Chapter 21 #3
There’s a crack.
Cayzor rears up off me with a roar that shakes the whole forest.
And I lie there in the wet grass with my heart going and think, quite clearly: oh no, I have broken my husband’s hand at our wedding.
He looks at his finger.
It is at a bad angle. It is at a really bad angle.
He looks at me.
And Cayzor of Eighteen — the most feared male on this planet, the male who hasn’t smiled since he was nineteen rotations old — bares every fang he has in something that is unmistakably a grin, and says:
“Mine.”
“Yours,” I gasp.
And he comes down on me with a broken finger and doesn’t stop.
The tunic goes. He takes it off me in one movement and I’m naked in the green dark under him and the air is cool everywhere and he is hot, he’s furnace-hot, and every place his skin meets mine burns.
“Mara.” My name comes out of him wrecked. “Mara — “
“I know.”
“I don’t — “ His whole body is shaking with the effort of holding still. “Tell me if I — “
“Cayzor.” I get both hands on his face. “I’m not made of glass. Stop being careful.”
That’s the thing I hold onto, even fevered, even out of my mind — thirty-one rotations and this male has never touched anyone. He doesn’t know what he’s doing and he is ferociously determined to do it well, and the combination is going to end me.
His mouth goes everywhere. My throat, my collarbone, my breasts — he spends a long time there, groaning, and I arch up into him and hear myself make a sound I’ve never made.
His claws are enormous and he keeps them curled away from my skin the whole time, using the backs of them, the pads, the flats, careful in a way that shouldn’t be possible for something in this state.
And then he moves down my body and stops, and I feel him go still between my thighs.
“Cayzor?”
“I want to taste you,” he says, and it isn’t a question, and there’s something almost desperate in it. “I’ve wanted — for nine moon cycles I’ve — “
“Yes.”
He puts his mouth on me and I come apart embarrassingly fast.
There’s no dignity available. None. He licks into me with a groan like a male who’s been starving, and his hands come up under my thighs and open me wider, and he learns exactly what to do in about forty seconds because he’s been watching me for nine months and apparently paying attention to every sound I’ve ever made.
His tongue is long. Longer than a human’s. I find this out in a way that makes me shout.
I get a fistful of his braids and hold on and he doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow, doesn’t come up for air.
Something builds low and hard and enormous and I try to warn him and can’t form the words, and then it takes me — the whole thing, from my scalp to my feet, my back coming off the wet grass and his name coming out of me in pieces.
He works me through all of it. And then he lifts his head, and his mouth is shining, and he looks up my body at me with an expression of pure, staggered wonder.
“You made a sound,” he says hoarsely.
“I made a lot of sounds.”
“I’m going to think about that one for the rest of my life.”
“Come here,” I tell him.
He comes up my body. I get my legs around him — as far as they’ll go, which isn’t far — and I reach down between us and take him in my hand, and oh.
Okay.
I have been living with this male for nine months and I have wondered about this exactly as often as you’d expect, and I want to say for the record that no amount of wondering prepared me.
“Mara.” He’s gone rigid. “If you keep doing that this ends immediately.”
“That would be embarrassing for you.”
“Extremely.”
“Then you’d better — “
He notches himself against me and pushes in and whatever I was going to say leaves my head entirely.
He’s enormous.
He goes agonizingly slow and stops every time I make a noise until I get my heels into his back. By the time he’s fully seated I can feel him everywhere, in places I didn’t know existed.
He holds still above me. His arms trembling.
“You’re perfect,” I tell him. “Move.”
It’s not gentle after that. He starts slow and it doesn’t last, because he’s thirty-one rotations of dormancy coming apart at once, and he’s got one hand braced beside my head and the other splayed across my hip and he’s driving into me with a rhythm that puts sparks behind my eyes.
The forest goes away. The trees, the moons, the stream that isn’t a stream.
There’s just this male, and the sounds he’s making, and the wet slap of us, and the fever burning through both of us like a live wire.
“Mine,” he snarls.
He gets a hand between us and finds my clit with his thumb. Another orgasm rushes through me, clenching around him.
“I love you,” he says.
Right there. In the middle of it. In a voice I’ve never heard him use.
He drives in hard and holds. He throws back his head and lets out a thunderous roar. I feel him let go inside me, and the heat of it triggers something that rolls me straight into a third mini orgasm that I did not authorize and cannot survive.
And then we fall down together in the grass, exhausted and sweaty.
It’s the best sex of my life.