Chapter 8 #5
He made that inhuman sound again, right against her, and the vibration rolled up through her core and pulled a sob out of her.
His tongue pressed inside her, tasting her deep, and her thighs closed around his head, and he did not stop, did not slow.
He learned her — every jerk of her hips, every catch in her breath, every helpless sound — with a merciless, ancient attention, cataloging her the way she catalogued the things she loved.
When he slid one thick finger inside her she was already climbing, and he curled it, and added a second, stretching her, working her open while his mouth returned to her clit.
“Demetri —” She was shaking, right on the edge, her whole body strung tight.
He looked up — ruby eyes burning at her from between her thighs, his mouth wet and glistening with her — and the sight of him there, the ancient dangerous creature on his knees devoting all of that focus to her pleasure, shattered her.
Her orgasm hit with brutal force. She cried his name and came apart around his fingers, her body clenching, her heels digging into the mattress, her spine arching off the bed. Demetri kept his mouth on her, gentling her, drawing it out, until the final pulse left her trembling and boneless.
Then he rose over her, and his control was gone. Not entirely. Enough. Red scales flashed across his shoulders and vanished, his teeth were sharper when he bared them, and a shudder of pure effort rolled through him. He turned his face away from her, jaw clenched.
Nica caught his arm. “Where are you going?”
“To regain control.” The words came out through his teeth, half a growl. “If I do not, I will frighten you.”
“No.” His whole body went rigid. She pulled him back down, and his cock pressed hot and hard and insistent against her stomach, and the size of it, the heat of it, made her ache all over again. “Condom,” she whispered.
Demetri reached into the bedside drawer without looking, and the fact that he had them there irritated her for reasons she refused to examine.
He tore the packet open, and his hands shook — the same helpless tremor she’d seen when he caught her off the ladder, a man two and a half centuries old undone by the woman beneath him.
Nica took the condom out of his unsteady fingers and rolled it down his length herself, and a rough, wrecked sound tore out of him at the touch.
She stroked once, root to tip, and his hips jerked.
“Careful,” he warned, ragged.
“You told me to stop deciding for you.”
“That does not mean I want this to end before I am inside you.” Heat swept through her at the raw need in it.
She lay back. Demetri settled between her thighs, the blunt broad head of his cock pressing against her entrance, and stopped there.
Every muscle in his body locked. A fine tremor ran through him.
His arms braced on either side of her head, caging her, and his red eyes bored into hers.
“Nica.” Her name came out of him wrecked.
“Yes.”
“Choose.”
She understood — not the full weight of the word, not yet, but enough. She reached up and touched his face, the hard clenched jaw, the mouth she’d wanted since the storage bay. “I choose this.”
Demetri pushed inside her. Slowly.
The stretch burned, thick and deep and relentless, and Nica’s breath caught and her nails bit into his shoulders as her body opened around him inch by inch.
He watched every flicker of her expression, holding himself in brutal check, feeding himself into her only as fast as she could take him.
Halfway, he stopped, jaw tight, a bead of sweat sliding down his temple.
“More,” she whispered.
His eyes closed. He sank the rest of the way home, and filled her completely, seated to the root, and for one suspended heartbeat neither of them moved. She had never felt so full. So taken. So impossibly matched.
His forehead lowered to hers. His skin burned against her, and something hotter than skin moved beneath it — fire, living heat, gathering low in him and rushing toward the place where their bodies joined, seeking her, reaching —
Demetri went rigid. “No.” The word came out like a command aimed at himself, and the heat vanished, wrenched back down. He would not give her that. Not yet. Not until she knew what she was choosing.
He drew back almost all the way and drove into her again, and Nica gasped, the bed shifting beneath them.
He found a rhythm — deep, steady, controlled thrusts that dragged along every nerve she had — and his mouth moved over her throat, her breasts, the scar above her eyebrow, and everywhere he kissed her, he told her what he saw.
