20. Chapter 20
Crowe
The stove ticks. I put another log in it, though the room doesn’t need it.
She left ten minutes ago. Pulled her hand back from mine, stood up, walked into the snow with nothing on her feet and nothing over her shoulders.
I let her go. A woman who has spent a year behind bars gets to walk through any door she wants.
Doesn’t stop me from worrying though. She runs hot enough to sleep on bare stone in a snowstorm, and I’m still standing here counting minutes. The pacing has stopped, and now there’s no sound from outside. No crunch, no shift of weight. She’s standing still out there, which means she’s thinking.
I sit down in the bad chair and wait. Which is a bad idea, because it happens again:
Teeth going into my throat. Blood—mine—her palms braced on my chest, holding me down while she takes it—
I’m on my feet, and the chair is over behind me. I set it upright.
The door opens.
She comes in with snow on her shoulders. It melts before the door shuts. Her feet are bare on the plank floor, but she doesn’t move toward the stove.
Something is different.
I can’t place it. She’s standing with her weight even on both feet. Kalli leans. On walls, on truck doors, on one hip. She isn’t leaning on anything. She isn’t talking either. She’s been in this room five seconds without saying anything. Kalli always has something to say.
“Kalli?”
She looks at me. Her eyes are the same eyes. Gold center, dark ring around. But there’s a glow to them now. Twin sparks of fire.
“You’re back,” I say, because one of us has to say something ordinary and it isn’t going to be her.
She crosses the room. She doesn’t hurry. She just doesn’t stop. Then her hands are in the front of my shirt. Her mouth is on mine. My back hits the door. The handle finds my spine.
“Christ—”
She kisses me before I can finish the word.
Her mouth is hot. I knew that. I felt it once before, and I’ve spent every day since trying not to think about it. It’s hotter now. My own mouth is cold inside hers.
“Mm—” She breaks off the sound halfway and deepens the kiss. At this rate, I’m going to stop thinking clearly in about ten seconds flat.
I get a hand flat between us.
“Kalli.”
She stops. That surprises me. Her eyes come up to mine and hold there.
“I want this,” she says. “I have waited long enough.” She doesn’t say more. Her hands are tightening in my shirt, and she’s pulling me down again.
I stop holding back.
So does she. Not that she was from the start.
She takes my shirt off me fast and badly. Two buttons go. One pings off the stove and skids under the bed. The left cuff catches on my wrist and turns the sleeve inside out. I swear into her hair while she hauls at it. The seam gives before the button does.
“That was my good shirt.”
“You don’t need a shirt. Ever.” Her mouth is on my chest. “You should walk around like this all the time.” She nips my nipple, and my hand closes hard on her hip.
I’m pulling at her shirt now. It comes off over her head and snags on her chin. She drags it clear. Her hair comes down out of it, heavy, over her face and into my mouth when I kiss her.
Then my hands are on her, and everything else stops mattering.
She’s bare without the shirt, and her back is smooth. Skin over muscle, nothing between my palms and the heat of her. She runs hotter than the wall nearest the fire. My hands have been cool as stone for sixty years. When I spread them flat across her back, she pushes into them instead of away.
“Touch me.”
I do. Down her spine. Around her ribs. Up under the weight of her breast, and she arches into the cold of my palm and stays there.
She goes for my belt and can’t work the buckle one-handed. I focus on her jeans instead, getting them open and sliding my hand down until I’m cupping her mound.
“Yes,” she hisses as my fingers slide through her slick folds. She’s wet. She’s also burning. The heat comes off her against my fingers, and she stops breathing for a second, then starts again, rough.
“There.” She’s tugging her jeans further down, taking her underwear with them. She spreads her thighs. “Stay there.”
I do as she says, two fingers flat against her clit, learning what makes her move her hips. When I slide further and dip past her entrance, she takes it easily. Her head goes back against the door.
“Cold,” she says.
“Sorry.”
“No. It’s good. I like it.”
Her hand comes down over the back of mine. She presses it harder into herself and holds it, then moves my whole hand where she wants it. She’s telling me where to touch her. I’ve never been happier to be told.
I get her jeans all the way down her legs. She kicks one foot free and leaves the other tangled at her ankle. I take her by the hips and put her up on the table by the stove.
The wood is warm from the fire.
“Ah!” The backs of her thighs hit it, and the sound comes out of her before she can stop it.
I go down on my knees on the plank floor in front of her.
