Chapter 17 #2
He helps, shrugging out of his shirt in a fluid motion that shouldn't exist in a male vibrating with barely leashed need.
The charcoal skin beneath bears new marks.
Evidence of the violence he walked through to find me.
A plasma graze across his ribs. A bruise purpling on his shoulder.
Small wounds that prove the cost he paid without hesitation.
I press my mouth to each one. Salt and heat and the taste that belongs only to him, flooding my senses until the room disappears and the world narrows to this. His skin beneath my lips. The tremors moving through his body as I trace his survival with kisses instead of sutures.
“Maeve.” My name has become a warning. His control is fraying beneath my attention, and the sound he makes when I trace my tongue along the darker striping on his ribs sends heat flooding between my thighs.
I've touched him before. Learned the planes and angles of his body during rushed claiming that left no room for exploration. This is different. I'm not racing toward relief. I'm savoring. Memorizing. Building a map of this male.
I follow the darker patterns toward his waistband. He catches my wrist before I reach my destination, and his silver eyes blaze with want so intense it steals my breath.
“Not yet.” Ragged. Hungry. “You first. I need to taste you first.”
He lifts me, one arm beneath my knees, the other supporting my back. I loop my arms around his neck as he carries me not toward the bed but through a doorway and into a bathing chamber.
“You're covered in that cage.” His jaw tightens. “I want nothing on your skin but me.”
The shower is large enough for a Draveki frame, all dark stone and metal fixtures that gleam in the low light. He sets me on my feet and reaches past me, and water cascades from overhead in a rush of heat.
Steam rises around us. He strips off his remaining clothing, and then he's stepping into the spray with me, seven feet of solid muscle.
His cock juts toward me, the ridges along his shaft pronounced with arousal.
The charcoal skin darkens to near-black at the head, flushed with blood, and at the base, his knot already swells with the promise of what's to come.
I've had him inside me before. I know how those ridges drag against every nerve ending, how that knot stretches and locks and holds me captive while he spills into me.
I want him. Want him so badly my hands shake with the need to touch, to stroke, to wrap around that thick length and feel him pulse against my palm. I want him on his knees before me and above me and behind me. I want him in every way a body can take another body, and I want it now.
His nostrils flare. He can smell my arousal, I realize. Can scent what the sight of him does to me.
“Soon.” He reaches for a cloth, for soap that smells of herbs I don't recognize. “First, I wash them off you.”
He starts at my shoulders. The cloth moves over my skin in slow circles, gentle pressure that loosens muscles I didn't realize I'd been clenching. Water sluices down my body, carrying away the grime of stone floors and cold hours and hands that touched without permission.
“I keep seeing you in that cage. The bruises on your face. The way you looked at me when I tore the bars apart.”
“How did I look at you?”
“As if you knew I'd come.” He turns me, runs the cloth down my spine, over the curve of my ass. “As if there was never any doubt.”
“There wasn't.” I lean into his touch as he traces lower, over my hips, down the outside of my thighs. “You promised you'd always find me. I believed you.”
A sound rumbles from his chest. Not quite a growl.
Not quite a purr. Then seven feet of apex predator, of muscle and scale and lethal grace, sinks to the shower floor before me.
Water streams over the breadth of his shoulders, traces the darker striping along his ribs, pools in the hollow of his collarbone before cascading down his chest. His silver eyes never leave mine as he lowers himself before me.
This male has killed without hesitation. Has torn through enemies and carved a path of blood and fear across Vahiri Prime. His hands have ended lives. His claws have shredded flesh. He commands enforcers and strikes terror into the hearts of those who cross House Draven.
And he kneels before me as if I'm the one with power here.
My heart slams against my sternum. The submission in his posture contradicts everything his body was built for, every instinct that drives Draveki males to dominate and claim and conquer. He's offering me this. Giving me something I didn't ask for and don't know how to hold.
“Drazex.” His name catches in my throat.
“Let me worship you.” He presses his lips to my hip bone, and the tenderness in the gesture makes my eyes sting. “Let me show you what you are to me.”
He lifts one of my feet, runs the cloth over my ankle, my calf, the sensitive skin behind my knee.
