Chapter 38 — Rhiannon
His breath ghosts across my lips, and the last thread of my restraint snaps.
I crush my mouth against his and kiss him like I’m trying to fuse him to me, tasting the salt from my tears on both our lips.
My wolf doesn’t hold back. She lunges with a possessive hunger that floods my chest and tightens every muscle in my body, recognizing what my stubborn mind has protested for weeks. Mine. He’s mine.
I grab the front of his shirt and pull. The fabric tears straight down the center, buttons scattering across the stone floor with tiny pings.
I don’t apologize. He shoves my leather vest off my shoulders while I yank the ruined shirt down his arms, and we’re a tangle of desperate hands and snapping laces.
My tunic catches on my belt and he fumbles with the buckle.
I knock his hands away and wrench it free myself, pulling the tunic over my head and tossing it somewhere behind me.
When his bare chest presses against mine, the full force of his scent hits me like a wall.
It’s not the faint trace I catch from across the training yard or the ghost of cinnamon that clings to the corridors after he’s passed through them.
This is the hallmark of Ethan in its most concentrated and devastating form.
His musk is deepened by arousal, his skin fever-warm, his pulse pounding so hard it echoes against my own ribcage.
My wolf revels in it, drunk and greedy. Every sense I possess laps him up: his stuttering breath, his racing heart, the low sounds he can’t contain.
I guide him backward. He hits the mattress and I’m on top of him before he bounces, pinning his wrists above his head. Driven by pure instinct. I hover over him, my hair curtaining us, and for a moment I’m exactly what I’ve been trained to be: dominant, fierce, unbreakable.
Then, he looks at me.
Those jade eyes, wide and dark, hold nothing back. Vulnerable, but powerful in a way no weapon could ever make him. This is Ethan, stripped bare in every sense, giving himself over to me with trust so absolute it makes my heart ache.
My palms slide down his chest, tracing the cut lines of his abdomen, every ridge of pure muscle tightening beneath my touch.
My fingers descend further. I cup his balls in my palm, rolling them with exacting pressure, and the groan of desire that comes out of him sends a bolt of heat straight through my core.
I wrap my hand around his cock and stroke it once.
Slowly. From root to tip. His hips jerk up from the mattress and I press them back down with my forearm, holding him still while I begin stroking him again, setting a rhythm designed to unravel him thread by thread.
“Rhi—” He stops short when he catches my eye.
I hold his gaze as I lower my mouth onto his cock, inch by torturous inch, letting him watch every inch disappear.
The taste of him floods my tongue — savory sweetness with that undercurrent of cinnamon that I will never be able to separate from mine for as long as I live.
My already-sharp Lycan senses become as pointed as a blade’s edge.
I can hear the blood rushing through his femoral artery, his groans vibrate through his body and into mine, where my hand braces against his hip.
His pulse pounds like a relentless war drum, and I match it’s rhythm with the movement of my mouth, pulling him in deeper, hollowing my cheeks.
Through our fated bond — that incredible tether neither of us thought possible — his pleasure pours into me like liquid fire.
Raw, unfiltered sensation that mirrors my own courses through my body, pooling hot and low between my thighs until I’m aching with it.
Every sound he makes stirs the magma in my core to burn hotter.
His moans become my pulse. His tension becomes my hunger.
His fingers tangle in my hair, and the raw, worshipful look in his gaze tells me exactly how he sees me right now: powerful and devastating and pleasuring him.
My wolf relishes in the satisfaction of it.
He’s ours.
“Rhiannon, fuck—”
There’s urgency in his voice. I feel him cresting. His steady breaths become shreds of short, desperate gasps. His thighs tense beneath my hands. I sense the exact moment his body begins to tip over the edge, white-hot pressure building toward release.
Not yet, I say through our mind-link as I pull back.
The broken noise he makes is the most gratifying sound I have ever drawn from another living creature.
“You don’t get to finish yet.” I circle the head of his cock with my tongue and press my lips to it. It jumps beneath my touch. “Not until I say.”
His head drops back against the pillow. He lets out a strangled laugh. “You’re going to kill me.”
I flatten my tongue against the underside of his shaft and glide it upward in one long, tortuous lick from base to tip.
