Chapter 18 #2
He kissed me again, cutting off whatever inadequate thing I'd been about to say, then pulled back to watch as he lifted his hand, giving me time to track the movement, to stop him if I wanted.
His fingertips brushed the hollow of my throat, then traced downward, following the line of my sternum with a touch so light it was barely there.
My skin prickled in the wake of it, goosebumps rising despite the warmth of the fire.
Slowly, so slowly, his fingers tracing the swell of my breast with a reverence that made my breath stutter.
His thumb brushed the underside, following the curve, and I heard myself make a sound—soft, involuntary, something between a gasp and a sigh.
He cupped me gently, his large hand warm and steady, and I watched his face as he did it.
The way his lips parted slightly. The way his pupils had blown wide, the dark centres swallowing the brown until his eyes were almost black in the firelight.
He looked at me like I was something sacred, something he'd been given permission to touch but still couldn't quite believe was real.
His thumb found my nipple and brushed across it, feather-light, and my back arched before I could stop it.
A shiver ran through me that had nothing to do with the cool air.
He did it again, watching my reaction with that focused intensity, learning me the way he learned everything—with patience and attention and quiet, devastating thoroughness.
"Good?" he murmured.
I couldn't speak. I nodded, my fingers still twisted in the front of his tunic, holding on.
“Down,” he murmured, gently guiding me back until I was lying across the furs. He lowered his head, his long hair falling forward and tickling my skin. The first press of his lips against the upper curve of my breast was so gentle it was almost chaste.
The second was not. His mouth opened against my skin, hot and wet, and he kissed his way down the slope of my breast with the same unhurried thoroughness he'd given my neck, lips dragging across every inch of skin as though he intended to memorise the taste of me.
His beard rasped softly against the sensitive underside, and I sucked in a breath as his mouth found the peak of my breast and he paused there, his breath warm against the sensitive skin.
I felt the question in the hesitation, the silent check-in, and I answered it by threading my fingers into his hair and pulling him closer.
He took me into his mouth.
The sound I made was embarrassing. A broken, gasping thing that echoed off the cave walls and would have mortified me if I'd had any capacity left for embarrassment, but I didn't, because his mouth was warm and wet and impossibly gentle, his tongue moving in slow circles that sent lightning forking down through my belly and into my thighs.
My head fell back, my eyes closing, and my hand tightened in his hair without conscious thought.
He made a low sound against my skin—approval, satisfaction, something primal that vibrated through the sensitive flesh and made me whimper.
His free hand came up to cradle my other breast, thumb stroking in lazy counterpoint to what his mouth was doing, and the dual sensation was so much, so overwhelmingly much after two years of nothing.
He released me, looking up at me. “Ellie… safe?”
He was checking I felt safe with him. The concern in his voice almost brought me to tears and I nodded quickly. He looked back down, trailing his fingers down to the drawstring at the top of my deerskin leggings. I gasped as he slipped them underneath, and he looked back up.
“Safe?”
“Safe,” I whispered. He smiled, then slid his hand down further.
The first brush of his touch against the slick heat between my thighs made my whole body jolt.
He explored me slowly. Maddeningly slowly.
His fingers traced the shape of me, as he found the places that made me gasp and lingered there, circling, pressing, retreating, then returning with a slightly different angle, a slightly different pressure, noticing every response.
He watched my face. That was the thing that undid me most—the way he kept his eyes on mine, reading every flicker of expression, adjusting his touch based on what he found there.
When his fingertips slid upward and found the spot that made me cry out, he didn't rush.
He circled it slowly, barely there, learning the pressure that made my breath hitch and the angle that made my thighs tremble.
"Here?" he murmured.
"Yes," I breathed. "There. Right there."
His fingers circled again, slow and deliberate, and my hips lifted off the furs of their own accord, chasing the contact. He pressed me gently back down with his free hand spread warm across my hip, holding me steady while he worked me.
I was falling apart. Slowly, beautifully, like ice breaking up in spring—the first cracks spreading outward from somewhere deep inside me, somewhere I'd thought was frozen solid.
