28. Chapter 28
He took her to their room and closed the door and pressed her back against it before the latch had caught.
His mouth found hers and his hands found her hips.
He lifted her off the floor with the kind of ease that still made her breath stutter, even now, even after weeks of being carried and held and repositioned like she weighed nothing worth accounting for.
Her legs went around his waist, and he kissed her so thoroughly that by the time he pulled back she had forgotten the temperature of the corridor, the sound of the yard, the color of the sky.
"Say it again," he said.
She was panting. His hands were under her thighs, fingers denting the flesh, and his face was so close she could see the silver threading through his beard at the chin.
"You're mine," she said. "I'm keeping you."
He made a sound against her mouth. Low, from the back of his throat. His teeth grazed her lower lip and his hips pressed forward, pinning her harder against the oak, and she felt every inch of him through the leather and the roughspun between them.
"Again," he said.
"Mine." She got her fingers into his hair where it had come loose from the leather cord and pulled. His head tipped back and his throat worked and the sound he made was not a word. She pulled harder. "Mine, Varek."
He carried her to the bed without breaking the kiss.
Her back hit the furs and he was over her, blocking the light from the hearth, one hand already working her laces.
He got the dress open to the waist and spread the fabric apart and looked at her the way he always looked at her, like he was counting everything he'd been given and was not finished being staggered by the sum.
"I had a plan for tonight," he said. "Do you remember?"
Her thighs pressed together. She remembered. His mouth still wet from her, his voice in her ear, the list of things he'd do to her that didn't risk a child. Pick one. When you come back.
"My mouth, I said. Or your hands. Or your tits." His hand left her jaw and dragged down her throat. "I told you to come back and pick one."
"I remember."
"So pick."
She looked up at him. Her heart was still slamming from the yard. Never once in her life had she gotten to say what she wanted. She could now.
"None of those," she said.
His hand, which had resumed work on stripping her naked, stilled. "What do you want then?"
"I want you inside me. I want—" Her voice caught and she pushed through it. "I want you to put a baby in me."
His hand didn't move. He stayed exactly where he was, half-kneeling over her with his palm flat on her ribs and her dress pulled open and the firelight cutting hard lines across the planes of his face.
"You're sure?" he asked.
"I'm sure."
His jaw flexed. The muscle in it jumped once. Then his hand left her ribs and went to the laces at his waist and he said, "Take the rest of that off."
She pulled the dress down over her hips while he stripped above her.
Tunic over his head in one motion. Boots kicked off the edge of the bed.
The laces gave and the leather dropped and he was naked and hard and she could see his pulse beating in the thick vein that ran the length of him, could see the ridges standing in hard relief, flushed dark green and slick at the tip where his body had already answered for him.
He came down over her and she reached for him and he caught her wrist. "Say it one more time. So there's no mistaking it later, when you're green in the mornings and cursing my name for it."
"I want your child, Varek. Put it in me."
Whatever he'd been holding all day came loose.
"Then that's what I'll do," he said, his mouth dropping to the hinge of her jaw. "I'm going to fuck you hard, Mab, and finish so deep it takes, and tomorrow you're going to walk through my fortress bred and sore, and you're going to hold your head up the whole way."
His teeth grazed her throat, and she tilted her head back to give him access.
"Yes," she breathed.
"Open your legs."
She opened them.
He knelt between them and put his hand on her, two thick fingers sliding through the wet of her.
She was so ready they went in easy, and he worked her open without hurry.
A third finger when she could take it, stretching her, his thumb circling the swollen knot above until her hips lifted off the furs to chase it.
"Look at you," he said. His voice had dropped into the register that lived below speaking, the one she felt in her sternum before her ears caught up. "Soaking my hand."
His fingers curled inside her and she clenched around them.
"More," she said.
He gave her more. Spread his fingers wider, pressed a fourth inside. The stretch was just shy of too much, and she moaned and pushed down onto his hand.
"That's it," he said. "Take it. Show me you're ready for what's coming."
She bore down and his hand opened her in a slow, relentless press that lit up every nerve she had. His thumb found her again and she jerked, her spine bowing, her fingers twisting in the furs beneath her.
"Come on my hand first. Then you get what you asked for."
She broke on a sound she didn't recognize as her own, raw and open-throated, her body clenching so hard around his fingers that his knuckles ground together.
He held her through it, his other hand flat on her belly, pressing down, and the pressure inside and out met in the middle and she shattered again before the first wave had finished.
He pulled his hand free while she was still shaking and put it on the inside of her thigh, wet, and pushed her wider.
"Keep your eyes open," he said. "I want you to watch."
She watched, or tried to. He'd pulled her hips to the very edge of the bed and lifted them, her knees hooked over his elbows, and the tilt of her raised her enough that when she came up onto her own elbows she could see down the length of herself: the swell of her breasts rising and falling with each ragged breath, the round pale landscape of her belly, and past it, where the angle laid her open, the dark shape of him standing at the edge of the bed with one hand guiding himself to her.
She felt it before she saw it—the blunt, broad head of him pressed against her entrance, slick and hot, and her body tightened reflexively at the size of it even after everything his fingers had done.
There had been a time, not so many weeks ago, when this view would have made her close her eyes.
The belly she couldn't see past, the breasts that fell to either side of her chest with their own weight, the soft width of her thighs held open by his hands.
She would have looked at the ceiling or the wall or the inside of her own eyelids and waited for it to be over.
She looked.
She looked at the dark green of his fingers pressing dents into the white flesh of her thighs.
She looked at the rise of her own belly where his hand had been, still flushed from the pressure.
She looked at the place where he met her, the broad head of him notched against her, and she watched him push in.
