Chapter Thirty #2
He unhooks my bra with steady hands and drops that, too, and when his gaze travels down my body, there’s nothing casual in it. It’s thorough, dark, and completely focused, a look that says he’s taking his time and means every second of it.
“Your turn,” I say, and my hands drop to his belt.
He goes still and lets me, watching my face while I work the leather free, pull it loose, and the quiet intensity of his attention does more to me than most men manage with their hands.
I push his jeans down over his hips, and then I look up at him through my lashes, and the expression that crosses his face at that, at me, on my knees in front of him, looking up, sends heat flooding all the way to my fingertips.
I take his cock in my hand first, watching his jaw tighten. He’s already hard, and the low sound that escapes him when I drop to my knees in front of him and wrap my lips around his tip makes something deeply satisfied uncoil in my chest.
“Cali.” His voice has dropped to something rougher, a warning and a plea wrapped up together, and I pull back enough to look up at him through my lashes.
“I’ve got you,” I say, echoing his own words back at him, and watch something flare hot in his eyes before I take his cock into my mouth again.
I set a slow pace, learning what pulls those quiet sounds from him and then doing it again, and again, until he’s hissing between his fangs and his fingers pull at my hair.
He doesn’t direct, just holds, fingers curled loosely at first, a vampire trying very hard to maintain control over himself.
I find that deeply interesting. Five centuries old, and I can reduce him to this.
There’s a power in it that I hadn’t anticipated, the way his thighs tense under my palms, the way he says my name again as though it costs him something.
I take him deeper, and his grip tightens in my hair, a reflex he doesn’t fully suppress, and the low sound that drags out of him at that hits me somewhere low and warm.
I hollow my cheeks and work him slowly, thoroughly, tracking every flex of his jaw, every small tell that a man as controlled as Scar doesn’t know he’s giving away.
When I drag my tongue along the underside of him and look up at the same moment, holding his gaze while I do it, his head drops back on a curse that sounds like it’s been pulled from somewhere deep.
“Enough.” The word comes out wrecked. His grip tightens in my hair, drawing me back with a firmness that sends heat rushing through me.
When I rise to my feet, his mouth is on mine before I’ve fully gotten there, hungry and immediate, nothing like the careful patience of a few moments ago.
His hands are everywhere at once, like he’s reclaiming the control I just spent the last several minutes systematically dismantling.
He walks me backward without breaking the kiss, unhooking the rest of what clothing remains between us as we go, and when the backs of my knees find the edge of the mattress, we go down together in a tangle of warm skin and wandering hands.
He settles over me and pulls back just enough to look, really look, his weight braced on his forearms, his dark eyes moving over my face and then down my body with the kind of unhurried attention that makes my skin feel like it’s been lit from the inside.
There’s no urgency in it. That’s what undoes me more than anything, the complete, deliberate absence of rush, like he’s decided he has all the time in the world and intends to use every second of it.
“Stop thinking,” he says, low, watching my face like he can see every thought running behind my eyes. “You’re allowed to just be here.”
“I’m here,” I say, which comes out less defensive than I intend, and he holds my gaze for a moment longer before he dips his head and drags his lips down the column of my throat, and I stop being clever about anything.
His mouth moves across my collarbone, down the curve of my chest, his hands tracing the lines of me like he’s relearning something he already knows by heart.
When his lips close over my breast, I arch into him on instinct, and his palm spreads flat against my ribs, holding me steady, keeping his own pace regardless of what my body is trying to communicate about urgency.
I slide my fingers into his hair, and he hums against my skin, the sound vibrating through me in a way that makes coherent thought increasingly difficult.
“Scar.” His name comes out rougher than I intend.
“Stop rushing me.” His voice is a low rasp against my stomach, and there’s a thread of dark amusement in it that I want to be annoyed by and cannot quite manage. “I’ve been alive five hundred years. I know how to take my time.”
“That…” I say, with what little dignity I have left, “… is the most insufferable thing anyone has ever said to me.”
Scar moves lower, and I stop having opinions about anything.