Then the other. Thorough. Unhurried. Worshipping every inch of me.
He washes the front of my legs with the same attention.
Up over my knees. My thighs. The cloth brushes the crease where my thigh meets my hip, and my breath stutters.
“Drazex...”
He sets the cloth aside and looks up at me, silver eyes burning through the steam. “Put your hands on the wall.”
I press my palms flat against the wet stone. The surface is warm from the water, smooth beneath my fingers. He lifts one of my legs and drapes it over his shoulder, then the other, until I'm spread open before him, supported by the wall and his strength and nothing else.
“I've been thinking about this.” His breath ghosts over my center, and my hips jerk toward him. “Every hour you were gone. Every minute I spent hunting. This kept me sane.”
The first stroke of his tongue drags a moan from my throat that echoes off the stone walls. Hot water cascades over my shoulders while his tongue traces through my folds, tasting, learning, driving me toward an edge I can already see approaching.
“So sweet.” He groans against me, and the vibration makes my thighs clench around his head. “You were made for my mouth.”
His tongue finds the bundle of nerves at my center, and the first stroke makes me scream.
He pins me on his shoulders, his claws dimpling my thighs.
His tongue is hot, slick, relentless. He licks through my folds in long strokes that gather my arousal and spread it over every sensitized inch of flesh.
“Drazex...” His name dissolves into a moan.
He doesn't answer. His mouth is too busy destroying me.
He sucks my clit between his lips, and my spine arches off the wall.
He releases it, flicks his tongue across the swollen bud, then sucks again.
The rhythm he builds is merciless, pushing me higher with every passing second.
His stubble scrapes against my inner thighs, rough against the slick heat of his tongue, and the contrast shorts out my thoughts.
He shifts one hand from my hip. His fingers trace through my wetness, gathering slick, before two of them press against my entrance.
“Yes.” I don't recognize my voice. “Please. I need...”
“I will never make you wait for pleasure, my Chosen,” he rumbles.
He slides them inside, and my walls clench around the intrusion. Thick. Hot. Curling against the spot that scatters my thoughts into fragments. His mouth never pauses, tongue stroking and flicking while his fingers thrust in a rhythm that matches the pounding of my pulse.
I fist his hair, grip the wet strands hard, and grind against his face. Chasing the pleasure he's building. Taking what he's offering.
“That's it.” He pulls back long enough to speak, lips glistening with my arousal, chin slick with evidence of what he does to me. “Take what you need. Use me. Ride my face until you come apart.”
His mouth returns to my clit. His fingers curl inside me, pressing against that spot with every thrust, and the dual sensation is too much, not enough, everything I need.
“I can't... it's...” Words fail me. Language fails me. There's nothing but his tongue and his fingers and the pressure building at the base of my spine.
“You can.” He growls the words against my flesh, and the vibration pushes me closer to the edge. “I want to taste you when you shatter.”
The orgasm hits hard. I cry out, spine arching, hands scrabbling against the wet stone for purchase I can't find. He doesn't stop. His tongue gentles but doesn't retreat, coaxing me through the aftershocks while his fingers keep their relentless pace.
“One more.” He nips at my inner thigh, and the sharp sting of his fangs makes me jolt. “Give me one more, Maeve. I want you weak with pleasure.”
“I can't... it's too much...”
“You can.” His tongue flicks, and fresh wetness floods where his mouth meets my flesh. “You can because I'm asking. Because you're mine, and you and I both need this.”
His fingers curl against that spot inside me. His tongue presses flat against my clit and holds. The pressure builds and builds until I'm wound so tight I might break apart.
The second orgasm rips through me. My walls clamp down on his fingers, pulsing in rhythms I can't control. I shake against his shoulders, thighs clenching around his head. A sound tears from my throat that barely qualifies as human, his name broken into syllables that echo off the wet stone.
His fingers keep moving, slower now but relentless, dragging out every aftershock.
His tongue gentles against my oversensitized clit, soft licks that send tremors rippling through my muscles.
The pleasure keeps cresting, keeps rolling, wave after wave until I lose track of where one peak ends and the next begins.
“I can't... Drazex... please...”