Chapter 7 #2
He laid me down on the wide rug before the fire, the candles bright around us, the night air cool from the open doors and his hands and his mouth warm everywhere they went.
And he kept his word — he took all the time, unhurried and reverent, peeling away the last of my clothes and then just looking at me in the firelight like I was a thing he couldn't believe he got to keep, his eyes traveling over every soft curve I'd once hidden and now, with him, never wanted to.
"There's my queen," he said, low and rough, and the old shame had nowhere left to live under a gaze like that.
He took his time getting there. He started at my mouth and didn't leave it for a long while, kissing me slow and deep until I'd gone pliant and breathless under him, and only then did he begin to move — the line of my jaw, the soft place below my ear that made me shiver, the column of my throat.
He closed his mouth over my breast, hot and unhurried, his tongue circling until I gasped and fisted my hands in his hair, and he stayed there, taking his time, his beard rough against tender skin, learning the catch of my breath and chasing it.
His hands never stopped — mapping the dip of my waist and the flare of my hips, the full weight of me filling his palms like a man memorizing the only road home.
Where his mouth went, warmth followed; where it left, the cool autumn air rushed in, and the contrast made me arch into him with a sound I didn't recognize as mine.
He pressed a kiss to the soft curve of my stomach — the place I'd spent a lifetime apologizing for — and held it there, reverent, and then he moved lower.
He worshipped me the way he'd promised, the first night and every night since — but tonight he was even slower, even more thorough, like a man with nowhere else in the world to be.
He settled between my thighs and parted me with his hands and put his mouth on me, and I came up off the rug with a cry he gentled with one broad palm spread flat across my belly.
He held me there at the edge for what felt like forever, his tongue and his fingers working me in concert, reading every tremble and answering it, drawing the pleasure out long and tight and unbearable until I was begging — actually begging, his name and please tangled together — and the firelight swam gold behind my closed eyes and the cool air kissed my heated skin and somewhere out in the dark the chickens settled and a single late cricket sang.
Only when I was past every fear and every guard, shaking apart against his mouth, did he rise over me and settle between my thighs and press his forehead to mine.
"Eyes open," he breathed, the blunt heat of him notched against me, his whole body trembling with restraint. "I want you with me. The whole way."
And then he pushed into me — slow, deep, deliberate, every inch of it a vow being sworn — and I felt the stretch and the heat and the staggering fullness of him drawn out until we were both shaking, his groan rough against my throat, my nails dragging down the ink and scars of his back.
He set a rhythm that built like a tide coming in, each unhurried stroke hitting some place that made the breath leave me, his hips rolling into mine, his eyes locked on mine the whole way.
He told me things in that low rasp, broken pieces of the future, his mouth at my ear: I'm gonna marry you.
I'm gonna fill this house. I'm gonna give you a kingdom, Brynn, you hear me, a whole kingdom — and I clung to him, met him, gave him back everything, my body climbing toward his with every measured thrust. The coil low in my belly drew tighter and tighter until I couldn't hold it, and when it finally crested it took us both at once — my name and his tangled together, his rhythm breaking deep and desperate as he buried himself to the hilt, his arms shaking where they braced around me, his face in my neck as we shattered and held on and rode it out wrapped in each other and the gold firelight and the cool autumn night.
He didn't let me go after. He gathered me against his chest, both of us boneless on the rug, his heart slamming under my cheek, and he pulled a blanket from the couch over us and tucked it close and pressed his lips to my hair and stayed.
"A kingdom," I murmured, half-laughing, wholly wrecked. "You can't just promise a girl a kingdom."
"Watch me." His arm tightened. "I've got a house, and land, and a club full of people who'd die for me, and starting tonight all of it's yours.
That's a kingdom, Brynn. And you're gonna be the best queen it's ever had.
" He tipped my chin up so I'd look at him in the firelight.
"You spent your whole life building families for other people.
I'm gonna spend the rest of mine making sure you finally get one of your own.
" His voice went rough again. "Starting with me.
Tonight. In this house. You're home now.
You understand me? You're done being everybody's helper. You're home."
"I don't know how to stop," I admitted, into his chest. "Helping. Being useful. It's the only way I ever learned how to be worth keeping. I'm scared that if I stop, you'll—" I couldn't finish it.
"I'll what." He said it gently, but he made me look at him. "Say it. Whatever the old voice tells you. Say it out loud so I can kill it."
So I said the thing I'd never said to anyone. "I'm scared that if I stop being useful, there won't be anything left worth loving. That the usefulness was the whole thing. That underneath it I'm just—" my voice broke— "the woman somebody tried to find attractive."
Declan was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had gone low and fierce and absolutely certain.
"Listen to me. I didn't fall for what you do.
I fell for how you laugh when you forget to guard it.
The way you argue with me. The face you make at bad coffee.
The way you went quiet and brave on that podium.
I have never once, not for a single second, needed you to be useful to me, Brynn.
I need you to be here. That's the whole job.
That's the only job. And the man who said that thing to you—" his jaw flexed— "wasn't trying to find you attractive.
He was failing to be a man worth your attention.
Two different things. You spent a marriage thinking the lack was yours. It was never yours."
I cried then, the ugly kind, the kind I never let anyone see, and he held me through it and didn't try to stop it, just murmured I've got you, I've got you, you're home into my hair until it passed and I came out the other side lighter than I'd been in twenty years.
I looked up at this man — this dangerous, gentle, brilliant, humbled king who'd looked at every weapon he owned and decided that I was the most powerful thing he'd ever held — and I felt the last brick of the fortress I'd built around my own heart come loose and fall away.
I'd spent thirty-five years certain I was the kind of woman a man kept around for her usefulness and never her self. The kind you tried to find attractive. The big girl with the big heart, overlooked and self-contained, fixing everyone's family because she'd given up on having her own.
And now I lay wrapped in a blanket and a king's arms in a candlelit farmhouse that was about to be my home, claimed out loud, promised a kingdom, home for the first time in my entire life.
"Okay," I whispered, and the word held everything. "I'm home."
Declan kissed my forehead, slow and certain, and I felt him smile against my skin.
"Damn right you are," he said, his arms warm and certain around me. "My queen."
The candles burned low. The fire settled. Outside the open doors, the stars wheeled over a kingdom I was about to inherit, and for the first time in my life I fell asleep in someone's arms without once thinking about who needed me in the morning.
Because for once, the answer was: him.
And that was a thing I was finally, after a whole life of giving, allowed to keep.
I think that was the moment it became real to me — not the yes, not the ring we'd buy later, but this: drifting off warm and claimed and unafraid, with nothing on my list for the morning except waking up beside him and doing it all again.