Past Tense #2
I took one breath. “I ended it.”
The line went so hot I almost stepped back.
Mine.
This time, the word came with heat, with hunger, and with relief so violent it didn’t feel like relief at all.
“Say it,” he said.
My pulse moved into my throat. “Dominic.”
“Say it for me.” An aggressive plea.
I had just ended a four-year relationship. I should’ve asked for space. Tea. One uninterrupted hour to feel like a decent person.
Instead, I looked at the dragon in his eyes and handed him the sentence he was asking for. “He’s past tense.”
Dominic’s eyes closed. When he opened them he asked, “And I am?”
Everything else fell back as I looked at him. At the control in his hands and the dragon in his eyes.
“You’re here,” I said.
His nostrils flared once. “No.”
“No?” I said.
He crossed the room in three steps and stopped six inches from me. Not touching me but I felt his heat anyway.
“Yours,” he said.
“Dominic—”
“I am yours, Catalina. The bond does not work the way the dining hall made it look. You are not mine because I said it in a room in front of witnesses. I am yours because I put myself in your hands and cannot take myself back.” His voice dropped.
My breath left me.
His hand came to my jaw, hot and steady. He kissed me first on the mouth. Lightly. Reverently.
Then he tilted my head, and my pulse jumped because I thought he meant to kiss the bite mark at the left of my throat.
He didn’t kiss it.
His mouth stopped just over the mark, and his tongue touched it instead.
The wave broke from there. The same heat that had taken me in the dining hall, but changed by the room, the closed door, the bed at the backs of my knees. No council. No cameras. No hundred and twenty witnesses.
Just him. Just me. Just the bond opening under my skin like it had been waiting for permission.
Pleasure rose so fast my breath caught on the way out. His hand moved to my stomach, palm flat and heavy, fingers spread wide. I felt the size of him. I didn’t feel trapped.
He was steadying me, holding me there, not holding me down.
I came hard, my hands finding purchase in his hair as a sound climbed my throat and broke before I could stop it.
My thighs locked, my back came off the bed, and the bond rang through me: a long, bright note that wasn’t only mine, striking the inside of my ribs and rolling outward, finally finding its shape.
For a moment, there was only breath. Mine, uneven. His, controlled.
Then he lifted his head. I saw his mouth, his vertical eyes, and the satisfaction he hadn’t quite managed to hide.
He knew exactly what he had done to me.
“Dominic.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be smug.”
“I am not smug.”
Liar.
“I am thorough.”
He undressed me the rest of the way with the same controlled possession he brought to everything else. His hands moved over fabric and skin like he was uncovering territory he already knew was his.
Then he slowly undressed himself. The belt came first. Then the buttons. His shirt went to the floor in a clean fold, because even now Dominic Graves couldn’t quite surrender order to chaos.
I watched him.
I watched the breadth of his shoulders, the hard line of his chest, the pale scars crossing his skin like a language I hadn’t learned yet.
I watched the cut of his hips, the long muscle of his thighs, the sheer, unfair size of him as he stood there with dragon eyes and human hands and a restraint that looked thinner by the second.
The bond pulled tight and hot.
Mine, it said. Not as a word but as a deep ache.
Dominic’s gaze dropped over me, and the air changed. The man was still there. The discipline. The careful hands. But the dragon had moved closer to the surface, possessive and silent and very certain about the bed behind me.
He guided me back toward it, not pushing, not taking, just moving with that unbearable patience until the backs of my knees touched the mattress.
Then he followed me down.
The mattress dipped under his weight, and every part of me noticed.
He took his time. Took me apart by degrees, his hands at my hips and his mouth working in patient, unhurried pressure. His attention settled on me as intently as if he were sighting a weapon.
Every shift landed. Every place my body answered before I could catch up. He learned me.
He watched the muscle in my thigh jump and chose to do that again. He found the pulse at the back of my knee with his thumb and ran it slow until I was breathing through my mouth and gripping the sheet for purchase.
I laughed once unsteadily.
He looked up. His mouth wet. His eyes very black in the low light. “Little spy.”
“That isn’t my name.”
“It is accurate.”
“It’s rude.”
“It is mine.” He moved down again.
He knew now what would unmake me, and the infuriating man was choosing exactly when to use it.
He spread me open with unhurried patience, which should’ve been illegal in a man with that mouth. Two fingers slid into me as his tongue found my clit, and the second orgasm built slowly, dragged out of me by his hands, his mouth, and the bond humming through every nerve I had.
My fingers tightened in his hair. My back arched off the bed.
I said his name, not quietly and not with any self-control.
Dominic didn’t stop. He worked me through it with the same steady attention, holding the pace as the pleasure crested, broke, and caught again in a smaller aftershock I didn’t see coming. It hit me on the way down and cracked open something in my chest I had been carrying closed for weeks.
When he came back up, he took his time.
His mouth moved over me in a slow, deliberate path: the inside of my knee, the crease of my hip, the flat of my stomach where his hand had held me earlier. Then my ribs, the space between my breasts, my collarbone.
By the time he found my mouth, I was already reaching for him. He kissed me, and I tasted myself on his tongue.
He braced above me on his forearms. The heavy length of him pressed against me, hot and thick.
He didn’t move yet. He only watched me and waited. The discipline showed in him. His shoulders shook with it. The bond beat through him like a second pulse, and I felt it answer in my own chest. Two animals trying to hold still.
I nodded and only then did he move.
He pushed into me slowly, filling me one careful inch at a time. The stretch pulled a sound out of me I hadn’t meant to make, and he stopped halfway, every muscle in him locked. Waiting. Letting me adjust around him.
His mouth touched my temple. “Catalina.”
“Yes.”
“You are mine.”
My breath went thin. “I understand,” I said.
His jaw tightened, and his breath came hot against my hair. “Say it.”
I met his eyes. “I’m here. With you.” Not what he wanted but what I could give.
For a second he went still. Then he exhaled, rough, a sound I felt in his chest more than I heard. “That is enough, for now.”
He rocked the rest of the way into me, and the bond went white at the edges.
Then he moved. Slowly. Deeply.