23. Chapter 23 #2
It builds low, and it builds slow, and then it isn’t slow at all.
I get one palm flat against the warm stone wall above my head and push.
My other hand finds his wrist—not to move it, just to hold on to the thing that’s doing this to me—and the wave goes through me in one long pull.
My thighs shudder with it, and I bite down on my own lip so the whole floor of the stores doesn’t hear about it.
He works me down slowly and stops before it turns into too much.
“Enough?”
“For about a minute. Come here.”
He comes up over me. I get my hands on his belt and get it open and shove the rest of it off him. Then he’s bare against me the whole length of my body, and the difference in us is everywhere—my heat, his cold, and nothing between them.
I take his cock in my hand. It’s cool and heavy, thick enough that my fingers don’t meet around it, and his stomach goes tight under my forearm.
“You’re not going to be able to do that slowly,” he says.
“Watch me.”
I push him over onto his back.
He goes. He watches me do it, and he lets it happen. I swing my leg across him and kneel up over his hips. This is how she had him. On his back, under my hands, my hair coming down over both of us—and this time I’m the one looking down at it.
“This is how it was,” he says. “The first night.”
“Then let me have it properly.”
I take him in by degrees. It’s a stretch, and it’s a real one, and I go carefully, my hands flat on his chest, and he holds my hips and lets me set every inch of it.
Cold going into heat. My whole body closes around him and tightens.
Then it gives, and I sink the rest of the way, and neither of us moves.
“Kalli.”
“I’m here.”
“I know, princess,” he says. “I’m just checking.”
Then I move, and I keep it slow the way I wanted, and I keep my eyes open for all of it.
I watch his face. I watch his jaw go tight, then let go, then go tight again.
His fingers are cold on the two bruises at my hips, and I push down into them harder.
The sound he makes is one I’ve never heard out of him, unguarded, and I’d trade a lot to hear it again.
Somewhere in it, I lean down, and my mouth finds his throat.
The skin there is smooth. There’s nothing under it—no pulse, no movement, nothing at all—and my teeth are set against it before I’ve decided anything.
Something under my sternum wants me to close them.
It wants a mark on him where a mark would show over a collar, and it wants it so badly that my jaw shakes with holding it open.
It isn’t hers. That’s what stops me cold in the middle of everything. She’s quiet under my ribs, exactly where I put her, and this is coming out of me.
He goes completely still under me.
He doesn’t pull away. His hand comes up and spreads across the back of my head and holds my mouth exactly where it is. For two seconds, he doesn’t move, and Gideon Crowe always moves.
“Do it,” he says. It comes out of him ragged.
I don’t.
I put my lips there instead, open, and hold them against the place where his pulse would be, and I feel his hand shake once against my scalp.
Then he sits up under me and gets an arm across my back and pulls me down onto him hard, and slow is finished.
I get my knees under me and take him at a pace neither of us chose.
His hands are on my hips. His mouth is at my collarbone.
I ride him until my thighs are shaking, and the whole narrow bed has moved a hand’s width across the floor.
“Gideon!” I choke out. I finish first, saying the name nobody else uses. He goes a few strokes later with his face pushed into my shoulder and both arms locked around my back, and I hold his head there and feel every second of it happen to him.
We stay wrapped around each other a long while. My heat goes into him. His cold comes back into me. Somewhere in the middle we end up the same temperature. I didn’t know that could happen, and I don’t say it out loud in case saying it ends it.
Then he lies back and takes me with him, and I end up on my side against his chest with his arm over me and the lamp burning down in its niche.
“The man on the stairs,” he says into my hair. “Aldis. He came past this door twice today.”
“Checking on you?”
“Checking the bar. Hesper says they were talking about locking me in here. I think it offends him that nobody’s used it.”
“Aldis has opinions about everything. He didn’t speak to my mother for a month once, over the correct way to store a spear.”
“Who won?”
“Aldis. Nobody has ever beaten Aldis on the subject of spears.”
He laughs. It goes through his chest and into my back. I’m collecting his laughs now. They’re the warmest part of him.
His hand rests open over my hip. My eyes want to close, and I won’t let them, because sleep costs hours and I’ve already lost enough hours that should have been spent in bed with this man.
“Gideon.”
“Mm.”
“When a job ends. What do you do after?”
His hand doesn’t move.
“I go back to my office,” he says.
“You have an office?” Somehow, I never imagined that.
“I do. There’s a desk and a chair. I write up the file, I close the ledger, and I wait for the next name to come across it.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all. It’s a good system.”
I want to ask him what happens when the system doesn’t work. When the job is over but it’s not supposed to be. I don’t.
His arm comes tighter over me, barely, just enough to feel through my back.
I stay until the lamp is nearly out.
Then I dress in the dark. He watches me do it from the bed and doesn’t ask me to stay. I don’t ask him anything either. At the door I lift the inside bar myself, quietly, and he lets me.
“Sleep,” I tell him.
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Try.”
The hallway is cold after that room. I go up through the sleeping mountain the way I came, barefoot, past the grain stores, up the stairs with my palm on the warm stone.
My legs don’t work properly. My mouth tastes of him.
My family name is cut over these doorways, and I’ve just come from a vampire’s bed though I know my mother sees him as staff.
I don’t yet know how to be both of those women at once.
On the third level, the lamp in the alcove has been put out.
It was burning on my way down. Somebody has come along this passage between then and now and put it out, quiet enough that Gideon and I never heard a footfall. Then again, we had other things on our minds.
I stand in the dark beside the dead lamp and listen.
Nothing moves. Nobody breathes. If someone is standing back in one of the side passages, they are better at being still than I am.
I climb the rest of the way to my suite, and I don’t run, because the Heir of the Aldrake does not run in her own halls.
My boots are where I left them by the bed. I shut my door and stand against it in the dark with my hand still on the wood.
I hold my breath.
Minutes tick by.
Just as I’m about to tell myself to stop being paranoid and lie down, footsteps move off down the stone hallway.