27. Chapter 27 #2
The bedroom waited beyond, dark except for the fireplace.
Orange and gold light moved across the deep Carpathian stonework, catching in the carved bedposts and the heavy furniture brought from old places with older shadows.
Maksym carried me toward it without hurry.
I held him tighter. For once, I did not confuse being carried with being helpless.
Maksym did not lay me down at first.
He set me on the edge of the bed with a care that felt almost ceremonial, my feet touching the thick rug, the towel still wrapped around my body. Firelight moved over him in low gold, catching on the hard planes of his chest and the lean strength of his abdomen.
He took another towel from a chair beside the hearth and stood between my knees.
“Let me,” he said.
I nodded. He gathered my hair in his hands. He worked slowly.
First, squeezing water from the ends. Then blotting near my shoulders. Then lifting the heavy fall of it away from my neck so he could dry the roots without tugging. Section by section, he moved through the task with the grave concentration of a man disarming a bomb.
After the towel came a wide-toothed comb of dark polished wood. I had not seen him retrieve it. He began at the ends, patient with every tangle.
The comb moved through my hair in long, unhurried strokes. When he reached a knot, he stopped, held the section above it so my scalp would not pull, and worked it loose with almost insulting competence.
“You have done this before,” I said, my voice rough from crying.
His mouth curved faintly. “I have lived a long time.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the safest one.”
A small laugh escaped me.
His eyes lifted.
For a moment we simply looked at each other, and the bond warmed between us, pleased by the sound. My laugh had been rare enough lately that perhaps even old magic took notice.
He returned to my hair.
At my temples, his touch gentled further. He combed until my hair lay smooth and dark against my shoulders, until I no longer felt like a woman freshly dragged from grief, but one prepared, attended, seen.
Then he set the comb aside.
The towel loosened under his hands.
I did not clutch it closed.
That, too, was testimony.
Maksym watched my face as he drew it away, not my body first. Only when I held his gaze did his eyes lower.
The look that moved over me was so intense my breath caught, but it did not make me feel inspected.
It made me feel mourned and desired in the same breath.
As if he saw every place I had been diminished and every inch that had returned, and his hunger existed not despite the history but in defiance of it.
He laid me back against the deep charcoal bedding.
The sheets were cool beneath my heated skin. My hair spread over the pillows. The fire painted him in gold as he braced one hand beside my hip and lowered his mouth to my collarbone.
The first kiss was soft. The second was not.
He moved along the delicate ridge of bone with lips, teeth, and tongue.
Not biting hard enough to break the skin.
Not yet. Just enough pressure to remind me that pleasure had edges, and that edges did not have to be harm.
His mouth traveled to the hollow of my throat, then down over the upper curve of my breast.
I stopped breathing out of old habit.
His hand flattened over my ribs.
“Breathe, Grace.”
I did. The air shuddered in.
His mouth closed over my nipple.
Heat shot through me so sharply my fingers tangled in the bedding.
He took his time there, laving, sucking, drawing the peak tight, then soothing it with his tongue before moving to the other breast. His hand followed his mouth, cupping the fullness, thumb brushing where his tongue had been.
Maksym worshiped every restored curve like the Goddess had carved it for him personally, and he intended to write a prayer with his mouth.
He moved lower. Between my breasts. Over my sternum. Down my stomach.
He paused there.
His hands spread over the softness below my ribs, over the place that had once hollowed so badly I could count myself in bones.
He continued downward, over my hips, his palms shaping them with open appreciation.
My body responded with a directness that embarrassed and thrilled me.
Between my thighs, I was already wet. Not from shower water now.
From him. From the care. From the bond, open and humming.
From the devastating knowledge that I could want and be wanted without a bargain hidden inside the room.
Maksym kissed the crease of my hip.
Then he looked up at me. “Turn over.”
I did.
The bedding brushed my breasts as I rolled onto my stomach. I folded my arms beneath my head, cheek against my forearm, my hair sliding over one shoulder. Vulnerability moved through me in a brief cold line. My back exposed. My face turned away. Too many memories knew that posture.
Maksym’s hand settled at the nape of my neck.