His fingers moved in tight, unhurried circles, and I felt the tension building low in my belly, coiling tighter with every pass of his fingertips.
Something shifted in his expression. The careful restraint cracked, just a fraction, and I caught a glimpse of what was underneath—hunger, raw and barely leashed, held in check by nothing but his own iron will.
His jaw tightened. His breathing had changed, I realised.
Deeper. Rougher. He wasn't unaffected. He was just choosing, with every ounce of discipline he had, to put me first.
"Daska—" His name came out ragged, barely recognisable.
"I have you," he murmured, and the simple certainty of it, the quiet promise in those three words, made something inside me break wide open.
His fingers slid lower, pressing into me, and I arched off the furs with a gasp.
One finger first, thick and careful, easing into me, then a second.
Daska's breath caught. I felt it—the stutter of his chest against my hip where he'd leaned in close, the way his hand stilled for just a heartbeat before he moved again, curling his fingers and making me moan his name. "Look at me," he said softly.
I opened eyes I didn't remember closing.
His face was above mine, close enough that I could see the individual flecks of amber in his dark irises, the way the firelight caught the copper threads in his beard.
His expression was fierce and tender in equal measure, and the raw want in his eyes made my belly clench around his fingers.
"See you," he murmured. "All of you. Beautiful."
My breath hitched. The coil inside me wound tighter, tighter, his fingers moving with that devastating steadiness, never speeding up, never chasing it, just maintaining exactly the right pressure in exactly the right place.
My thighs were trembling. I could feel it, the fine tremor running through the muscles, completely beyond my control, and I didn't care.
I didn't care about anything except the slow, relentless movement of his hand and the way he was looking at me like I was the centre of the entire world.
"Daska," I whispered, and it came out broken, pleading, a sound I barely recognised as my own voice. "I can't—I'm going to—"
"Yes," he said. Just that. Just yes, like it was the simplest thing, like there was nothing more natural than this, than me falling apart under his hands in the firelit warmth of his cave.
His thumb found that spot again, pressing in a slow, firm circle, and his fingers curled inside me, and the coil that had been winding tighter and tighter finally snapped.
It hit me like a wave. Not the sharp, quick kind that crested and broke, but the deep, rolling kind that started somewhere at the base of my spine and moved through me in slow, devastating pulses.
My back arched off the furs. My hand flew to his wrist, not to stop him but to anchor myself, fingers closing hard around the thick bones as the pleasure rolled through me in wave after wave.
I heard myself cry out—his name, I think, though it might have been nothing, might have been just sound, raw and unformed.
Just the sound a body makes when it remembers what it's for.
Daska held me through it. His fingers slowed but didn't stop, drawing out every last tremor, every aftershock, his other hand warm and grounding against my hip.
He murmured something I couldn't parse—soft words in his language, low and rhythmic, almost like a song—and I realised distantly that my face was wet.
I was crying. Not the ugly, gasping kind.
The quiet kind, the kind that leaked out of me without permission, tears sliding sideways into my hair and across my temples while my body still hummed with the aftershocks.
I wasn't sad. I wasn't afraid. It was just—too much.
Too much feeling after too long without any, like a door thrown open in a house that had been sealed shut for years, and everything rushing in at once.
Daska didn't flinch. Didn't pull away or ask what was wrong or look at me with that particular brand of male panic that meant oh God, she's crying, what did I do.
He just eased his hand free, gentle and slow, and gathered me against him.
His arms came around me, one beneath my shoulders, the other curved around my waist, and he pulled me into his chest and held me there.
I pressed my face against the warm skin of his throat and let myself cry.
Quietly. The kind of tears that washed things clean rather than the kind that tore you apart.
His hand moved in slow passes up and down my spine, and his chin rested against the top of my head, and he didn't say a word. Just held me and breathed, his heartbeat steady and sure against my cheek, and let me feel everything I needed to feel without making me explain any of it. Somehow that was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me, and I found myself thinking that I was in serious danger of falling in love with this man. This incredible man that I couldn’t keep.
I honestly didn’t know how I was going to be able to walk away.