Chapter 11 #2
His mouth moves down my body. Not rushing.
Mapping. His lips find the curve of my breast and close around the peak, the suction soft and steady, his tongue circling the hardened nipple in slow, deliberate strokes that pull heat down through my belly and between my legs.
He stays longer than need requires. His mouth on one breast and his hand on the other, thumb tracing wet circles, and the dual sensation builds in long, rolling waves that I feel in my thighs, in the curl of my toes against the sheets, in the wetness gathering between my legs where his body will be soon.
His mouth continues down. Across my ribs.
Along the line of my hip. The inside of my thigh, where the skin is thin and sensitive and his breath alone makes my legs open wider.
I'm wet enough that I can feel it on my inner thighs, my body's verdict arriving ahead of my mind's permission, the same way it's arrived every time this man has put his hands on me.
When his mouth reaches between my thighs, the first stroke of his tongue is slow and reverent and I want to hate the reverence because it's easier to come for a man who's taking than for a man who's giving.
He parts me with his tongue and licks from my entrance to my clit in one long, flat pass, and the sound I make is quiet and involuntary and more honest than anything I've said out loud tonight.
He works me with his mouth the way he works me with everything: thoroughly, with the intent to leave nothing undiscovered.
His tongue circles my clit in slow, firm strokes while two fingers slide inside me and curl against the front wall, pressing and stroking the spot that makes my hips lift off the sheets.
But the pace is different. There's no teasing withdrawal.
No controlled edging, no proving he can hold me at the brink.
He gives me everything, steady and generous, his mouth and his fingers working in rhythm, and I keep waiting for the pullback, the moment he withholds to prove he can, and it doesn't come.
The generosity is the cruelty. He's giving me everything because he thinks it might be the last time, and the kindness of a man who doesn't do kindness is the most devastating weapon he's ever aimed at me.
The orgasm builds like a tide instead of a wave, rising slow and deep until it crests through me in long, shuddering pulses that lock my thighs around his head.
I don't try to control the sound that comes out of me.
I'm too busy trying to control the thing behind it, which is grief, which is want, which is the terrifying recognition that I am in love with a man whose family killed my sister.
He stays with me through all of it. His mouth gentles but doesn't leave, drawing the last aftershocks out until my body goes loose and heavy against the sheets.
He rises over me and I pull him down. His body settles onto mine, skin to skin, and the weight of him is the most grounding thing I've felt in weeks.
He's hard against my thigh, the heat of him searing against my skin, and when I reach between us and wrap my hand around his cock, the thickness of him in my fist makes my breath catch.
He's hot and rigid and the pulse under my fingers is fast, faster than his composure suggests, and the sound he makes against my throat when I stroke him is raw and quiet and honest.
I guide him to my entrance. The blunt head of him presses against me, and I'm so wet the pressure slides through slick heat without resistance.
He pushes inside slowly, filling me by inches, and the stretch of him is a deep, consuming fullness, the thick heat of him parting me open and seating itself behind my ribs.
Each inch is its own event, his hips pressing forward in long, gentle thrusts that open me around him until he's buried to the hilt and I can feel every inch of him inside me, the heavy, intimate pressure of a man who fits like he was designed to take up exactly this much space.
His forehead rests against mine. His breathing is unsteady. His hips are still, his whole body trembling with the restraint of staying deep and not moving, feeling me around him, the wet heat of my body gripping him completely.
"There you are," I say, because the face I'm looking at is the face I've been looking for since the first night.
No composure, no calculation, no professional surface.
Just a man inside a woman he's terrified of losing, holding still because the stillness is the only way he knows how to say the thing his mouth won't form.
He starts to move. Long, slow strokes, the full length of him withdrawing until I ache with the emptiness and then returning, filling me again, the head of him dragging against my front wall on every pass.
His pace is the pace of a man who has decided to make this last, and the decision is command, not request, his body setting the terms the way it always does.
I try to speed him up. My hips roll against his, pulling him deeper, demanding urgency, because urgency would make this feel like something I know how to survive. He catches my hip with one hand and pins it to the mattress.
"Slow."
The word is quiet and absolute.
It carries every ounce of the man who said Sit and Look at me and Not a chance. The alpha commanding tenderness the way he commanded fury.
The command strips me of the last defense I had, which was pretending this was just bodies.
I wrap my legs around his hips and stop fighting the pace. My hands find his back, tracing the scratch marks I left there, and I feel him shudder at the touch, the ridges of torn skin sensitive under my fingertips.