Not restraining.
Present.
“I am here,” he said.
“I know.”
“You tell me if you want me to stop.”
“I know.”
His mouth touched the back of my neck.
The cold line dissolved.
He kissed down my spine one vertebra at a time, slow enough that anticipation gathered ahead of him.
His palms pressed flat against my sides, warm from the fire and his own restrained hunger.
He moved as if memorizing a sacred text beneath skin.
Shoulder blades. Spine. Waist. The rise of my backside.
He kissed and bit softly, hands spreading me, shaping me, praising without words the flesh that had returned to me.
When his mouth reached the curve where back became hip, I pressed my forehead into my arms.
Pleasure gathered low and heavy.
He kissed the backs of my thighs, then the sensitive place behind one knee, then the other.
It should have been absurd. It was not. It was devastating.
He left no part of me unattended, no corner of my body dismissed as merely functional.
I had been used in pieces. Fed from. Handled. Reduced to what appetite required.
Maksym made me whole by refusing to hurry past any of me.
His hands slid up the backs of my thighs. He parted me.
My breath caught.
His tongue dragged slowly between my ass cheeks.
The sound I made was not dignified.
He paused, perhaps to give me the space to object. I did not. My fingers curled hard into the bedding, and my hips lifted by the smallest amount, betraying me beautifully.
I felt his smile against my skin. Then he did it again. Slower.
Hot tongue, firm hands, the wet, intimate glide of his mouth over places I had not known could become pleasure when touched without cruelty. Shame flickered, reflexive and old. The bond answered with his hunger, his reverence, his absolute lack of disgust, and shame had nowhere to stand.
He licked lower, teasing close to the heat between my thighs, then back up, until I was trembling for entirely different reasons than before.
“Maksym,” I said, and this time my voice broke on need.
“I know.”
He rose behind me.
His hands settled on my hips and drew me up onto my knees. The bedding shifted beneath us. I heard the brief rasp as he pushed his boxer briefs down and away, then felt him there, hard and heavy against me. My body clenched in anticipation.
He rubbed the head of his cock through my wetness once.
Twice.
“Grace.”
“Yes,” I said.
He entered me from behind in one slow, controlled thrust. The stretch stole the breath from my lungs.
I bowed forward, hands braced against the bed, and he stopped with his hips flush against me, buried deep. He waited. His hands gripped my hips, not hard enough to bruise, though I would have healed. He gave me the time to feel him, to adjust around him, to choose the next movement.
I pushed back.
His breath left him in a low, rough sound.
Then he moved.
The first strokes were slow. Deep. Measured.
He leaned over my back, his chest covering me, one arm braced beside mine.
His mouth found the space between my shoulder blades and kissed there, then up my spine, each thrust pressing him deeper, each kiss traveling higher until his lips brushed the curve of my neck.
The position should have made me feel overpowered.
Instead, I felt surrounded.
His breath warmed my skin. His body covered mine. The bond pulsed with restraint. I could feel what it cost him not to take everything his hunger wanted at once. That knowledge lit something vicious and tender inside me.
“More,” I whispered.
His hips snapped harder. I cried out. He did it again.
Then his arms came under mine, and he pulled me upright.
My back met his chest. Still inside me, he settled onto his knees and drew me down onto him, one arm banding across my ribs to hold me flush against him. The change drove him deeper. My head fell back against his shoulder, a moan opening my throat to the fire-lit room.
His free hand slid down my stomach.
When his fingers found my clit, my entire body jolted.
“Maksym—”
“Here,” he murmured against my ear. “Stay with me here.”
He rubbed slow circles while rocking up into me from below. Not fast. Not frantic. Controlled enough to ruin me. His cock filled me with every upward thrust, his fingers keeping steady pressure until pleasure began to spiral out from that point in bright, ruthless waves.
I tipped my head back. My neck bared against his mouth.
The air changed.
His fangs descended; I felt the faint graze before he bit. He did not take without asking, not even now, not even with the bond wild between us. His lips pressed against my pulse.
“May I?”
“Yes.”
The word had barely left me when his fangs sank into my throat. Pain flashed. Then venom turned it molten.