Chapter 12 #3
He pulls back just far enough to reach between us, and I mourn the loss of his weight for the half-second it takes him to grip the hem of his shirt and drag it over his head.
The movement is careless, impatient, nothing like the controlled grace that usually defines him.
He wants this badly enough to be graceless.
The shirt drops somewhere I don't bother tracking.
His hands move to his waistband, and I prop myself on my elbows to watch. His fingers work the fastening with a dexterity that shouldn't be possible given how badly they're shaking. He's wrecked. Coming apart. For me.
The fabric parts, and he shoves the material down his hips in one rough motion, kicking free of boots and pants together. Then he straightens at the foot of the bed, chest heaving, and lets me look.
I've seen bodies. Hundreds of them on operating tables, in field hospitals, in the bloody aftermath of battles that left more dead than living. I've catalogued anatomy across six species and learned to read flesh the way other people read words.
None of that prepared me for him.
Seven feet of lean muscle stretches above me, built for speed and violence.
His shoulders block out the light, broad enough that I could lie across them, tapering to a narrow waist and muscular hips.
Charcoal skin covers every inch of him, darker than shadow and threaded with silver that catches the amber glow of his quarters until he shimmers.
The striping I glimpsed before traces down his ribs in patterns that scream apex predator, marking him as other, as dangerous, as everything my hindbrain should be running from.
My eyes travel lower.
His abdomen carves into ridges of muscle that flex with each breath, a trail of darker skin leading down from his navel toward...
Oh.
His cock juts from his body, flushed darker than the rest of him, so hard it curves toward his stomach.
It hardens under my gaze, a bead of slick pre-cum welling at the tapered tip and sliding down the first of five raised ridges that spiral the shaft.
He's thick enough that my fingers wouldn't meet around him.
Long enough that I swallow against the sudden dryness in my throat.
At the base, his knot has already swollen, a thick bulge that pulses with each beat of his hearts.
Then there's nothing between us but skin and heat and the hard length of him pressing against my thigh, and the only thought left in my head is more.
He's watching me look at him. “Second thoughts?”
“First thoughts about how any of that is supposed to fit.”
His mouth curves, the barest hint of a smile, and the expression transforms his face into something approaching human. Then he moves.
One knee lands on the mattress, then the other, and the bed dips under his weight as he prowls toward me.
The motion is pure predator. Shoulders rolling, muscles flexing beneath charcoal skin, his cock swaying heavy between his thighs with each movement.
He holds my gaze the entire way, silver eyes gone dark with want, and I can't look away. Don't want to look away.
He pauses when he reaches my ankles. His hands close around them, warm and rough, and he parts my legs.
I let him arrange me, let him open me, let him look his fill at what he's uncovered.
His nostrils flare as my scent reaches him, and the growl that rumbles from his chest vibrates through the mattress and into my bones.
He lowers himself between my thighs, his body covering mine by inches.
His mouth grazes my knee. The inside of my thigh.
The crease where my leg meets my hip. Each kiss deliberate.
Each one a promise. His shoulders spread my legs wider as he settles into the cradle of my hips, and the hard length of him drags through my slick folds, not entering, not yet. Teasing. Learning me.
When he braces himself above me, his forearms framing my face and his hips aligned with mine, I'm shaking with need.
“Your human body is beautiful.” He notches the tapered head against my entrance. He’s hotter than the rest of his body, slick with pre-cum that smears against my swollen flesh. “And my body will make me fit. My pre-cum will relax you. Open you.”
He rolls his hips, and the length of him slides through my folds.
The impossible heat of him drags through my wetness, the ridges catching against my clit one after another.
He groans above me, low and rumbling, and repeats the motion.
Again. Again. Coating himself in my arousal until he's slick with it.
“You're soaked.” The words come out reverent, wrecked. “All of this for me?”
I can't answer. Can only whimper as he drags the flared head through my seam once more, pressing harder against my clit before sliding lower. Lower. Until the tapered tip notches against my entrance and holds there, a pressure that makes my hips cant toward him.
