Chapter 15 #2
“What are you doing?” Fergal murmured.
“Taking care of you.”
“I don’t need—”
“You do.” Gregor’s thumb traced a slow circle against Fergal’s hip. “You need to stop thinking. You need to be here, in this bed, with me, and nowhere else. And you’re not going to get there on your own tonight.”
Fergal was quiet for a moment. Then, very softly, “No. I’m not.”
Gregor leaned in and kissed his temple. Then his cheekbone. Then the corner of his jaw, where the close-cropped beard gave way to the softer skin of his neck, and Fergal’s breath stuttered out of him in a shaky exhale.
“Let me,” Gregor whispered against his skin.
Fergal’s hand found the back of Gregor’s neck, fingers curling into the short hair there. “Yes.”
The word was barely a breath, but it unlocked something inside Gregor—a tenderness so fierce it bordered on pain. He kissed Fergal’s mouth, slow and deep, tasting chamomile and warmth and the bone-deep exhaustion that Fergal wore like a second skin.
Fergal kissed him back, but the distraction was still there. Gregor could feel it in the slight tension of his jaw, the way his body was responding even as his mind lagged behind, still tangled in seating arrangements and threat assessments and the thousand burdens of a king.
Gregor would have to go deeper. He’d have to pull Fergal so far into the physical that there was no room left for anything else.
He slid his hand from Fergal’s hip to the hem of the shirt and pushed it upward, his palm skating across warm skin.
Fergal’s stomach was lean, the muscles taut from the tension he carried every waking hour, and when Gregor’s fingers traced up the center line of his abdomen, those muscles twitched and fluttered beneath his touch.
“Gregor—”
“Shh.” He pressed a kiss to the hollow of Fergal’s throat, feeling his pulse jumping hard against his lips. “Just feel.”
He took his time. The urgency of their first encounter—the desperate, clothed frotting that had been more collision than choice—was absent tonight. In its place was something slower, more deliberate, something achingly tender and sweet.
Gregor pushed the shirt higher and followed it with his mouth, kissing his way up Fergal’s chest. He found a nipple and traced it with his tongue, and the sound Fergal made—a sharp, startled inhale followed by a low moan—told Gregor he’d found a weak point in Fergal’s defenses.
He exploited it without mercy. His tongue circled, flattened, flicked, and his teeth grazed just enough to send Fergal’s hips jerking forward. Fergal’s hand tightened in his hair, and the small, desperate noises falling from his mouth were losing their coherence, words dissolving into sounds.
Good. That was good. Gregor needed him wordless. Needed him past the point where his extraordinary mind could form sentences, past the point where strategy and fear and grief held him in their grip.
He kissed lower. Fergal’s ribs, each one a ridge beneath his lips. The dip of his waist. The sharp angle of his hip, where the soft pants hung low. He pressed his mouth to the sensitive skin just above the waistband and felt Fergal’s entire body shudder.
“Oh god,” Fergal breathed. “Are you—”
“Yes.” Gregor hooked his fingers into the waistband and drew the pants down slowly, pressing kisses to every inch of skin he revealed. Fergal lifted his hips without being asked, and the trust in that unconscious gesture tightened something in Gregor’s chest until breathing became difficult.
He pulled the pants free and settled between Fergal’s legs, his hands resting on Fergal’s thighs, feeling the muscles tremble beneath his palms. In the faint glow of the ward lights, he could see Fergal’s cock, hard and flushed, curving toward his stomach.
He could see the rapid rise and fall of Fergal’s chest. He could see Fergal’s face, half-shadowed, eyes dark and wide and fixed on Gregor with an expression that was equal parts desire and vulnerability.
“You’re so damn beautiful,” Gregor said, and the words came out rough and honest and entirely without his permission. He didn’t take them back.
Fergal’s laugh was breathless. “You don’t say things like that.”
“I’m saying it now, so you may want to pay attention.”
He lowered his head and pressed his lips to the inside of Fergal’s thigh, and the high, broken whimper that Fergal had clearly never intended to produce sent a bolt of heat straight to Gregor’s own cock, which was straining against his pants with an urgency he was ignoring.
This wasn’t about him. Tonight was for Fergal.
He kissed up Fergal’s inner thigh, slow and open-mouthed, feeling the muscles quiver under his lips, tasting salt and clean skin and something underneath that was purely Fergal.
He could feel the heat of Fergal’s cock against his cheek, could hear Fergal’s breathing fracturing into sharp, staccato gasps above him.
“Gregor.” His name, spoken with a rawness that had nothing to do with technique and everything to do with what was happening beneath the physical. “Please.”
The “please” undid him the way it always did. Gregor turned his head and ran his tongue in one slow, flat stroke up the underside of Fergal’s cock, from base to tip.
Fergal’s hips bucked off the mattress, and the sound that tore from his throat was strangled and desperate and so perfectly wrecked that Gregor committed it to permanent memory alongside every other sound this man had ever made that was his alone.
He took the head into his mouth, letting his lips stretch around the girth, his tongue tracing the ridge where shaft met crown.
The taste of him flooded Gregor’s senses—salt, musk, the faintly smoky undertone that was unique to dragon shifters, all of it concentrated into something heady and intoxicating.
He held still for a moment, letting Fergal feel the wet heat of his mouth, letting the sensation sink in past every layer of thought and worry and royal obligation.
Then he began to move.
Slowly. A gradual descent, taking more of Fergal into his mouth inch by inch, his tongue working the underside, his hand wrapping around the base to cover what his mouth couldn’t reach.
Fergal was thick—thicker than Gregor had expected, which was a thought he’d examine later because he’d clearly not devoted enough attention to Fergal’s anatomy—and the stretch of his lips, the weight on his tongue, the fullness pressing toward the back of his throat was grounding in a way that surprised him.
He found a rhythm. Slow pulls upward, his cheeks hollowing, suction tight, his tongue swirling the head before sliding back down.
Each stroke drew another sound from Fergal—moans that were growing louder and less controlled, interspersed with fragments of Gregor’s name that sounded like they were being pulled from his chest rather than formed by his mouth.
Fergal’s hand was in Gregor’s hair, fingers buried in the strands.