Chapter Sixteen #3
“I will buy you new ones. Hold still.” He bent his mouth to the hollow of her throat, the place where her pulse had knocked against his palm the night he held his hand over her mouth in the dark, and he kissed it hard enough to leave a mark, which the noble version of him would never have done, and the honest version wanted on her skin like a signature.
His mouth moved down. He took her breast into his hand, the weight of it warm and full against his scarred palm, and he closed his mouth over the tight peak and pulled, slow and deliberate, and her whole spine arched off the table towards the ceiling.
“That is not taking turns,” she managed. “That is taking everything.”
“I have been told I do not share well. You may file a complaint.”
He felt the small helpless sounds building in her chest the way a musician hears the phrase before it arrives, each one pulling the next closer, louder.
His teeth closed gently over the swollen tip, a pressure just past tenderness, and the sound she made at that was the one he had been listening for, sharp, startled and entirely surrendered; a woman who had spent her whole life holding the inch suddenly discovering she had spent it.
He released her wrists. She did not move them from where he had held them, and the choosing to stay pinned when the pin was gone did something to his chest that the touching itself had not reached.
“You are keeping your hands where I put them.”
“I am a quick study. You have said so yourself.” Her voice had gone breathless, and her eyes had gone dark, the pupils swallowing the amber until only a thin ring of gold remained. “Show me the rest of the curriculum.”
He slid his hand down the flat of her stomach, beneath the bunched fabric at her waist, and found her bare beneath the skirts, bare, wet and swollen, and the slick heat of her against his fingers landed in him like a struck match.
He pressed two fingers into her without preamble, deep and unhurried, and her hips rose hard off the table, and her mouth opened on a sound that was his name broken into syllables she could not reassemble.
“You are going to lie there,” he said, low, bending over her, his mouth beside her ear while his fingers worked inside her, “and you are going to let me have the whole of you, in the order I choose, and at the pace I set. You are not going to rush me, because I have waited longer for this than I have waited for anything in my life, and I find I am owed interest.”
“You are owed nothing.”
“Then consider it a gift, freely given, that I intend to collect anyway.” He curled his fingers inside her and found the place that undid her, and held it, pressing, circling, and the sound she made at the discovery was the most honest sentence either of them had spoken all night.
“There. Remember that for later. We will come back to it.”
He withdrew his hand and brought his fingers to his mouth and tasted her, watching her face while he did it, and the look that crossed her when she saw him put his tongue to the slick shine on his own fingers was worth every year that he had spent not doing this.
“You are obscene,” she whispered.
“I am thorough. You have complained about my thoroughness before, and tonight I am going to be so thorough that you shall retire the complaint.”
Then he went to his knees. He pulled her to the edge of the table by her hips, the oak scraping against the floor, set her thighs over his shoulders, and buried his mouth in her.
The dream gave him the taste of her, salt, dark and impossibly warm.
He felt the wet silk of her folds parting under his tongue, and the jolt that ran through her whole body when his mouth found the swollen centre of her and closed over it.
He held her hips where he wanted them, his grip firm enough to keep her from twisting away from the intensity.
He worked her without hurry and without gentleness, the flat of his tongue stroking hard against the aching peak, his fingers pressing back inside her to find the place he had found before, and the two together, mouth and hand, pulled a cry out of her that rang off the library shelving.
“You are loud in my library,” he said against her, and the vibration of the words drew another sound, higher, broken.
“Your library has appalling shelving. I shall be as loud as I please.”
He laughed against the wet heat of her, and the laughing vibrated through her, and the sound she made at that was no longer a word at all.
He worked the swollen knot with his tongue in slow firm circles while his fingers thrust deep, curling inside her, and her thighs tightened hard at his ears and her hand fisted in his hair and held him to the work, and the frankness of the holding undid him in a place his discipline did not reach.
He drew back before she could crest, and the sound of outrage she made at the loss of his mouth was worth a hundred compliments from better women. “I am not done. You are stopping.”
“I am deciding,” he corrected, rising from his knees. “I decide the order tonight, and the order is that when you come undone, it will be with me inside you, not on my tongue, because I have imagined both, and the second one is the one I cannot wait for.”
“Then stop deciding and take me off this table.”
“I will take you on it.” He drew her upright by both hands and turned her, and the turning put her back against his chest and her hands flat on the oak and his mouth at the join of her neck and shoulder.
He gathered her skirts above her hips with one hand, and with the other he freed himself and set the thick blunt head of his manhood against the slick opening of her, and held there.
He pressed to the threshold without entering, feeling her push back against him, trying to take what he had not yet given.
“Ask me,” he said against the nape of her neck, and the cruelty of it was deliberate, but that was the point, because for seventeen years other men had taken from her without asking, and he would be the one who made her want to say the word.
“I have kept my hands to myself since the day I married you. I will not take this without hearing you want it.”
“I have asked you three times tonight, and you do not listen.”
“I listen to everything you say. I am simply greedy for the sound of it. Again.”
“Take me, Royce. Now. Stop governing and take.”