Chapter 15
15
Marcelis
Our skin touched, and Toorin sucked in a breath through his clenched teeth, sounding like one of those hissing cobras that got introduced into the Tranquility Province a decade ago that we’ve been trying to eradicate ever since.
“You’re freezing,” he said.
I didn’t feel the need to respond. My teeth chattered loud enough to corroborate his statement.
“Come closer.” Toorin’s voice softened as he drew me into his body. He had to be cold after the thorough drenching from the squall, but his body heat felt like a warm caress from the sun.
I laid on my back, and his arm went around my upper chest, pulling my side tight against him. One of his legs went between mine, and his heel locked behind my calf. We both shivered under two layers of blankets, the rattle in my chest and the clacking of my teeth the only sound breaking the silence.
Certainly, Toorin had things to do besides acting as my personal heater. “If your crew needs you—”
“Bodie has them. They’ll be fine without me for a while.”
Without a reason to disbelieve him, I let it go. A violent cough racked my body. It would have shaken my heart loose if Dr. Phan hadn’t stitched it in so well.
In the harshest winters I’d lived through, where even the chancellor’s residence ran low on materials to burn to keep the frigid temperatures blowing off the IP at bay, I couldn’t remember ever being this cold.
Toorin settled me closer against his relatively warmer body. My head nestled on his arm, his free hand laying on my chest over my scar and my heart.
A fresh wave of guilt flushed my skin as he did that, but also, a sense of peace seeped into my body. Our shared heart had brought him to me, and in a startling way, I was glad of it.
“If you’re going to keep landing in the water,” Toorin said, “I should teach you to swim.”
“To be fair, I think I’m better suited to life on land.”
Toorin’s low rumble of a chuckle warmed me faster than a roaring fire ever could. “Maybe that’s for the best.”
But then you can’t be together. You, with a life on the land. Him, with a life on water.
Oof. Where had that come from? We barely had a future. Period. We certainly didn’t have one together . Even if, for the first time in my life, Toorin made me feel like perhaps I did have a future. Like there was a life out there where I could be happy.
You know, between the chancellor guard trying to capture or kill me or the seas trying to drown me.
My body tensed as Toorin’s fingers scrubbed through the smattering of hair on my chest. Not because I didn’t like it but because I did. And because Bodie could walk through the cabin door and catch us lying together. He wouldn’t like it. Why I cared so much about what he thought, I didn’t know. But I did.
Toorin shifted, looking down at me. “What’s wrong? I feel like you’re about to bolt. I could stop… or leave if—”
“No. Don’t stop.” I snuggled into him. “That—” My voice dropped to a barely-there whisper of a whisper as if I could yank my words back if Toorin laughed at me. “That felt good.”
Toorin’s fingers resumed their soft exploration. The hair beneath his calloused fingertips made a scratching sound in the quiet of the cabin. And the stars above help me, I wanted to feel his touch in other places.
Lower places.
A deliciously dark chuckle emanated from deep within Toorin’s chest. “Lower, huh?”
Moon and mars and the stars . Had I said that out loud?
I must have, or maybe Toorin read my mind because ever so slowly, those calloused fingers skimmed over my skin, raising gooseflesh on my body and a sigh to my lips.
The boat rocked, pressing us together, the occasional sway much gentler now that we’d come out on the other side of the squall. If we’d only experienced an outer band of foul weather, I don’t think I ever wanted to experience sailing through the middle of a full-force gale.
Right now, I felt safe. Safer than I’ve ever felt. Which is hard for my brain to comprehend. Especially since I had Toorin’s heart…
And he wanted it back.
I didn’t know how we’d resolve this issue. All I knew was that we had this time.
We had now .
“Lower.” The repeated word held an unworldly cosmic quality, and I fully expected the heat to rush to my face. It didn’t.
It didn’t make me less to want. I had nothing to be embarrassed about.
“Fuck,” Toorin groaned in my ear.
Soft, sizzling kisses rained down on me. On the barely-there bulge of my bicep. At the juncture where my neck met my shoulder. That sensitive spot behind my ear.
Turning into him, I cupped the back of his neck, wanting those lips on mine, chasing the stolen intimacy we’d found in a darkened culvert in the heart of Toonu.
Deepening the kiss, Toorin brushed his fingers through the thick trail of hair below my belly button. My cock filled, bumping against Toorin’s hand.
Toorin broke the kiss. “That’s it.”
I couldn’t wait to get my hands on him. To feel the heft and girth and the slickness of him against my palm.
