24. Chapter 24 #2
She set to work on my shirt with a seriousness that would have been amusing if it had not nearly killed me.
Her fingers trembled only a little at the first button, less at the second.
By the time she reached the center of my chest, curiosity had begun to overtake nervousness.
Maddie had always been brave where it counted.
Brave enough to be honest. Brave enough to ask questions.
Brave enough, apparently, to undress a vampire prince while looking directly at the result.
When she pushed my shirt from my shoulders and laid her palms against my skin, I hissed a quiet breath through my teeth. Warm hands. Small compared to me, but not delicate in any useless way. She explored the breadth of my chest with a concentration so pure it felt more intimate than seduction.
Her gaze dropped lower.
I removed my boots myself before impatience made her scowl at me for trying to be helpful, then rose and let her open my trousers.
The instant she dragged the zipper down, the pressure of confinement became its own torment.
My cock sprang free when she pushed the fabric lower, hard and aching and without any of the polite concealment the evening downstairs might have preferred.
Maddie stared.
Then, with that frank, open curiosity that was so entirely hers, she traced her fingertips lightly around the length of me.
A growl left me at once, low and involuntary.
Her eyes flew up to mine.
“Did I—”
“No,” I said hoarsely. “You did precisely what you ought not do if your intention is to preserve my decency.”
“Your decency seems long gone.”
“An excellent observation.”
I caught her under the thighs and lifted her before either of us could say something clever enough to delay what was clearly no longer postponable.
She gave a small, startled laugh and wrapped herself around me on instinct, arms around my shoulders, hair brushing my face as I carried her the few steps to the bed.
When I laid her down against the turned-back covers, I paused only long enough to look at her there—flushed, wanting, alive beneath the amber lamp glow and the quiet witness of her books.
Then I went down beside her, and the rest of the world ceased to matter.
The mattress dipped beneath my weight as I settled over her, and the sight of Maddie spread beneath me struck me with such force that for a moment all I could do was touch her as if prayer had finally been given a body.
My hand moved over her hair first, smoothing it back from her face.
Then over her cheek, where the bruise had nearly vanished.
Then lower, tracing the line of her throat, the delicate shelf of her collarbone, the soft rise of one breast beneath my palm.
Every part of me ached to devour, but I had been denied this by my own folly for too long to rush now that mercy had arrived.
She watched me with parted lips and unsteady breath.
“What are you thinking?” she whispered.
“That I ought to have worshipped sooner.”
Color touched her face. “That was criminally smooth.”
“It was also true.”
I bent and put my mouth where my hand had been.
Along her throat first, where her pulse leaped against my tongue.
Across the curve of her collarbone. Over the upper swell of her breast. She arched beneath me at the first slow circle of my mouth around her nipple, breath catching sharply as my hand found the other and gave it the same patient attention.
Maddie’s fingers slid into my hair, not pulling yet, merely anchoring.
That small trust nearly broke me open again.
I took my time.
The room seemed to narrow to the sounds she made for me.
Those quiet gasps she tried to swallow and could not.
The little hum low in her throat when I learned some place particularly sensitive and returned to it with deliberate care.
The catch in her breathing when my beard grazed the soft skin under her breast and my mouth followed after to soothe.
“Still dreaming?” I murmured against her ribs.
She let out a shaking laugh. “If I am, don’t you dare wake me.”
“As you command.”
I moved lower, kissing my way over the gentle plane of her stomach, pausing at her hip long enough to feel the jump of muscle there under my mouth.
She watched me now with a kind of stunned concentration that made me feel, absurdly, as if I were being granted something rather than taking it.
Maddie had a way of making generosity look like courage.
When my hands slid to her thighs and eased them apart, she drew a quick breath.
I looked up once, asking without words.
Her answer came in the soft opening of her body and the way her fingers tightened in my hair. “Please.”
That one word went through me like lit spirits.
I kissed the inside of one thigh, then the other, and felt her shudder with each deliberate pass of my mouth.
Her scent had deepened with arousal—warmer now, sweeter, touched by that wild note that belonged to wolf and woman both.
