Chapter 12 #3
His mouth closes over my breast, cool lips and the slow, deliberate press of his tongue circling my nipple until it tightens and my back lifts off the mattress.
He moves to the other breast and gives it the same attention, unhurried, taking his time, his hand sliding up the inside of my thigh while his mouth works.
He knows exactly what this is doing to me.
Every small catch of my breath. Every time my hips shift.
He is absolutely using that information.
His mouth moves lower. Across my chest. My stomach. He pushes my thighs apart and settles between them and looks up at me from there.
"Look at me," he says.
I do.
His mouth finds me, and the first cool press of his tongue against my center pulls a sound out of me that bounces off the stone walls, and I don't care even a little.
He works slowly, deliberately, tracing and circling, his tongue flat, then pointed, then circling in a pattern that my entire nervous system begins anticipating.
I try to close my thighs, but he pins them open. Both hands, cool fingers pressing firm into the soft skin of my inner thighs, holding me exactly where he wants me, and it’s absolutely driving me crazy.
He seals his mouth over my clit and sucks and my hips come entirely off the bed.
His hands are the only reason I stay connected to the mattress.
He slides two fingers inside me and curls them forward in a slow, deliberate press, and the combination of his mouth and his fingers and the bond carrying all of it simultaneously builds something at the base of my spine that I know is going to be significant.
He doesn't rush any of it. He works me with the same precision he brings to everything, reading every response and adjusting, finding the exact rhythm and pressure that has me fisting the bedding with both hands and breathing in short broken intervals.
Tonight, with the Fae blood in my system, the sensation has edges I don't normally have access to.
Everything is brighter. More immediate. His tongue and his fingers and the low gold light and the music still threading faintly through my bones, and I feel all of it at once, layered, and it is almost too much.
Almost.
He curls his fingers again, and his mouth seals tight, and I come apart with his name leaving my mouth and the walls blazing gold and my hands locked in his hair, and he works me through every last second of it, slow and thorough, until I am pulling at his shoulders.
"Now," I say.
"Celeste."
"Maximus. Now."
He moves up my body, cool skin dragging against warm, and looks at me for one long moment. Something in his face that isn't quite readable.
Then he pushes inside me.
Slow. One long unhurried stroke until he’s fully seated and we’re both holding very still, and I am aware of every point of contact between our bodies simultaneously. Cool and thick, and the stretch of him pulling every nerve ending I have to attention at once.
I breathe.
He waits.
"Move," I say.
He does.
He sets a pace that is deep and thorough and precisely calibrated, each stroke rolling forward from his hips with an angle that hits the same point inside me with a consistency that I would find almost clinical if it weren't for the fact that his jaw is tight and his shoulders are rigid with the effort of keeping it steady.
I can feel what holding that control is costing him.
I dig my nails into his back.
He drives deeper. His hands grip my hips and pull me into each stroke, and I wrap my legs around him and pull him closer, and the new angle pulls a sound from both of us.
His mouth drops to my throat. He drags his teeth along the vein there, slow, without breaking skin, and the bond flares so hard the room goes briefly white at the edges.
"Again," I say.
He does it again. Teeth at my throat and his hips keeping their rhythm and his thumb sliding between us to find my center, circling slow and steady while he moves inside me, and I am climbing again, the first release still warm in my bones and a second one building fast on top of it.
The Fae blood has made everything porous. The line between what I feel and what he feels is thinner than it has ever been, and I am getting both simultaneously, my own building pressure and the tight-reined want on his side of the bond, and the combination is staggering.
"Look at me," he says again. His voice has lost its smooth edge. He’s working to keep the pace.
I look at him. Gold light catching his jaw. Black eyes. The specific expression he gets when he’s losing control, and tonight I’m drunk and feel warm, and I hold his gaze and let him see everything on my face too, none of it hidden, and something shifts in his expression when I do.
His thumb presses firm. He drives deep. He says my name and I lock my legs around him and pull him closer, and we peak together, the bond flaring so bright it whites out behind my eyes for a long suspended moment, and the walls answer with gold, and I stop being aware of anything outside the two of us.
He settles beside me. His hand finds my hip. Cool fingers tracing slow and absent against my skin, the same line, over and over.
I have a thought that feels important.
It doesn't make it out.
The blood and the dancing and the night drag me under all at once, and I go without a fight, his hand still warm from me and the walls still glowing soft.