Releasing the back of his neck, my hand swept down his back until his gooseflesh matched mine. This time, when he shifted, his hard length pressed into my abdomen.
I didn’t know if the weather had warmed after passing through the squall or if our combined body heat finally started working, but I no longer shook—at least not from the cold—and my teeth didn’t clatter as I nibbled his bottom lip.
His hot breath breathed life into me as my hips bucked, searching for the friction I craved. Precum leaked from my tip and slicked his skin.
“You’re so fucking sexy,” he said somewhere between a growl and a groan.
I didn’t know much about that, but the way he devoured my neck, the way he kissed and sucked on my skin, the way the little noise tore from him made me believe that he was as turned on as I was.
Embody it.
And serve that energy right back.
It had been a long time since I’d had my hands on a cock other than my own. My hand shook—this time in anticipation—as I reached down the front of his trousers and cupped Toorin’s balls.
His lips froze on my skin, and he thrust against me as I gently rolled his sensitive balls in my hand. For a second, he remained so still I thought I’d broken him. Then his breath leaked out with a hiss.
Never had I believed one singular sound could have said more than my sire’s yearly days-long orations, but Toorin made me a believer.
He wanted this as much as I did.
The contact, the connection, the caresses may not mean as much to him as those things meant to me. Him filling this void of intimacy I’d had nearly my entire life. I no longer cared if Bodie or the whole crew walked in. I wouldn’t stop. They couldn’t break into this tiny bubble of him and me and our unanchored desires.
Unlike others, Toorin didn’t treat me with the deference due the chancellor’s spawn. With him, we stood on equal footing.
He nipped at my jaw.
“What was that for?”
“Stop thinking. Get out of your head. It’s you and me and our hands and mouths and dicks. It’s not complicated.”
I ran my hand up the underside of what I found to be the most glorious cock I’d ever had in my hands. Soft but hard. Firm yet silky. Girthy and so fucking luscious .
If I were a poet, I’d write sonnets about his cock for the rest of my days. I stroked back the foreskin, exposing the sensitive ridge of the head and the slit leaking copious amounts of precum.
He adjusted his leg, giving me all the access I could want. Beneath the blankets, I couldn’t see how glorious he was, but I traced every solid inch of him until I had memorized his heft and shape.
His hips arched, even as I kept my touch light. I’d never pushed hookups or pressed them beyond their comfort, wanting to treat them as equals. But Toorin and I were already there, and I wanted nothing more than to hear this man beg.
He reached for my cock. As much as I wanted his hands on me, I wanted him desperate in mine. I wanted his world to shrink to my hands and lips and the pleasure wracking and wrecking his body, reducing him to muttered oaths and guttural groans.
Toorin
I rolled onto my back, and Marc followed, his hand never leaving my cock. Heat built beneath the blankets until sweat started to slick my body. I kicked us free of the covers. The cooler temperatures we’d been hiding from now helped soothe our overheated skin.
Marc skimmed his hand down my shaft, past my heavy balls, to the sensitive patch right behind. I shuddered as pleasure exploded, my head falling back and the keening need escaping my lips.
I gripped the back of his head, but he resisted. Right then, I wanted his glorious mouth on me more than I wanted my heart. “Why are you denying me?” The petulance came laced with a heavy dose of frustration.
His teeth sunk into the point of my hip, releasing me before pleasure shifted to pain. My hips thrust into the air, determined to go to him if he wouldn’t come to me.
Marc’s dark laugh wound me even tighter. Hearing that veiled mischievousness from a man who’d seemed so proper did things to my mind and body that no man had done before.
“I want to hear you beg,” he said.
“I will not.” The words escaped before my cock kept me from uttering them. If my cock could talk, he would have turned into an unabashed beggar and never shut up until Marc took him to the back of his throat, where it was wet and warm.
Marc didn’t press. He let that we’ll-see-how-long-you-can-resist chuckle rumble out of his chest again. My dick strained, my hips snapped, and my fingers fisted in his hair.
All I got in return was the brush of his fingers up and down my desperate length, the hot press of his lips into the crease of my inner thigh, the nip of his teeth into tender flesh.
This man will ruin me.
“ Marcelis—” I didn’t have the words for what he was doing to me, and the ones I did have tangled together at the back of my throat, refusing to fall free.
“Now you use my real name.” My other hand reached for him, and he batted it away. “Tell me what you want.”