He moves down my body with the same unhurried deliberateness he brings to everything, pressing his mouth to my ribs, my stomach, the soft skin below my navel, until he settles between my thighs and looks up at me with dark, certain eyes that make my breath stall completely.
“Scar—”
“Still rushing me,” he says, low, and then his hands slide to my hips, thumbs pressing into the hollow of them, pinning me in place with that quiet authority that is entirely, infuriatingly him, absolutely certain that I’m going nowhere until he decides otherwise.
Then his mouth finds my clit, and every thought I was forming dissolves on contact.
He starts slow, which I should have anticipated and somehow didn’t, his tongue moving against my center in long, unhurried strokes that are clearly designed to dismantle me from the ground up rather than simply finish the job.
I forget the thread of whatever I was going to say.
I forget everything, actually, as he takes his time in exactly the way he promised, reading every sound I make with that unnerving precision and returning to what works again and again with a focus that is both devastating and deeply, irritatingly deliberate.
When I roll my hips toward him, chasing the pressure, his grip tightens, and he pulls back just enough to remind me who’s running this and then returns without mercy, his tongue circling, stroking, and drawing sounds from me that I have no hope of suppressing.
He seals his mouth over me fully, and the groan that escapes me is entirely undignified, and I find I cannot locate the part of myself that would usually care about that.
The bond hums between us, and through it I can feel the low edge of his own want, restrained, held back on purpose, and somehow that knowledge, that he is choosing to wait, choosing to do this first, makes the whole thing more devastating than it already was.
The tension that has been winding through me finally snaps, and my back lifts clean off the mattress, his name tearing out of me on a broken cry that I make no effort to contain.
“Sca-ar!” My thighs clamp against his shoulders, and my fingers pull hard at his hair, and he doesn’t stop or even slow down, his mouth working me through it with ruthless patience while my entire body shakes apart in his hands.
Every muscle I possess draws tight and then releases in waves that roll through me one after another.
I’m gasping at the ceiling with my chest heaving, my legs trembling, and absolutely nothing in my head except the heat of his mouth and the hum of the bond blazing bright between us.
I weakly press at his shoulders, over-sensitized and undone, and he gentles by degrees, slower, softer, easing me down from it with the same deliberate care he used to take me apart, until my body finally stops shaking and goes heavy and loose against the mattress beneath me.
He raises his head and looks up at me from between my thighs, unhurried, like he has all the time in the world and is quietly entertained by the disaster I’ve become.
“Still with me?” he asks.
“Barely,” I say, which comes out more honest than I intend.
Something that isn’t quite a smile moves across his face.
“Good.” Then he moves back up over me, and his eyes, when they find mine, are completely dark, the red burning low and deep, and his expression is the most undone I have ever seen him.
Whatever satisfaction he’s carrying from reducing me to wreckage hasn’t done anything to cool the want written plainly across his face, and I reach for him and pull him down to me without ceremony.
He comes willingly, settling his weight over me, and for a moment, he just stops.
His forearms bracket my face, his eyes finding mine in the low amber light, and he looks at me the way he has been looking at me all night, like I am something he has decided on completely and intends to keep.
My heart does a flip in my chest, and I turn away from it as quickly as I turn away from everything else that scares me.
His hand slides down the side of my body, tracing the curve of my waist, the line of my hip, coming to rest at the juncture of my thigh like he’s in absolutely no hurry and wants me to know it.
“Scar.” His name comes out low, half plea, half warning.
“I hear you,” he murmurs, and shifts his hips forward by degrees, slow, so slow, giving me every inch of him one at a time until I’m gripping his shoulders. My breath is coming in shallow pulls, and my whole body is adjusting to the overwhelming, consuming fullness of him.
He stops when he’s sitting fully upright and lets his forehead fall against mine.
The contact stole whatever words I had left.
We stay like that, breathing hard, covered in the remains of a battle that should have taken both of us.
The bond burns bright between us. I feel it in my veins, in my chest, in every place he’s touched and every place he’s changed.
His blood runs through me.
Mine runs through him.