he has been thinking about for some time—does something catastrophic to my remaining composure.
“God, Ivy,” he says. “You're absolutely soaking.”
“Yes,” I manage.
He runs two fingers slowly through me—not inside, just through, back and forth, learning how embarrassingly wet I am, and his mouth is still on my breast and the rope is warm across my shoulders and I cannot move my arms and I cannot close my thighs.
I can’t do anything except kneel here and take whatever he decides to give me.
He presses two fingers inside me.
I grunt with pleasure and want.
He curls them up immediately, finding the spot and working it in slow firm circles while his thumb rests against my clit without moving—just the pressure of it, the promise of it—and I am grinding against his hand before I decide to, my hips moving on their own because they have run out of patience faster than the rest of me.
“Please,” I say. “Please—I need —”
“I know what you need,” he says.
He presses harder with his thumb. One slow circle. Then stops.
“Please,” I say again, and I do not care at all how I sound.
He brings me to the edge—right there, his fingers pressing up and his thumb pressing down and my whole body drawn tight as a wire, the orgasm enormous and right there—and holds me there.
And withdraws his hand.
“Alistair,” I beg.
“Patience,” he says.
I watch him undress in the candlelight—the specific, unhurried way he takes his clothes off when he knows I am watching, which is its own form of torture—and feel the want move through me in another long slow wave. Alistair Ravenscroft is the most beautiful man I have ever seen in my life.
He comes back to me—kneeling now, level with me, his cock hard and warm against my stomach—and kisses me again. Deeper. Some of that careful control beginning to show its edges.
“Please,” I say into his mouth.
He lifts me—the rope shifting with the movement, new pressure across my chest that makes me gasp—and lowers me onto him slowly.
Inch by deliberate inch.
My spine curves. Eyes screwed up, my head falls back.
“Oh god,” I breathe. “Oh—oh fuck—”
“Look at me,” he says.
I look at him. His eyes are very dark and very steady and entirely fixed on mine.
Alistair begins to move.
Slow, deep, rolling strokes—the rope shifting with each one, new pressure with every movement, my body held perfectly still while everything inside it dissolves—and I feel every inch of him on every stroke I can’t move. I can’t do anything but feel it, all of it, building and building.
“Don't stop,” I breathe. “Please—don't —”
His cock throbs deep inside me and his thumb finds my clit and presses and I stop being able to form words. His breath is ragged against my temple, his grip on my hips tightening as he pulses inside me, tipping me over the edge.
My orgasm hits me like something breaking—full body, total, moving through me in long full-body pulses. I am shaking with it, and the rope presses warm against my skin throughout all of it, holding me.
We shudder into each other. Then for a long moment we stay exactly as we are, kneeling together in the candlelight.
Carefully and methodically, Alistair begins to undo the knots.
He takes his time, each section released with the same deliberate attention, his hands checking my skin as he goes. When the last of the rope falls away I feel simultaneously lighter and more held than before.
He wraps me in the dark silk throw from the end of the bed and pulls me against him and we lie in the candlelight and neither of us speaks for a long time.
“It's good to be home,” he says eventually, his breath warm on my scalp. I feel so safe in his arms that I am asleep within seconds.