“What are—”
“Put your foot on my shoulder.”
She does. The other leg opens for me on its own.
She smells of woman and woodsmoke and warm stone. Then I put my mouth on her pussy and stop thinking about anything at all.
She’s hot enough there to tingle. My mouth has been cold since 1965, and the shock of the difference goes through my whole chest. She jerks against my face at the first contact.
“Oh!”
I hold her hips flat on the table. I work my tongue up through her, slow, until I find her clit.
“Yes! There.” Her hand is in my hair, pressing me closer.
My fangs are down. They came down somewhere between the door and the table. I keep them clear of her, careful, every second, and that care is most of what’s holding me together.
I go at her steadily. Flat tongue. Then the point of it. Then my mouth closes over her clit, sucking, and her hand comes down on my shoulder, nails digging in.
Her other hand finds the table edge. Her thighs shake against my ears.
“Yes! Fuck! Oh, God!” She’s loud.
I did not expect that from a woman who spent a year learning to make no noise. Every sound she makes goes straight down into my cock.
I put two fingers back into her while my mouth stays where it is. She comes the first time on both. Her whole body clenches down around my hand. The heat of her climbs against my face until staying there is genuinely difficult.
I stay there.
She’s still shuddering when she pulls at the back of my neck to lift me off.
I don’t lift off.
“Wait—” Her voice cracks. “Wait, you need to—”
I don’t need anything. I don’t remember when last I tasted a woman. Definitely not one like this. I’m not stopping now.
She figures that out about ten seconds later. Her hand goes loose on my neck. Her head goes back.
“God, please—” She doesn’t finish it.
“Mm,” I say against her, and go back to work.
The second one takes longer, and it lands somewhere different in her. She’s noisy through the whole build.
“Oh! Oh, oh, oh!”
Then at the top of it she goes silent, mouth open, both hands flat on the table behind her holding her weight up. Her heat spikes. I feel it on my mouth and my cheeks and along my forearms.
She sags. Her leg slides off my shoulder.
“I’m done,” she gasps.
“I’m not.” I get up off the floor and take her with me, arms around my neck, kicking at the jeans that are still tangled around one ankle.
We go for the bed, and we do it badly. Lips locked, hands everywhere. We land on the mattress in a tangle with the whole thing creaking under us.
She puts me on my back.
I start to sit up. Her hand lands flat on my chest and pushes me back down before I can stop her. I keep forgetting how strong she is. She has small hands and a narrow build, but there’s a creature within that could take me out if she wanted to.
“Too many clothes,” she mutters, stripping my pants off me. Then she’s astride me with her knees against my ribs and her thighs burning against my hips. She reaches down and takes my cock in her hand and holds it, feeling the temperature of it, and something in her face settles.
“You’re like snow,” she says. “Everywhere.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“No.” She shakes her head, looking down at where her hand is closed around my shaft. She slides the tip along her slit, and the muscles in my belly tighten.
“God,” I groan. I’m waiting to see steam rise between us. She moves her hips and sinks down an inch, hissing out a breath.
“So…so…good,” she murmurs as she sinks down further. She takes half of me and stops. Her breath goes out long. She’s tight enough that I feel her working around it.
“Slow,” I say.
“I know what I’m doing.”
She takes the rest of me in three long presses. On the third, she seats fully and her eyes close.
“Kalli,” I groan, a sound coming from my chest that I’ve never heard from myself before. I’ve been burned by sunlight, by runes, and once by an actual house fire. None of it prepared me for being inside a dragon.
“Move when you’re ready.”
She moves.
She sets her own pace, deep and unhurried. She adjusts the angle twice until she has what she wants and then she stays there. I lie under her and let her use me. I’ve been in control of things for as long as I can remember, but letting her take charge feels like the most natural thing in the world.
“You fit just right,” she moans, grinding her hips down against me, then leaning down to brush her lips against my forehead.
Her hair falls forward over my face. I gather it into a fist at the back of her neck and hold it.
She lets me. Holding it puts her throat above my mouth.
I press my lips there and feel her swallow.
My free hand moves down to grip her hip. The muscle works under the skin with every roll of her body, her movements growing bolder.
“Talk,” she says.
“About what?”
“Anything. I want your voice under me.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Say something less human.”
“Less human?” I frown.
Something’s wrong.
It arrives at the back of my head while she’s riding me, and I don’t want it there. She hasn’t said my name since she walked through the door. Not once. Kalli uses my name constantly.