Epilogue #3
"I need you inside me." This is Zara, my Zara, the woman who has seen every broken piece of me and stayed anyway. "I need to feel you. It's been—"
“I know how long it's been.”
“Then stop talking,” she begs sweetly.
I kiss her. Deep and messy and without finesse, because we don't have time for finesse.
Her tongue meets mine. Her nails rake down my back.
She's fumbling with my belt buckle and I'm kicking off my clothes and then there's nothing between us but heat and want and three days of stolen glances across a stretch of sand.
My hand finds the back of her knee. Hikes her leg up around my hip. The head of my cock presses against her and she's wet. I slide the tip through her folds just to hear the sound she makes.
“Mikhail, please.”
“Please what?”
"Don't make me say it."
“Say it.”
Her defiant, desperate, daring eyes meet mine.
“Fuck me.”
I push inside her in one slow, unrelenting stroke.
Zara's back arches off the mattress. Her mouth opens but no sound comes out, just a rush of air, and her fingers dig into my shoulders with enough force to leave marks. I hold still for a heartbeat. Two. Letting her adjust. Letting myself feel every inch of her, hot and tight and home.
Then I move.
The rhythm is urgent but not careless. We know each other's bodies too well for carelessness. I angle my hips the way I know she likes, and her leg tightens around me, and the little sounds she makes—half-moan, half-whisper—drive me toward the edge faster than I want to go.
"Look at me," I rasp.
Her brown eyes are glassy as she looks at me, her lips parted, her bronze skin flushed darker across her cheeks and chest. She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
I've told her this before. I'll tell her again.
I'll keep telling her until my voice gives out and then I'll find another way to say it.
She sees something in my face. Her expression shifts—softens, opens, becomes something so raw and real that I almost have to look away.
"I love you," she says. It's barely a breath.
The words hit me like they always do. Like a punch and a gift and a reminder that I don't deserve this, deserve her, deserve any of it. But I'm too selfish to let it go.
"Come for me." My thumb finds her clit, circles it with the pressure I've learned by heart. "Now. Right now."
Her body obeys before her mind catches up.
She clenches around me—a flutter, then a cascade—and I feel her orgasm rip through her like current through a wire.
Her cry is muffled against my shoulder. Her nails break skin.
The sensation of her pulsing around my cock shatters whatever restraint I had left, and I follow her over the edge with a groan that I bury in her hair.
We lie there. Tangled. Breathing hard. The surf outside keeps its steady rhythm, and somewhere in the cabin, Soren sleeps on.
*****
THE END