“You know what I—” Marc’s fingertip traced the ridge of my cock, and dipped down to the extra sensitive spot on the underside. “W-what I want.”
He stroked my shaft up and down again. I glanced down at my exposed slit as a drop of precum threatened to fall with Marc’s mouth mere inches away.
“I want to know how you taste,” he said. “I want to feel you come down my throat.”
My head fell back. It was right there. He could lick and suck and take me deep. But he wouldn’t. It was the worst and most frustrating game of chicken I’d ever played.
I’d grown up and survived by not giving in. He didn’t know what he was asking of me.
A tender kiss dropped on my thigh. “It’s okay to surrender.”
Or maybe he did.
I could end this now. I could pull up my trousers and walk right out of my cabin. But fuck if I wanted to. Marc slicked a finger with saliva and slid it down my length before gathering more and sliding it between the cheeks of my ass. Ooof . I wanted to shift until that finger brushed my rim, until it pressed inside…
Until I could bear down and fuck myself on it.
Marc’s breath came faster, hot little pants dancing across my skin.
Fuuuuck. I didn’t need to be strong. I needed to come.
“Take me deep.” My strangled words sounded foreign, a barely there, needy caricature of me. “I want your mouth on me. Your finger in me.”
“ Want? ” Marc asked, with an annoyed raised brow and a knowing grin I wanted to kiss off him until he was the one who begged and writhed beneath me. I’d never get there if I didn’t do what he wanted.
“Need. I need —”
Oompf. I choked on my words as Marc’s tongue swiped across my slit.
“Fuck. I love the way you taste.” His reverence alone nearly made me come. I’d never heard such awe in another man’s tone before, at least not from one going down on me.
He wet his fingers and slid them down to my ass as his tongue licked between the head of my cock and my foreskin. My legs quaked, and my hand gripped his roots.
I couldn’t stop the short, shallow thrusts. I no longer had complete command of my body. I’d relinquished that mere minutes before. Now, I was Marc’s to command. Marc’s to devour. To tear apart and put back together.
“More,” I managed, sounding weak and completely at his mercy.
With a self-satisfied hum that I felt in my dick and sent tingles up my spine, Marc took me deep in one glorious, wet, warm slide.
My hand spanned the breadth of his skull, holding him in place, taking in the moment before I released him. Instead of pulling off, he circled his hand around the base of my cock and used his talented tongue and that sweet, sweet suction to make me forget the world existed beyond him.
I thrusted into his mouth, and those wet fingers found my rim, slicking me up for what I wanted most. It had been too long since a man had fingers inside me, much less his cock, and I chased the pleasure and the first tingling of my impending orgasm.
I was close. Really close.
Marc pulled off, and I growled my vexation. “What the—”
I glanced down at his self-satisfied smile as he removed his hand and sucked three fingers into his mouth, soaking them with his saliva. “Patience.”
I didn’t have any.
My orgasm lay just out of reach. Teasing and taunting me. Then his mouth returned, and his fingers found their way to my hole, the wetness more than enough for what I wanted him to do.
Shifting, I bore down on his finger until it breached the tight ring. “ Ahhhh. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. ”
Marc stilled. “Want me to stop?”
“Fuck no,” I gritted out as I tried my best to relax around the intrusion.
This time, Marc’s chuckle held more amusement. He was enjoying what he was doing to me, the exquisite torture he was putting my body through. Then his mouth found me again.
I fucked his throat, then fucked myself on his finger, taking him to the knuckle. It wasn’t enough and too much at the same time. I wanted to be filled and drained and— “More…”
Words failed me, but Marc didn’t.
He eased a second finger inside, then gradually a third. I hovered on the brink of ecstasy, tossed in a stormy sea of his whims.
My breath short, my body shaking, I stiffened as Marc sucked me deep one last time. His fingers brushed my prostate, and I was lost.
I gave in to him. I gave into the utter realization that no one had ever fucked me the way Marc had. Like I mattered and not the act. I came with a shout, not caring who heard.
Marc swallowed every last drop I gave him. I fell back against the mattress, my lungs gasping for air. Marc gently pulled his hand away, kissing the short crop of hair around my slowly softening cock.
“Come here,” I said, wanting those lips on mine. I needed to touch him, to hold him—I needed something I’d never needed before.
“Captain? Everything okay in—”
“Don’t come in.” I found the words and, more importantly, the tone that stopped a usually irreverent Darwin in his tracks before he opened the door.
“The winds have shifted, Captain. The squall is coming back around.”