Chapter 23 #2
“Ellie, it’s good. It’s good. You didn’t hurt me. I know you and Rivik feel something. I don’t mind. You are my mate, but if you and Rivik are mates too, that doesn’t hurt me. It just means two of us want to take care of you.”
She opened her eyes and looked at me. We were standing close enough that I could see the individual flecks of colour in her irises, gold and green and brown all tangled together.
You mean? Not hurt you?”
“Ellie, do you want to be here with me?”
She nodded and I smiled.
“Then we’re good. Do you want me to touch you?”
Another blush, but this time her lips parted, and her eyes drifted down to mine.
"Come closer, Daska.”
I moved closer, pausing just before I reached her, but she slipped her arms around my waist and urged me forward until we were standing with our bodies pressed together, her cheek against my chest.
I wrapped my arms around her and held on.
The water moved softly around us, steam rising in slow curls, and I stood there with my mate in my arms and tried to remember how to breathe.
She was warm against me, her skin slick from the spring, her hands spread flat against my back, and I could feel the steady beat of her heart where her chest pressed to mine.
She chose me.
I kept coming back to it. Couldn't stop.
The thought circled through my mind like a hawk riding thermals, returning again and again to the same point.
Not because Karik had forced her hand. Not because Rivik had laid out the calculations and the consequences and the law.
She had stood in that cave with flowers at her back and ochre on her brow and she had said I chose you. I'm here.
I pressed my face into her braids and breathed her in. She made a soft sound against my chest. Not a word. Just a sound, low and contented, like something settling.
I ran my hand slowly up her spine, feeling the ridge of each vertebra beneath my palm.
She shivered. Her hands moved. Slowly. Spreading flat across my back, tracing the lines of muscle there, exploratory and wondering.
I felt every point of contact like fire, even through the warmth of the spring, and I focused very hard on breathing steadily and not doing anything she hadn't asked for.
"Daska," she murmured into my chest.
"Yes."
"Your heart is beating very fast."
"Yes," I agreed.
I felt her smile against my skin. She tipped her head back to look up at me, water droplets on her lashes, and the expression on her face was so open and warm and unguarded that something in my chest cracked clean through.
"Mine too," she said.
"Ellie," I said, my voice coming out rougher than I meant it to . "If you keep... I am trying to be—"
"I know," she whispered.
"I want to—" I stopped, frustrated by the gap between what I felt and what I could say. "I want to go slow. Be careful with you. But I also want—"
"I know what you want," she said quietly. "I want it too."
She looked up at me. Neither of us spoke.
I bent my head and kissed her, and she rose onto her toes to meet me, her fingers spreading warm across my back, and I felt the bond pulse between us like a second heartbeat, low and steady and utterly certain.
Not the desperate, drowning thing I'd feared it might be.
Not a chain or a cage. Just warmth. Just connection. Just her.
I deepened the kiss, and she made a sound against my mouth that undid every careful, patient intention I had left.
My hands moved to her waist, then her back, drawing her closer, and she came willingly, her arms sliding up around my neck, her body pressing against mine.
Feeling braver, I slid my hands back down her back and over the smooth curve of her ass.
I rubbed gentle circles over her flesh, pulling her hard against me.
She gasped into my mouth, her fingers tightening in my hair, and I did it again, pulling her hips tight against mine so she could feel exactly what she was doing to me, the hard length of me pressed against her belly through nothing but warm water and skin.
She didn't flinch. Didn't pull away. Her breath stuttered and her eyes went dark, and she rocked against me, a small, experimental movement that sent a bolt of heat straight through my core and made my vision blur at the edges.
My hands tightened on her hips, fingers pressing into the soft flesh there, and I heard the low, rough sound that came from my own throat without any conscious decision to make it.
The bear stirred inside me, not aggressive, not threatened, just awake—deeply, intensely awake and focused with every fibre of its being on the woman in my arms.
I kissed her harder. Her mouth opened under mine, warm and willing, and I tasted the sweetness of the berry cakes she'd eaten that morning and something underneath that was just her, just Ellie, and I wanted to drown in it.
My tongue found hers and she made that sound again, the broken, gasping one that I'd first heard in my cave when I'd touched her, the one that had been playing on repeat inside my skull every night since, keeping me awake and aching.