He clutches the sheets in his fists. I do it again, slower, tasting the bead of moisture gathered at the crown, letting our bond send every ounce of his torment into my own body, where it settles between my legs like a lit match.
The world tilts.
One second, I’m in control, my tongue against his cock, his pleasure reverberating through the bond like a plucked string. The next, his hands clamp around my waist and he tosses me sideways onto the mattress with a strength that I didn’t think could come from a human body.
My back hits the sheets and he’s holding himself over me before I’ve processed the reversal, his weight pressing me down, his knee between my thighs.
My wolf doesn’t snarl. She purrs.
“Your turn.” Two words: low and rough and laced with a tone of command that I have never once heard in Ethan Langley’s voice before. It’s neither request nor question, but a promise that sounds like a threat.
Oh.
His hands are all over me. Greedy. Demanding.
His palms drag down my ribs, his fingers digging into the curve of my waist with enough pressure to bruise.
He grabs my hips and yanks me closer, positioning me exactly where he wants me, and the sheer audacity of it sends a spike of heat so sharp through my center that my back arches off the bed.
His mouth finds my neck. He drags his teeth along my tendon, then his tongue follows the same path, hot and wet, tasting the salt on my skin. He bites down on the junction where my neck meets my shoulder, not hard enough to break skin, but hard enough that it draws a sharp breath out of me.
Both of his hands close over my breasts at once, kneading them with precise, possessive pressure.
He squeezes the base of each one while his thumbs roll over my nipples, working them with concentration that borders on aggression, and every nerve beneath his palms feels like it’s on fire.
I arch into his grip, but he pushes me back down.
He stares into my eyes, his breath ragged, his gaze stripped of every defense. “You are everything I could ever want, Rhiannon.”
He lowers himself, and his tongue traces a slow circle around my left nipple.
Agonizingly slow. Mapping the areola with flat, deliberate strokes while his thumb rolls the other to a stiff peak.
He switches, but moves at the same devastating pace.
His tongue and fingers caress me with the same measured patience that makes me want to grab his hair and force him where I need him.
Then his lips close over my nipple and suck so hard and with such relentless pressure that makes my vision white out.
My hips buck against his. A cry tears out of my throat that doesn’t sound like it belongs to a warrior. It’s fractured and pleading. He releases my nipple with a wet pop, but closes his mouth over the other, sucking with the same steady intensity, his teeth grazing the sensitive skin.
“Ethan—”
He traces a path down my stomach, his lips and teeth passing over the scar that curves along my ribs, a souvenir from a border skirmish three years ago. He kisses it like it’s sacred. Then his tongue drags across the sensitive skin below my navel and my hips roll on their own.
The scent of my own arousal reaches me, tangled with his cinnamon warmth, and the combination is intoxicating — a cocktail of desire that makes my head swim and my wolf keen.
His face settles between my thighs. His breath cools my slick skin and I grip the sheets.
“Tell me what you want, Commander,” he instructs.
Without waiting, his tongue parts me: light, precise, a delicateness that borders on cruel.
I gasp. “Don’t stop.”
“Like this?” His tongue flattens and drags up like a feather, slow and merciless.
“Harder.”
He obeys, observing me closely: every nerve, every response, adjusting pressure when my breath catches, pulling back when I get too close, building me in waves that crash and recede.
His fingers slide inside me, curling against the spot that makes my back bow off the bed, while his mouth seals over my clit and sucks.
My claws extend. The linen shreds beneath my fingers with a sharp tearing sound. A growl tears from my chest, more wolf than woman.
His tongue works me faster and his fingers press deeper as he worships me with a reverence that I can’t survive.
He pulls back just enough to speak against my soaked flesh. “Who’s the Commander now?” The satisfaction radiates off him, smug, prideful, and intoxicating.
His fingers curl harder. His tongue flicks once, precise as a blade.
“Come for me, Rhiannon. Right now. On my tongue.”
Not a request, an order. From a human. Directed at me.
My wolf doesn’t bristle. His tongue enters me again, and I implode.
The orgasm rips through me like a shockwave: intense, blinding, absolute. My thighs clamp around his head. My back lifts clean off the mattress. A howl tears from my throat, raw and primal, echoing off the stone walls as every muscle in my body seizes, then shatters.