Chapter Seven #3
“You are already wet,” he said, and his voice dropped to something she had not heard from him: rawer than the careful dryness he armoured himself in, and rougher.
His fingers traced the slick folds of her slowly, learning the shape of her the way he learned everything, by touch, by patience and by refusing to be hurried.
“Do not make me say anything you will quote back to me in the morning.”
“There will be no morning inside this room. There is only this.” He eased two fingers into her, slow and deep, and the stretch of it, the sudden intimate fullness where she had been aching and empty, pulled her hips off the bed and a hand pressed over her mouth.
“I am going to put my mouth on you, and I am going to take my time about it. You are going to let me because you unlocked the door, and you are glad of it, but you would rather die than say so.”
“You presume.”
“I read. You taught me the trick of it in this very house.” He moved down her body, his mouth tracking the line between her breasts, the flat of her stomach, the soft hollow below her navel, and everywhere his lips passed, the skin tightened and flushed as though answering a question she could not hear.
His shoulders spread her thighs wider as he settled between them, his breath warm against the wet centre of her before his mouth arrived, and the half-second between the warmth of his breath and the touch of his tongue was the cruellest interval of her invented life.
He tasted her slowly, the first broad pass of his tongue parting her from root to the swollen peak, and the sound she made at the crest of it was a ragged exhale that would have appalled the woman who had written clause five and now could not have quoted a single line of it.
His fingers curled inside her as his tongue circled the tight knot of sensation at her centre, and the two rhythms, the slow thrust and the slow circling, found each other and locked.
Her body answered them both, her hips rising to meet his mouth with a frank, graceless hunger that owed nothing to any inch she had ever held.
“You are trembling,” he said against her, and the vibration of it ran through her where she was most swollen and most raw.
“I am not trembling. I am trying to remember your name so I can tell you to stop.”
“You are lying. You remember my name perfectly. You said it the night I bled on you, and you said it like it cost you something, and I have not stopped hearing it since.” He pressed his mouth to her again, harder now, the flat of his tongue working against the aching peak, and his fingers inside her found a depth that buckled something at the base of her spine.
“Say it now. I want to hear what it sounds like when you are not being brave about it.”
“Royce.” The name came out of her stripped of every wall she had ever written around it, but saying it tipped the balance, because a woman who had said a man’s name in the dark with his mouth between her thighs had confessed to a thing no clause could unsign.
The pressure gathered at the base of her spine, climbed, narrowed, and drew every nerve to a single unbearable point.
When it broke, it came through her in long, shuddering waves that emptied the breath from her chest and filled her throat with a sound she had no intention of making and could not have stopped for any locked door in England.
Her thighs closed hard at his ears, her back bowed off the bed, and her hands in his hair held him to the work through the whole of it, graceless, honest and hers.
He stayed with her through the last of the pulses, his mouth gentling as the waves drew back, his hands flat and warm on her hips as though he held something precious still while the shaking passed out of it.
His lips pressed once, softly, to the trembling inside of her thigh, and the tenderness of it undid something in her chest the climax itself had not reached.
She reached for him to draw him up over her, to feel the weight of him along, and to have the rest of what the night owed her.
Her hand closed on cold linen.
The bolster bore the shape of no head but her own. The pillow where she had gripped handfuls of his hair held nothing between its creases, and the wetness between her thighs belonged to no one’s mouth, only to her own wanting, which had made its case without counsel and won.
She lay very still in the grey light of the early morning with her nightgown twisted to her hips and her pulse still hammering under her own fingers where the dream had left his.
The sheets were wound about her legs as though she had fought them.
For a long moment, she could not have said whether what woke her was the pleasure, the loss of him, or the shame that sat cold on top of both.
She drew her hand from between her thighs and pressed the damp fingers to the place above her collarbone where his gaze had rested and his mouth, in the dream, had begun.
It was still warm, as though he had only just left it, though no one in the waking world had touched her there at all.