Chapter 29 #3
He held the pressure, watching her face, and she worked against his hand with a slow, specific rhythm, and when he shifted his thumb slightly, and the angle changed, she grabbed his wrist.
“Don’t you dare,” she said.
He moved his thumb back.
“Yes.” Her hips rose. “There. Don’t—” She stopped again, losing the thread of it.
He felt the shift in her, the way her breathing broke at intervals.
“Tell me,” he said.
She looked at him. “You know what I want.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Her mouth pressed together. The silence lasted exactly two seconds. Then: “Your mouth.”
He moved lower, and when he put his mouth on her, she cried out his name, and her hand came to the back of his head and pressed.
He followed the pressure. He paid attention to all of it: the tilt of her hips, the interval between sounds, the specific catch in her breathing when he held a particular angle.
When he found the angle that worked, he stayed on it.
She was not quiet about any of it. She was not trying to be.
“Right—” The sentence didn’t finish.
“You’re close,” he groaned, against her.
“I know I’m—” Another cut-off.
Her fingers tightened in his hair, not gently, and her hips strained against his forearm.
He kept the pressure and kept going, and she cried out: full and open, her thighs locking against his shoulders, keeping his head down.
He worked her through all of it until she pulled at his hair, and her grip finally loosened.
He lifted his head, every sinful part in him ravenous for more.
Heavens, he couldn’t get enough of her.
She lay there breathing hard, her hair spread across the pillow, looking like a goddess. He waited until she came back, his body straining for her still.
“Come here,” she slurred, sounding drunk on him.
He did not need to be told twice, and moved over her fully.
She pulled her knee up, and he positioned himself against her.
At last, he pressed in slowly, feeling her take him, the adjustment of it.
Annabelle exhaled steadily through the stretch, and he stopped twice to let her settle, watching her face for the shift from difficult to manageable.
“If it is too much for you, Belle, I—” He started to say, but she shook her head.
“No!” When she wrapped her leg around the back of his thigh and pulled, he understood.
He moved, and crying out, she put her hands in his hair and her mouth against his temple and breathed there, and he found the rhythm she wanted by feeling for it. Her hips rose to meet him with a small sound each time that worked its way through his restraint like heat through stone.
He held himself just short of where he wanted to be until she was past choosing about it, until the sounds she was making had gone lower and less deliberate.
“Look at me, Belle,” he said.
She obeyed, opening honey-brown eyes to look back at him. Her eyes dark, her shiny hair loose across the pillow. He held her gaze and moved deeper and watched her close her eyes again despite herself, and her nails raked once across his back.
“Again,” she said.
He gave her the same. He sat up to kiss her, one arm banded around her back, the other slipping between them to stroke where they joined. Her movements quickened, her inner muscles fluttering around him…
“Yes,” he growled, hungrier with each pulse of her, tightening around him.
When release claimed her, she cried out softly, clenching tight, body shuddering in long waves that pulled him after her. Pleasure surged through him, deep and consuming, as he spent himself inside her, his face against her hair, holding her close through every aftershock.
He rolled to his side and lay on his back.
The ceiling. The ordinary plasterwork of a room he had not been in enough to have learned it.
She lay beside him. Her hand came to rest on his chest, over his heartbeat. He covered it with his.
“Still fast,” she said.
“It will slow,” he said.
Outside, London was settling into its evening. A carriage on the larger street, the distant cry of a vendor, the city doing what the city did without reference to anything that had happened in this room. The light through the window had gone from afternoon to the flat grey of dusk.
She turned her head and pressed her mouth to his temple, and he turned to look at her.
Her hair was spread across the pillow. She looked entirely like herself—unhurried, particular, real—and he held the looking for long enough that she raised her eyebrows.
“What,” she said.
“Nothing,” he said, but her expression made clear what she thought of that answer.
“I just…I intend to spend a considerable amount of time making up for the past several months,” he said. “I want you to know that I am fully aware of the ground I have to cover.”
Her cheeks exploded in such a beautiful shade of pink, and she laughed, the brightness back in her eyes, differently now. “That is a lawyerly way to frame a declaration.”
“I am not a lawyer,” he said.
“No,” she agreed, and turned her hand under his so that their fingers laced together. “But you are mine.”
He was quiet with that for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”