He meets my eyes. Waits.
“Please.” The word scrapes out of me. “I need you.”
He pushes forward.
So slow my nails score his shoulders. The tapered head parts me by millimeters, stretching me wide, and the burn hovers between pain and pleasure until his pre-cum does what he promised.
My muscles soften around the intrusion, yield to the width of him, open for him.
He sinks another inch, tracking every twitch of my expression.
The first ridge breaches me, dragging across nerves that have never been touched.
I make a sound I don't recognize, broken and begging and beyond language. He freezes, his forehead dropping to mine, his breath sawing in and out. “Too much?”
“More.” I dig my nails into his back. “Don't you dare stop.”
He gives me another inch. The second ridge catches and drags, and I keen against his throat.
The third. Each one pulls sounds from me I've never made, sparks sensation that compounds until I'm drowning in it.
The texture of him, the heat, the stretch that should hurt but doesn't because his body has prepared mine to take him.
When he seats himself fully, his hips flush against mine and every thick inch of him buried so deep I swear I can taste him in my throat, I understand the word claiming.
I’m claimed. He's so deep inside me that I've forgotten where I end, and the pressure of his knot against my entrance promises more to come.
“Look at me.” His voice has gone to gravel. “I want your eyes when I take you.”
I meet his gaze as he moves.
The ridges. God, the ridges. They catch and drag with every thrust, stroking places inside me that no one has ever reached. He starts slow, letting me adjust to the size of him, the alien texture lights up every nerve he passes. Then his control cracks.
His thrusts deepen. Quicken. Each one drives the head of him against the spot that fractures my vision while the ridges work the sensitive walls around them. His mouth finds my throat and his fangs scrape my pulse point, not breaking skin, and the threat alone floods me with fresh arousal.
His jaw drags across my shoulder, my collarbone, the curve of my breast. Leaving his scent. Marking every inch of skin he can reach so that anyone who comes near me will recognize who I belong to.
“Close.” The word barely forms. “I'm going to...”
“Wait.” His rhythm turns ragged, his body shaking. “With me. Fall with me.”
His knot swells against my entrance with each thrust, a thick pressure that grows with every stroke.
The bulge at the base of him catches against my rim, not quite breaching, not yet.
Every time he drives into me, his knot kisses my entrance and retreats, teasing, testing, stretching me wider with every pass.
“Your knot’s getting bigger.” The words splinter on the way out. I'm not asking. The gradual swell turns every thrust into something my body has to relearn how to take.
“Yes. It won't stop until it's inside you.”
The pressure mounts. He pushes his knot harder against my opening, demanding entry my body isn't sure it can give.
The stretch burns, aches, tips between too much and not enough.
I'm already stuffed with nine inches of ridged cock, and still there's more.
Still he's asking me to take the impossible.
I want it anyway. Want the stretch that will split me open. Want to be locked to him, tied, trapped beneath him until his body lets me go.
“More.” Tears leak from the corners of my eyes, my voice gone to gravel. “I need all of it.”
His knot pulses against me, hot and insistent. Both his hearts pound through it, throbbing against flesh that's swollen and sensitized from everything he's already given me.
“My knot will hurt before it feels good.” He's panting, barely holding on, his thrusts turning shallow as his knot grows too large to pull back fully.
“I don't care.” My legs wrap tighter around him, my heels digging into the base of his spine. “Give it to me.”
“Once I’m in, we can't separate until it releases.”
I wrap my legs around him and pull.
His knot breaches me. There's no slow. No gradual. One moment he's pressing against my entrance, the next the widest part of him forces past my rim in a rush that empties my skull of everything except the stretch.
It's enormous. Impossible. My body screams protest even as pleasure floods in behind the burn, my walls clenching around the intrusion, trying to accommodate what they were never built for.
He's inside me now. All of him. His knot locked behind my entrance where it can't retreat, where neither of us can escape what we've started.
He roars. The sound rips from his chest and bounces off stone walls, animal and triumphant and stripped of every shred of control. His hips jerk against me, grinding his knot deeper, and then he's coming.