Chapter 18 — Ethan #2
And I, kneeling between the legs of a woman who could knock me into the ground six different ways even from this position, have never felt more powerful.
Not Lycan-powerful or the kind of powerful that comes from brute force.
There’s a specific power to be derived from doing this to someone — stripping away every defense with patience and attentiveness and the willingness to stay.
She comes with a cry that she muffles against her forearm, her back lifting off the ground, thighs clamping around my head. I work her through every aftershock, becoming gentler as the waves slow, pressing soft kisses into her inner thigh while her breaths stabilize.
When I lift my head, she’s staring at the canopy.
Her eyes are unfocused. She’s undone. Her hair spreads across the moss, the freckles on her collarbone rising and falling with her breaths.
I burn every detail into my brain.
She exhales a sound that’s half sigh, half laugh. The kind that means, come here.
I go to her.
She kisses me deeply, her tongue sliding against mine without hesitation.
She doesn’t flinch at the taste of herself on my mouth.
She kisses me harder, her fingers curling behind my neck.
The unapologetic directness of it makes me want her so intensely my vision narrows until all I see are the gold flecks in her eyes.
Her hand slides down my chest, my stomach, until it wraps around my cock.
I exhale hard and let my eyes close. Her grip is firm and confident.
Her thumb glides across the head in a slow circle that draws a groan out of me.
She strokes me with the same deliberate focus she brings to everything.
She understands my responses, adjusts pressure, and finds the rhythm that causes me to fall apart.
My hand skims between her thighs, where she’s slick and swollen. I circle her clit with light, teasing pressure, and the sharp breath she exhales tells me exactly how tormenting patience can be for her, too.
We stay like that for a little while. Face to face.
Breathing each other’s air. Hands working each other in a rhythm that joins us together without discussion.
The intimacy borders on unbearable. I can see every flicker of sensation cross her face.
She can see every expression on mine. There’s nowhere to hide.
But neither of us is trying to.
Rhiannon shifts beneath me. She reaches for my hip, then my shoulder, and pulls. She’s not flipping us or positioning herself for tactical advantage.
She’s pulling me down over her.
The significance of this registers in my mind like a flare shooting up into the dark sky. Last time, she was on top. She needed control then because everything else was in chaos. She rode me like she was proving something. And I let her, because she needed that.
Now she’s encouraging me to have dominion over her body. She’s wrapping her legs around me, settling beneath me with her golden-brown eyes looking up into mine with an openness that could cost her more than any fight ever has.
She’s choosing to be mine.
For a woman like Rhiannon — a true warrior who holds the line when everyone else breaks — this isn’t surrender. This is the bravest thing she’s done since I’ve known her.
I settle between her thighs with a carefulness that I hope communicates what words can’t. I brace on one forearm, guiding myself to her entrance, and pause there. The tip of my cock presses against her heat, not pushing in. A question lingers in my eyes. Another chance to choose.
Rhiannon wraps her legs around my waist and pulls me in.
I enter her slowly. It’s a long, steady movement that lets us both feel every inch.
Her eyes close and her lips part on a silent exhale.
My forehead drops to hers, and for a moment we’re completely still.
Bonded. The fullness, the closeness of being inside her, it coheres into a sensation so right that something in my chest gives way.
We begin to move together.
Slowly. Purposefully. In one, fluid rolling motion. My hips draw back and push forward in long, deep strokes. Rhiannon matches me, her hips rising to meet each thrust, her hands gripping my back. Every motion feels intentional, and I pour everything I can’t say into it.
My mouth finds the sensitive spot below her ear that I remember from last time. I press my lips there and whisper against her skin, broken and honest.
“You’re everything.”
I shift my angle, making a small adjustment in response to the catch in her breath, the digging of her nails, and each thrust glides across a spot that makes her gasp.
Her nails bite harder into my shoulders.
She breathes my name, gasping and unraveling, and hearing that nearly makes me lose it entirely.
We find a pace that builds. It’s still not rushed, but insistent now, urgent in depth rather than speed. Her legs tighten around my waist. Her hand slides to the base of my skull, her fingers threading into my hair.
We kiss, but keep breaking apart because neither of us can maintain focus on anything but the sheer pleasure. We breathe against each other’s mouths in the space between us, our foreheads pressed together, eyes half-open, watching each other fall apart from inches away.
Rhiannon breaks first.
I sense it before I hear it. Her inner walls narrow in rhythmic waves, and then there’s the sound. A moan pulled from behind her sternum, raw and unguarded, rises from her through the trees without her trying to stifle it.
She lets me hear it.
She lets me see her. Her eyes half-closed, throat exposed, every defense stripped away. Moonlight glints off the sweat on her collarbone. Her brow is creased not in pain but in total immersion.
I already know that this memory of her will outlast everything else I’ve ever seen.
Her body pulls me in so deep I lose the boundary between where I end and she begins, and the sensation drags me over the edge.
I bury myself to the hilt and come with her name on my lips, shuddering against her. The orgasm empties me completely, not just in the physical sense, but in the release of some reservoir of loneliness I’ve carried so long I forgot it was there.
Then, still inside her, my face pressed against her neck, there’s a feeling I can’t explain.
It’s like something finally settling into place, like a puzzle piece clicking into the spot it was always meant for.
A rhythm that isn’t mine is beating in perfect sync with my own, in my chest, my throat, and every other inch of skin that’s pressed against hers.
I can’t tell which heartbeat belongs to me.
There’s just one beat, shared, locked together like two frequencies finding each other along the same wavelength.
It should alarm me, but it doesn’t.
I tuck it somewhere in my mind between impossible and of course. It’s like gravity in the way it just is.
I could overthink it, but I hold her tighter instead.