The first inch was always the hardest. Her body seized and then gave, and the ridges caught at her entrance one by one as he fed himself into her with a patience that cost him.
She could see it costing him. The tendons in his forearms stood rigid, his breath came shallow through his nose, and his jaw was clamped so tight the muscles bunched beneath his ears.
"More," she said.
He gave her another inch. And another. The ridges dragged against her walls, each one a blunt pressure that made her gasp and push down for the next.
He let her. He held still and let her body pull him deeper.
When she couldn't reach any further, he rolled his hips forward and sank the rest of the way in one long, grinding stroke that punched the air from her lungs.
She felt him everywhere. In her spine, in her teeth, in the backs of her knees. He was so deep the pressure had moved past pleasure into some territory that didn't have a name, where her body couldn't decide whether to bear down or pull away and chose both at once.
"There," he said. His voice was wrecked. "All of me. Every inch."
She couldn't speak. She nodded, her fingers locked in the furs, and he drew back in a slow drag that lit every ridge against her walls until only the head remained, and then he drove forward.
Her whole body moved with it. Her breasts rocked with the force and she let them.
Her belly shook and she let it. He set a rhythm that was deep and unhurried and brutal in its patience, each stroke bottoming out with a pressure that stole her breath and then retreating just far enough to make her feel the loss before he filled her again.
"This is what you asked for," he said, and his hand came back to her belly. Flat palm, fingers spread, holding the soft weight of her while he moved inside her beneath it. "This body. Carrying my child. You understand what you've given me?"
"Yes," she said.
She had given away every scrap of herself her whole life, and none of it had ever been giving because none of it had ever been chosen.
This was chosen. This body that she'd worn like an apology, this belly she'd held in and turned sideways and tried to make less of—she was asking it to do the thing it was built for.
Not for him. With him. Because she wanted to.
Because she had walked into a yard full of warriors and opened her mouth and the sky had not fallen, and now she was lying beneath the man she'd claimed and telling her own body, yes, this, do this, and her body was listening.
"Yes," she repeated, louder this time.
"Good."
He bent forward over her without slowing his hips, and his mouth found the swell of her breast. His teeth closed over her nipple.
She arched into it, her hand flying to the back of his head to hold him there.
His tongue was rough and his teeth were precise and the pull of his mouth sent a wire of sensation straight down through her belly to the place where he was buried.
Her hips rolled up to meet him. The angle ground the base of him against her, and she made a sound that was half sob, half demand.
He released her breast and pressed his forehead between them, breathing hard against her skin.
His hips had not stopped. The rhythm had thickened, the strokes shorter and harder, and she could feel him hitting the deepest part of her with each one, a blunt insistent pressure that was building toward something she couldn't control.
"You're going to come again," he said into her skin. "And when you do, I'm going to finish inside you. Deep as I can get."
She couldn't answer. The pressure had gathered into a knot low in her pelvis, pulled tight by the drag of his ridges and the weight of his hand and the raw fact of what they were doing.
Not fucking. Not even the urgent claiming of the first night at the holding.
This was the thing that came after choosing.
After standing in a frozen yard and saying a word out loud and meaning it.
His mouth moved up her chest to her throat. His teeth found the tendon and his tongue followed, and the sound she made was animal and unashamed. Her heels dug into the small of his back and her hips locked against his and the knot broke.
It tore through her from the center outward, a clenching so deep it pulled him in.
Her back came off the furs and her mouth opened and the sound that came out of her filled the room, filled the stone walls and the high ceiling and the space between his body and hers.
She felt every ridge of him as her body seized around them, each one a distinct point of pressure that her muscles gripped and released and gripped again.
He followed her over. His hips slammed forward once, twice, and then locked.
She felt the first hot pulse of him deep inside, thick and spreading, and his whole body stiffened above her.
A groan tore out of his chest, and his hand on her belly pressed down as his hips ground into her in short involuntary pulses that pushed his seed deeper with each stroke.
She held on. Her arms around his neck, her legs locked at the small of his back, her face pressed into the hard curve of his shoulder where the muscle met the throat.
He was shaking. She had never felt him shake before.
Not in the lady's chamber, not in the pool, not in any of the nights between.
His arms had braced on either side of her head and his breath was coming in raw, open-mouthed gusts against her hair and he was shaking like a man who had put something down that he'd been carrying too long.
The pulses slowed. His hips gave a last grinding roll and then stilled, and the weight of him came down on her by degrees, not all at once, controlled even now, even wrecked as he was.
His forehead found the hollow of her throat and his breathing roughened there and she felt each exhale damp against her collarbone.
He didn't pull out.
Every other time, there had been a moment after the end when he withdrew and cleaned her and pulled her against his chest, efficient and tender in equal measure.
This time he stayed where he was. Sunk to the root, his hips flush against hers, the last heat of him still spreading inside her in a slow thick pulse that her body answered with small involuntary contractions she couldn't have stopped if she'd wanted to.
His weight settled. Not all of it. Enough. His elbows stayed planted but his chest came down against hers, and the heat of his skin soaked through her from sternum to navel. She could feel his heartbeat against her own ribs, heavy and deliberate, already slowing while hers was still racing.
"If it took," he said into her hair, "I'll smell it on you before you've missed a thing."
"And if it didn't?"
"Then tomorrow. And the day after." She felt him smile against her hair. "I've no shortage of patience and no shortage of stamina, and nowhere in the world I'd rather be than balls-deep in my woman."
She laughed. It came out wet and shaky and surprised her, because she hadn't known there was laughter in her alongside everything else.
His smile widened against her scalp and his arms tightened and she lay beneath him, full of him, laughing into the warm skin of his shoulder like a woman who had never been taught to be quiet.