37. Callum #2
Then it lets one band slide free, and her freed hand tears my shirt the rest of the way open and flattens against my bare chest, over the place my heart is slamming too hard for a man who's supposed to have no pulse worth counting.
She feels it. She feels exactly what she does to me, and her eyes go bright with it.
I kiss down the line of her throat, the dip of her collarbone, the soft skin under her breast, lower—her stomach jumping under my mouth, her breath coming apart above me—and her hand fists in my hair and pushes me down.
"Yes," she says. "Callum. Your mouth. Now."
Bolingbrokes do not kneel. We are the thing other people kneel to.
I go to my knees in the dust of a house that won't tell anyone, and I hook her leg over my shoulder, and before I do anything else I look up the length of her once, because I want her to know it's me down here. Not the heir. Not the Frost King. Me.
"Nothing's making you do this," she says, breathless, half a laugh shaking out of her. "No bond pulling you down there, no bargain. You just want to. On your knees. For me."
"Yes."
"Then do it. Don't make me wait anymore."
I put my mouth on her.
She's already wet, already swollen, and the first stroke of my tongue against her clit pulls a sound out of her that I feel in my own cock, hard and ignored and throbbing against the seam of my trousers.
I don't ignore her. I find the rhythm that tightens her thighs and I hold it—exactly it, no variation—because precision is the one thing twelve generations gave me worth keeping, and I will spend every scrap of it here, on her, on the floor.
Her hips chase my mouth and I let them. I bring my hand up and slide one finger into her, then two, curling them the way the change in her breath tells me to.
She's tight and hot around my fingers and the taste of her is everywhere, and I am achingly, stupidly hard, and I don't care.
This isn't for me. It's the first thing in my life that's been entirely for someone else, and I want it that way.
The shadow works with me without asking. It bands her free wrist again and pins it to the glass, climbs her thighs and holds them wide where my hands are busy, cold against the heat I'm making, until she's open and held and shuddering top to bottom.
She grabs a fistful of the dark itself with her caught hand—and it holds for her, solid as rope, because it's hers now too, more hers than mine—and she pulls on it the way you pull on something that won't give, and grips my hair with the other hand hard enough to sting.
"Don't stop," she gets out. "Right there—God, Callum—don't you dare stop."
I don't. I don't stop when her spine bows off the glass. The shadow lets her wrist go and both her hands fly into my hair, and I don't stop when she rides my mouth shameless, saying my name like it's the only word she has left in her.
She comes against my tongue with my fingers still buried in her, and I feel every muscle in her clench and ripple around them, and the shadow flares so black the window goes to nothing.
And through it, through the dark, through the bond I have spent months refusing to lean on because leaning on it meant admitting it was mine, her pleasure arrives in my own chest from the wrong direction.
Outside me. Not in. Hers laid down over mine until there are two hearts going behind my sternum and only one of them is keeping my time.
I stay on my knees until she stops shaking.
Then she pulls me up by the shirt, by whatever she can reach, and kisses her own taste off my mouth and says against my lips: "Now the rest of you. All of it. I meant it."
I get us to the floor because there's no bed and neither of us will wait for one. The torn shirt comes off my shoulders. My hands have stopped moving the way I tell them to and I have stopped telling them anything.
I drag my trousers off and my cock comes free, heavy, aching, and her eyes go down the length of me and her breath changes—and that, her wanting the size of me openly in the dark, gets me harder still, a hot pulse I feel in my teeth.
She's under me in the spreading shadow, her knees coming up around my hips, and when I line myself up and look down at her she takes my face in both hands and holds it so I can't look anywhere else.
"Watch me," she says. "I want you here. Not managing it, not bracing for the cost, not three rooms deep in your own head. Here. With me."
"I'm here," I tell her, and I push into her.
The wet heat of her takes the head of my cock and closes around it, scalding after the cold of the shadow, and every coherent thought empties out of my skull at once.
I make myself feel the whole of it—her body giving way around me inch by inch, the tight slick grip of her, the small broken sound she makes against my jaw as I sink—and by the time my hips meet hers I'm shaking with the effort of not simply rutting into her like an animal.
"All of it," she breathes. "You promised."
I don't go slow. She told me not to and I couldn't if she begged.
I draw back the whole length of myself and drive home, and her gasp breaks against my throat, and I feel it in my chest half a beat before she makes it, the bond running her sensation back into me, so that I'm fucking her and feeling what it does to her at the same time.
The drag of my cock inside her, doubled.
Mine and hers. The clench of her when I hit the place that arches her spine, arriving in my own body like heat poured down the thread, until I can't tell whose pleasure is winding tighter.
I set a rhythm that isn't gentle and she rises to meet it.
Deep, hard strokes, each one jolting a sound out of her, her nails scoring my shoulders, her heel dragging up the back of my thigh to pull me in.
Sweat runs down my spine. My arms shake with the work of it and I don't slow, won't, the ache at the base of my cock climbing every time she tightens around me.
I have never once in my life let my body simply want like this—no measure, no restraint, just the slick heat of her and the sounds she's making and the wet obscene rhythm of us echoing through a gallery built for portraits and silence.
"Callum." My name comes apart in her mouth. "There—right there—"