“Beautiful.” A thrust. “Perfect.” A thrust, angled deeper, and she cried out.
“Mine.” The word escaped him, low and guttural, and Demetri froze, and Nica’s heart kicked hard against her ribs.
His face changed — regret, hunger, fear, all at once — and he started to pull back, to take the word back the way he took everything back. She wrapped her legs around his waist and locked him inside her.
“Don’t.”
“Nica —”
“Not now.” She kissed him, hard, and whatever control remained in him broke like a snapped chain.
His hand slid beneath her hip and lifted her into every thrust, faster now, harder, the headboard cracking against the wall, the room filling with the sound of skin on skin and their ragged mingled breath.
Nica clawed his back, and beneath her fingers ruby scales rose through his skin — she felt them, smooth and hot and real under her nails — and Demetri buried his face against her neck, and she felt the scrape of his teeth against the join of her throat and shoulder.
Sharp. Wanting. Pressing.
Not biting. Holding back.
The restraint in it — the sheer straining effort of a creature denying itself the thing it wanted most, for her — made her clench hard around him, and he groaned into her skin, a broken, tortured sound.
“Again,” he ordered, wrecked. “Do that again.”
She tightened around him deliberately, squeezing, and his thrust broke rhythm, stuttered, and she smiled against his cheek, drunk on the power of it.
“That was not kind,” he gritted.
“You’ll survive.”
His head lifted. His red gaze bored into hers, and beneath the heat there was something else, something raw.
“Will I?” The question carried far too much — two hundred years of surviving, of enduring, of outliving — and she couldn’t answer it with words, so she answered it with her body, rolling her hips to meet him.
Demetri reached between them and found her clit with his thumb — two strokes, three, tight fast circles — and the pleasure rose too fast, too high, her nails digging into his scaled shoulders.
“Demetri —”
“I have you.” The words undid her. “Let go. I have you.”
She came around him, hard enough to lose sound, her mouth open on a silent scream, her whole body clamping down on his cock in wave after wave — and Demetri followed her with a roar muffled against her throat, his body locking, his cock jerking deep inside her.
Heat surged through him — a blast of fire without flame, cresting, reaching the boundary between their bodies — and stopped.
He shook with the effort of holding it back, every muscle rigid, the fire straining to pour into her and finding the door shut. Then it receded, banked, denied.
He collapsed beside her and dragged her against his chest.
For several minutes neither of them spoke. His heartbeat slowed under her ear, still too fast. The scales faded from his skin, and Nica traced the place they’d been with one fingertip — smooth skin now, no explanation, too many questions. Not tonight. His hand moved slow along her spine.
“You are unharmed?” he asked, low.
She laughed into his chest, wrung out. “Is that how you ask if it was good?”
“It was not what I asked.”
“I’m fine.” His hand tightened, gathering her closer, possessive even now.
She lifted her head, and the intensity in his face made her wish she hadn’t.
This had not been casual to him. He’d warned her it wouldn’t be.
It was there in the raw open way he looked at her, stripped of every wall — and Nica felt her own walls rising in answer, fast and automatic, the old reflex, the drawbridge going up.
Demetri saw it. Of course he did. He touched her cheek.
“You are the only woman I will ever want,” he said.
Her chest closed. The room became too warm. And she moved away from him before she’d decided to, out of the circle of his arms, sitting up with the sheet clutched to her chest.
“That’s not something you can know,” she said.
“I know.”
“We met three days ago.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t get to say things like that after three days.”
“Why?”
Because people left. Because they died. Because every promise she’d ever believed had turned into a weapon in her chest the moment she let herself trust it.
Nica looked toward the windows, where fog pressed against the glass.
“I need a shower.” Demetri did not try to stop her, and that hurt more than it should have — more than if he’d fought her.
She crossed the room with the sheet wrapped around her and closed the bathroom door behind her, and only then, alone, did she let herself breathe.
On the other side of the door, something heavy struck the wall. Once. Then silence.