She broke the kiss and looked up at me, her eyes dark, her breathing uneven. I watched her gaze drop to the water between us, then back up, and the flush that spread across her cheeks had nothing to do with the heat of the spring. I wanted more, I needed more.
I lifted her then, hands at her waist, and she made a startled sound and grabbed my shoulders as I carried her to the flat rock at the edge of the spring, the one that jutted out low over the water, warm from the heat rising off the surface.
I set her down on the deerskin I'd spread there earlier, then slid my hands up under her thighs to gently push her legs apart.
“Daska!” she gasped. “What are you…oh!”
I kissed the inside of her thigh, and felt her whole body jolt. Her skin was warm and damp from the spring, impossibly soft against my lips, and I pressed another kiss higher, then another, working my way up with the same deliberate patience I brought to everything that mattered. She was trembling.
"Daska, you don't have to—"
"Want to," I said against her skin, my voice rough even to my own ears. "Want to taste you. Please."
She stared at me. Her lips parted. I watched her throat work as she swallowed.
"Yes," she whispered.
The word barely left her mouth before I lowered my head.
The first touch of my tongue against her drew a sound from her that had my cock jerking under the water.
She was slick and hot, the taste of her sharp and sweet and utterly intoxicating, and I groaned against her, the vibration making her hips buck.
I pressed one hand flat against her hip to hold her steady and settled in, drawing my tongue in a slow, broad stroke from her entrance to the swollen bud at the top.
Her back arched off the deerskin. Her hand flew to my hair, fingers threading through the strands and gripping hard enough to sting, and I didn't care.
I did it again, slower this time, learning the landscape of her with my mouth the way I'd learned it with my fingers that first time in the cave.
Every fold, every curve, every place that made her breath hitch or her thighs clench or her fingers tighten in my hair.
"Please," she whispered. "Daska, please…"
The sound of my name in that voice, wrecked and wanting, made something primal and possessive roar through me. I sealed my mouth over her and sucked gently, my tongue working in slow, firm circles against the sensitive peak of her, and her hips came off the rock.
"Oh God, there—"
I stayed there. Circling with the tip of my tongue, light and steady, not chasing it, not rushing.
I slid my other hand beneath her, cradling the curve of her backside, holding her where I wanted her, tilting her up toward my mouth so I could reach deeper, taste more.
I had dreamed about this. Lying awake in my cave while she slept on the other side of the hearth, I had imagined exactly this—her thighs around my head, her fingers in my hair, the taste of her on my tongue.
The reality was better. Infinitely, devastatingly better, because in my dreams she hadn't made these sounds.
The real ones. The soft, hitching gasps that came with every stroke, the way her breath caught and held when I found the right spot, the broken moan that spilled out of her when I sealed my mouth over her.
I could feel her getting close. Not just in the way her body tightened, the fine tremor building in her thighs, the quickening rhythm of her breath—I could feel it through the bond.
A building wave of heat and pressure that echoed through my own body like sympathetic resonance, like two drums struck at the same frequency, and the sensation was so overwhelming I had to press my forehead briefly against her thigh and breathe.
"Don't stop," she gasped, her fingers pulling at my hair. "Please don't stop—"
I would sooner have stopped breathing.
"Daska—" My name came out shattered, barely a word, more breath than sound. "I'm going to—I can't—"
She came with a cry that echoed off the rocks around us, her back arching, her thighs clamping tight around my head, her fingers twisted so hard in my hair that I felt strands pull free at the root.
I didn't care. I held her through it, my mouth gentle now, easing her down with slow, soft strokes while her body shuddered and pulsed against me.
The bond was a living thing between us, a current of shared sensation that made my own body throb with sympathetic pleasure so intense that it took all I had not to straighten up and thrust deep inside her.
I pressed one last, reverent kiss against the inside of her thigh. Then I rested my forehead there, my own breathing unsteady, my body wound so tight with want that every nerve felt like a live coal. She was still trembling. I lifted my head and looked up at her.
She was propped on her elbows, watching me with wide, dark eyes, her chest rising and falling rapidly, the beads in her braids catching the light. The ochre marks on her brow and the dried lines of my blood on her cheekbone. My mate. Claimed and trembling under my hands.
"Safe?" I asked.
"Safe."