17. Chapter 17 #3
Mouth to sternum. To the soft slope under my ribs. To my stomach, where he paused long enough to press one open-mouthed kiss just below my navel that felt more intimate than anything higher had. He looked up at me from there, one hand hooking into the waistband of my jeans.
“Yes?” he asked.
I was breathing too hard for elegant speech. “Please.”
He stripped my jeans and underwear down together and knelt in front of me with a reverence that nearly broke me. He gently placed me on the bed, then he spread my thighs with his hands and looked directly at me before lowering his mouth.
The first touch of his tongue had my whole body jerking.
“Oh—”
He made a low, approving sound against me and settled in like a man with no intention of rushing.
Slow was the cruel word for it, except it did not feel cruel once I stopped fighting the pace and let him teach my body what patience could become.
He licked me in long, deliberate strokes, then shorter ones, alternating pressure until pleasure stopped arriving in clean lines and began to gather into something much larger and less manageable.
His hands held my thighs apart. Every so often his thumbs stroked the trembling inside of them as if he enjoyed feeling what he was doing to me.
I gripped the bedspread behind me hard enough to wrinkle it.
“Nikolay.”
He glanced up once, eyes molten, mouth wet from me, and went back down with a little more pressure that made my legs tense.
I was already shaking. He knew it. The bastard knew I was close and kept me on the edge—wanting to come, nearly coming, not permitted yet—until I was whining his name under my breath and too far gone to care what dignity cost.
When he finally slipped two fingers inside me, I cried out.
His gaze stayed on my face. His mouth never stopped.
The stretch of him, the slow expert curl of those fingers, the drag of his tongue over the exact place that made my thoughts burst white at the edges—it became unbearable in the best possible way.
I rocked against him shamelessly. He let me.
Encouraged it, even, with a deeper sound in his throat that vibrated through my whole body.
“That’s it,” he murmured against me. “Let go for me.”
I did not. Not yet. The pleasure kept climbing and climbing without release, every nerve in me pulled taut enough to hum.
Tears stung unexpectedly at the corners of my eyes.
He saw that too, because of course he did, and softened his mouth for one exquisite second before making me gasp all over again with a firmer flick of his tongue.
I raised my hips to meet his mouth.
He withdrew his tongue but kept his fingers inside me.
I almost protested. Then he rose in one smooth motion, kissing his way back up my body while I lay there boneless and wrecked and open for him.
My stomach fluttered when he licked the taste of me from his lips like something earned.
His mouth found my breasts again briefly, then the line of my collarbone, then the side of my throat his fingers still working.
I went still.
Not from fear.
From hunger so sharp it made my pulse leap under my skin.
He kissed the place where neck met shoulder, once, twice, his breath warm over flesh already over-aware. Then his mouth parted there, and I felt the subtle, impossible press of fangs descending.
A sound caught in my chest.
He paused.
“Maddie.” My name came low and dark against my throat. “If I do this—”
“Yes.”
His hand came up to cradle the back of my head. “You do not know what you are asking.”
I turned my face, baring my neck to him in full. Wanting had become its own kind of honesty. “I do.” My hips still slowly moved against his hand.
That was the truth of it. I wanted his bite more than I had wanted anything in recent memory. More than caution. More than pride. More even than the release he had been drawing out of me so mercilessly.
His mouth brushed the spot once, almost tender enough to be an apology.
Then his teeth broke my skin.
Pleasure hit me so hard it might as well have been lightning.
I cried out, whole body arching, orgasm ripping through me in a wave so intense it felt almost separate from flesh.
My legs quaked. His arm locked around my waist and held me upright while heat and shock and something far stranger than either convulsed through me.
The bite burned and soothed at once. My pulse pounded into his mouth.
Every place he had touched me answered all over again in one impossible flood.
My eyes flew open on a gasp to the ceiling of my room at Ironwood.
Dark beams.
Curtains.
My own ragged breathing loud in the predawn hush.
I lay twisted in the bed, sheets damp and shoved down around my hips, one hand already at my throat before I had fully caught up to consciousness. My fingers found only skin.
No blood. No marks. No ache beyond the phantom one.
I stared at the ceiling, chest heaving, and pressed my fingertips harder to the exact spot where his mouth had been.
Only a dream.
The knowledge settled into me slowly and badly, bringing no relief with it at all.