21. The Night Before #2
He laid her down on the kesh platform so fast the furs breathed under her. The ceremony brushes were still in her side vision where they lay on the linen cloth beside the bed, tomorrow waiting in the dark while tonight devoured itself around them. The oil bowl threw off warm amber light.
Mavrek stripped the last of his clothes without taking his eyes off her. His cock sprang heavy against his belly, flushed dark, already wet at the tip. She reached for him immediately, greedy now, and his whole body flinched when her hand closed around him.
"Iva."
Warning and plea in one sound.
She stroked him anyway, slow first because she wanted to feel the weight and heat of him in her palm, the thick vein under skin, the way he shuddered and tried not to thrust into her hand.
She used the oil still on her fingers to slick him, spreading amber shine down the length of him.
The sight of maruk oil on his cock nearly unmade her all by itself.
Mavrek made a raw sound and caught her wrist.
"If you keep that up," he said, "I will spill in your hand like a boy."
"And?"
His grin flashed, sudden and hungry and almost savage.
"And I intend to be inside you when I lose my mind."
He dragged her hand to his mouth, sucked the last of the oil from her fingers, and came over her.
He opened her thighs and knelt between them and stared once, full and open, at the slick wreck she had become under his hands. Then he bent and put his mouth on her cunt with the unhurried greed of a man who had spent five weeks holding something in check and no longer saw a reason to.
She cried out hard enough to hear it bounce faintly from the workshop front room.
His tongue worked her without mercy, not careless, never that, but ruthless in its intent.
Every time she twisted from the edge, he held her hips down and drove her back toward it.
Every time she tried to muffle a sound, he pulled her hand aside and watched her.
"Let me hear it," he said.
She did.
Her second climax tore through her with his mouth still on her and his hands pinning her wide. He only rose when she was limp and trembling and flushed from chest to thigh.
Then he entered her in one hard thrust that made both of them curse.
This was not the slow deliberate meeting in the kesh three nights earlier.
Tonight he fucked her like a man released from a sentence.
Hard, deep, already lost enough that the first few thrusts drove the platform against the wall in a rhythm she could feel through her spine. She met him with the same violence.
He caught her thigh over his shoulder and changed the angle until the next thrust went so deep she saw white at the edges of the room.
"That's it," he said, voice broken open, no formality left in it. "Take it. Aye. Just so."
She came again around him, clutching so hard his whole body jerked. He swore, dropped his forehead to hers, and fucked her through it with a desperation that would have frightened her once and now only made her wetter. The ceremony brushes lay beside them on the linen cloth.
He rolled them without fully withdrawing. She landed on top of him with a startled curse, then took one look at his face under her and all amusement died.
He was wrecked. Mouth swollen, hair wild, throat gleaming where she'd marked him with his own oil.
"Ride me," he said.
She did.
She took him deep and moved on him hard and open, both hands braced on his chest, hair falling over her shoulders. He gripped her hips and stared up like a man determined to memorize exactly how the woman who had chosen his claim looked destroying herself over him in private the night before dawn.
When she slowed from the force of it, he reached between them and thumbed her clit with brutal pressure until she shuddered and fell apart again with his name snapped out between clenched teeth.
He came with a sound that started low and tore higher before he could stop it, hips bucking up under her, hands bruising at her waist. She felt the hot pulse of him inside her and bent over him, catching his mouth, swallowing the rest of the sound until both of them were shaking too hard to keep moving.
For a while afterward they lay in the wreckage exactly where they had fallen. Her thigh thrown over his. His palm sprawled across her ass. The maruk oil bowl still warmed over its little brazier. The ceremony brushes untouched on the linen cloth.
His breathing eased first.
Iva lifted one hand from his chest and looked at the side of his throat where she had marked him. The oil had blurred in the heat and friction, but the amber shine remained. Private claim. Hers. Her body went soft with a satisfaction so sharp it bordered on grief.
"You are staring at your own work," Mavrek said.
"It improved the subject."
That earned her one of the rare full laughs, short and disbelieving and warm enough to spread through her where they were still joined.
"Cruel woman."
"You seem to be enduring it."
His hand slid up her back, broad and slow, then stopped at the nape to hold her there while he looked at her properly.
"Aye," he said. "I am."