It intoxicated me more surely than any wine I had tasted in three hundred years.
When I finally traced my tongue up to her clit, Maddie went taut under me.
The first sound she made was almost disbelief.
I learned her slowly. That mattered. Not because I lacked urgency, but because I had spent too long misunderstanding what she needed from me in every other realm.
I would not make that mistake here. My tongue traced and tested, and when it entered her, it made her hips stir.
I pulled back and circled her clit, then used my finger inside her as I tormented that bundle of nerves with the flat of my tongue.
I heard her breath catch—saw her fingers grip the duvet as she writhed against my face.
The sounds she made, I might have read an ancient text—carefully, reverently, with the awareness that precision mattered.
She was exquisitely responsive. A little pressure there, slower there, then firmer when the bond flashed her need through me before her body could fully voice it.
I listened with mouth and hands both. When she began to tremble in earnest, I eased another finger into her with care, watching her face from beneath lowered lashes as her lips parted around a broken little cry.
“That’s it,” I murmured.
Her thighs tightened.
I curled my fingers and found the exact place that made her gasp my name as if it hurt to hold it in. I nipped at her clit and kept her there between pleasure and collapse until restraint ceased to be either possible or desirable.
“Nikolay—”
The sound of my name on her lips while she came apart beneath my hands would have ruined me all by itself.
Her back bowed off the mattress. Her fingers fisted hard in my hair.
The whole beautiful line of her body went taut and then shuddered through release in waves that I felt against my mouth, against my hand, through the bond now singing between us with bright molten certainty.
I did not stop until her trembling softened into aftermath and her hand, still tangled in my hair, shifted from desperate hold to dazed caress.
I kissed the inside of her thigh once more before rising.
Slowly. Deliberately. I licked my way back up the length of her body as though I meant to memorize her with my mouth.
The curve of her hip. The soft hollow beneath her ribs.
The underside of one breast, which drew a fresh shiver from her when my lips brushed there.
Her skin tasted of salt and woman and something tenderly hers that made hunger feel too crude a word for what I carried.
By the time I reached her ear, Maddie was flushed from throat to chest, her breathing still unsteady, her eyes half-lidded and luminous.
I pressed a kiss below her ear. “I love you, Madelyn. With a depth that has no bottom and no end. If I lived three more centuries, I would spend them all discovering fresh ways to be grateful for you.”
The cry that escaped her was soft, wrecked, and so full of feeling that my own control thinned to transparency.
Her hands came to my face. “Say that again.”
“I shall say it until death grows envious.”
She laughed through what looked perilously like tears. “Lord, you really are old.”
“Insufferably.”
“Good,” she whispered. “I love you too.”
I kissed her then because words had become insufficient.
When I positioned myself between her thighs, the urgency I had held at bay returned with punishing force.
Even so, I entered her slowly. There was no other way I could have borne it.
Her eyes stayed on mine the entire time, wide and trusting and shocked by sensation as I gave her every inch with care bordering on agony.
Goddess.
My jaw tightened hard enough to ache. She was heat and welcome and a form of rightness so profound it nearly felt like grief for all the years before I knew it.
Maddie breathed my name and held my shoulders, nails biting just enough to remind me I remained in my body and not some fevered vision granted to mock me.
“You all right?” I asked, though the question emerged ragged.
She nodded once, then again, fiercer. “Better than. Move.”
I obeyed.
Her hips rose to meet mine with growing confidence, her breath hitched and helpless and beautiful beneath me.
I kissed her whenever I could not bear the sight of her mouth open on my name.
I put my face in her throat when the force of her pleasure moving through the bond threatened to strip speech from me altogether.
Her nails dragged down my back. Sharp enough that the sting flared and vanished under greater sensation.
I liked it far too much.
“Maddie,” I said into her skin, half warning, half prayer.
“I know,” she whispered, though I had not said what.
Did she? Perhaps she did. The bond between us no longer felt theoretical or wounded. It felt alive, voracious, eager to complete itself in every way our natures allowed.
I drew back enough to look at her. “May I drink from you?”