26. CHAPTER 26 #2
With every stroke, the head of his cock slid forward between her slick folds, grazing her clitoris.
He could hear it in the way her breathing changed — shorter, sharper, the catching quality that meant she was climbing again.
He angled his hips to press more firmly against that swollen knot of nerves, and she gasped.
"Val — "
Again. The thrust, the friction, the maddening almost. She was panting. Her fingers twisted against the silk at her back.
He shifted his angle. A fraction .
And slipped inside her.
One smooth stroke and he buried his cock in her to the hilt. Her body, wet from her climax, slick with oil, parted around him and drew him in, and the heat of her closed around his cock.
He stilled.
Every muscle locked. His hands on her hips, fingers pressing white marks into her skin. The world had narrowed to the place where his body joined hers. The tight, wet, consuming heat of her was so acute he could not breathe.
Seven years of empty beds and his own hand while he thought of her, and now she was here, bound and willing and slick with oil, and the restraint required to do anything other than drive into her was almost unbearable.
Beneath him, she gasped. Her back arched. He pressed into her a fraction deeper, and her breath left her in a rush.
"Are you all right?" His voice did not sound like his voice.
"Yes." Breathless. "Stay. Please stay. It feels — "
She did not finish. She didn't need to. He could feel what it felt like. He could feel her body remembering him, softening around him. Her hips tilting and adjusting so instinctively it could not have been conscious.
He knew he should leave. Now. He was too close.
His discipline lay in ruins around him, and the old fears were pounding at the edges of his mind.
His mother. The three losses they had already suffered.
If he stayed and finished... if the consequence of this one moment of weakness was a child she could not carry. ..
But God, the pull of her. The clasp of her body around his, the slick heat, the way she held him. His cock was inside his wife for the first time in seven years, and... he could not leave.
He moved. Slowly. A withdrawal that was agony, a return that was bliss. One stroke. He felt the full length of it — the drag, the clench, the shuddering intake of her breath.
Another. And then he settled into a steady rhythm. The one he remembered she liked best. Deep. Slow. Relentless .
She was tightening around him. He could feel the gathering, the trembling in her thighs, the way her body coiled toward the climax with a swiftness that told him this fullness — the completeness of being inside her — was what she had needed all along.
She came.
Crying his name into the pillow. And the sensation of the pulsing grip of her climax tightening around him tore through every wall he had left.
He wrenched himself out of her.
The violence of the separation drove a ragged, wrecked sound from his throat.
He staggered back on his knees, one hand on the mattress, the other gripping himself as his savage climax hit.
He spilled across her buttocks and the curve of her lower back with a groan that came from somewhere beneath reason, from the place where his love for her and his terror of losing her shared the same dark room.
He pressed his forehead to her spine. Her skin was damp with oil and exertion, and she smelled of almonds and salt. He stayed there until the shaking stopped.
Then he untied her.
Her legs first. His unusually clumsy fingers fumbled the knots, and when the silk fell away, she flexed her feet with a small, sated sound.
Then the harness: unwinding the silk from her chest and arms, rubbing the pink marks it had pressed into her skin.
He kissed each one. Her wrists. The creases of her elbows.
The line across her ribs where the rope had held her.
He used the sheet to clean his spend from her skin. Fetched a warm cloth from the basin and wiped the oil from her back and legs. Then covered her with the blanket and curled himself around her.
S he lay in the warm haze and felt him tend to her as though she were something precious and breakable. His hands that had gripped and commanded and driven her to the edge were gentle now, careful, wiping oil from the small of her back, pressing a kiss to the mark the silk had left on her forearm.
"Come here," she whispered.
He lay down behind her. Drew her against him. His arm settled across her waist, and her body fit against his with an exactness that made her chest ache, as though they had been designed for this single configuration.
She took his hand and pressed it to her breastbone. His heartbeat against her back. Hers under his palm. Both still fast. Slowing together.
She had felt him inside her. The fullness of him, the way her body had embraced him without thought. She had felt him move, and the tenderness in those few strokes, the care he took even while losing control, had cracked something open in her that she could not close again.
And then he had torn himself away.
She had felt that too. The sudden absence. The wet heat of his release on her skin instead of inside her.
She turned in his arms. He let her, though she felt him brace.
She put her hand on his chest. His heart was still hammering.
"Val."
"Hmm."
"Why did you not give me your seed?"
His heart kicked under her palm. She counted the heartbeats. One. Two. Three.
"I don't want to burden you with a pregnancy while you are still recovering."
The words were reasonable. Considerate, even. And yet, they made her uneasy. She turned them over in her mind. They fit on the surface. A recovered amnesiac, finding her feet in a life she could not remember. Of course a pregnancy would be premature.
But the raw, wrecked sound he had made when he pulled out of her was not the sound of a man being careful. It was the sound of a man being torn apart.
She remembered what Venus had said about his mother and did not press. Not tonight. Tonight was about reaching him. He had given her his body and his tenderness and the ferocity of his need, and she would not repay it by pulling at threads he was not ready to unravel.
"That is very considerate," she said.
He exhaled. She felt the tension drop from his shoulders — not all of it, but enough. He pressed his lips to her forehead and held them there, and the gratitude in the gesture told her more than his answer had.
"Sleep," he murmured. "I will be here."
She closed her eyes. His arm drew her closer. The stone room was cool, but his body was warm, and his heart was steady under her hand. He had chased her through dark corridors, caught her, bound her, and touched her with a ferocity that left marks that went beyond skin deep.
Then he had left her body before making his claim complete.