Chapter 30 #2
I trace my fingers around the curves of her breasts, down her sides, and along the roundness of her hip. She’s so soft and warm. I slip my fingers into her hair and kiss her forehead.
“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever encountered,” I murmur, sliding my fingers to the ends of her strands.
Maris’ eyes widen and her breath falters.
We get the rest of our clothes off.
She lies back on the bed and I come over her, pinning her wrists above her head with one hand, my other hand gripping the back of her thigh. I press my mouth to the corner of hers, then her neck.
Lower, I flick my tongue against the hardened nub of her nipple. Then I move to the other and close my lips around it, rolling my tongue over the sensitive flesh.
Maris moans and writhes on the bed beneath me. My cock jumps against her leg, eager, ready, but I want to focus on her first.
Keeping her arms pinned, I slide my free hand between her legs and feel the heat of her sex, the wet arousal emanating from her. She’s warm and ready, and I swallow a ragged breath, moving my lips to her other nipple, sucking the puckered flesh and grazing it with my teeth.
I run my fingers along her moist netherlips, each gasp and tremor through her body sends all the blood rushing into my hard cock. I tease her entrance and slide a finger inside her.
Her moan, and the way her body responds by lifting her hips off the bed has me pressing my erection against her soft leg. It’s not enough.
I stroke her insides with two fingers, curling the digits to touch her inner walls until she’s moaning and bucking her hips off the bed. Maris’ cries of pleasure are followed by a full body tremble.
Kissing up her neck, I find her lips again, and swallow her moans with my mouth, sliding my tongue against hers, tasting her completely. I grip her leg and tuck it around my hips, my cock dripping precum and unable to wait any longer.
She wraps her leg around my hip and tenses, pulling me down to her, and I find her entrance — warm and soft and soaking — and push inside.
Her back comes off the mattress.
Her head tilts back on her pillows and she moans.
I drop my mouth to her throat, her collarbone, and begin to move — slow, firm strokes, working deep with each one, my fingers tightening on her thigh and wrists as I pull her against me.
She's flushed from her chest to her face, her hazel eyes dark, her head pressed back into the pillow.
"Kaedrin." My name in her mouth, broken in the middle.
I move harder. Her arms strain against my grip, not pulling away — pushing into it, her whole body arching up to meet each thrust. The flush on her skin deepens.
Her breathing comes faster, and I feel her tighten around my erection — once, then again, then the sustained clenching of her release rolling through her, her voice rising and her hips lifting and her body shaking under mine.
I follow her over the edge with a groan that comes from somewhere deep in my chest, my hips pressing flush against hers as I spend myself inside her, my forehead dropping to her shoulder.
We stay there while the lamp gutters.
She breaks my grip and her arms come down around me, her hand cradling my head against her chest. Her heartbeat is loud and slowing under my ear.
I close my eyes and let her hold me there, and the tension I've been carrying since the council hall, since the storage yard, since running down a man who keeps slipping through — all of it releases by degrees into the warmth between us.
I wake before she does.
The lamp is out. Grey morning light comes through the curtain, and the bakery below is quiet, and Elin is still asleep down the hall. I can hear the small sounds of the house around me — the settling of old wood, the distant noise of the square beginning its morning.
Maris is asleep against my shoulder, her braid half-undone, her breathing slow and even.
I tip my eyes to the ceiling.
The commission papers are at the inn, along with the crates of artifacts and the sealed reports addressed to the dark elf courts.
An extraction team will arrive within the week.
After that, the formal proceeding, the testimonies, the disposition of the prisoners.
My part of it ends when I deliver the case.
After that, I'm free to take the next assignment — the next borderland fugitive, the next route, the next town where I know no one and leave the same way.
That has been the shape of my life for eighty years.
I look at Maris's hand resting on my chest. Her knuckles, the flour-dry skin of her palms, the small scar below her left thumb from a knife slip she mentioned once in passing. I roll my eyes to the ceiling again.
Then I think about Elin's palm against my cheek last night. Two pats, deliberate and warm, the complete trust from this little girl who decided I am safe without requiring proof beyond her own assessment.
She's three years old and she's already the most honest person I've ever met.
I made a life out of moving. Out of arriving and leaving and arriving somewhere else.
I told myself it suited me — the courts' schedule, the commission, the next assignment.
I told myself this for eighty years and it was true enough to be livable.
It stopped being true the morning I walked into a bakery in Brindle Hollow and a small girl with my eyes looked up at me from behind a counter.
Maris shifts against my shoulder and settles back into sleep.
I stay where I am and watch the light come in through the curtain and let myself arrive at the thing I've been circling.
I don't want the next assignment.
I want this — the warm weight of her against my side, the sounds of this house, Elin upstairs with her pebbles and her drawings and her complete certainty that pointed ears are just ears.
I want to be the one crouching beside her bed at night.
I want to carry flour sacks and know which bread she likes best and be present for whatever comes next, including the things that won't be easy.
I want to be her father. Not just the man keeping her safe from the outside.
The ceiling doesn't offer any objections. Neither does the house.
I close my eyes, and I stop trying to figure out when I'm leaving.