Chapter Sixteen #4
He pressed forward into her in one long steady thrust, the tight wet heat of her opening around him inch by inch until he was seated fully and her forehead dropped to the table and the breath left both of them at once.
The sheer weight of it, the anchoring, ruinous reality of being inside her at last, stripped the dreaming mind of every restraint the waking one had built, and the sound he made against her hair was not a duke’s sound and not a careful man’s sound and not a sound he had made in years, raw, low and broken open.
“There,” she breathed into the oak. “That is the man who stands behind the noble one. I knew he was in there. I have been knocking.”
“You have been doing a great deal more than knocking.” He drew back slowly and thrust again, deeper, and her fingers spread wide on the table, her back arched and the wet sound of him moving inside her filled the library with a frankness no catalogue had ever contained.
He set the pace slow and punishing, each withdrawal nearly complete, each return deliberate and deep, so that she had the whole of him and the loss of him in turn, and the rhythm of it built something at the base of his spine that had no interest at all in patience.
His hand slid around her hip to where their bodies joined, and his fingers found the swollen peak of her above the place where he moved inside her, and he circled it in time with his thrusts, matching the pressure to the pace.
Her voice climbed out of words and into sound, and the sound was his.
He pressed harder, moved faster, and felt the first tremor run through her, the clenching of her around him that told him she was close, and he bent over her and spoke against the damp skin behind her ear.
“Now. For me. Let it take you.”
She came apart under his hands and around his manhood in a long shuddering seizure that locked her whole body against his, the pulses of her gripping him in waves that pulled his own climax up from the root of him before he could govern it.
He spilt inside her with a groan that emptied every held breath of all those locked-down years, his hips driving hard against her through the last of it, his face pressed to the back of her neck, his arms braced on the table that held them both.
They stayed that way while the pulses ebbed, his chest to her back, both of them breathing as though the air in the room had thinned.
He pressed his lips to the mark he had left at her throat and found it warm under his mouth, and the tenderness of his own gesture after the force of what had come before undid something in him that the wanting itself had not touched.
“You are heavy,” she murmured into the table.
“You are magnificent,” he said against her neck. “And I am not moving because the moment I move, this is over, and I have waited too long to let it be over quickly.”
“It was not quick. You are confusing the catalogue.”
“I am confusing you a great deal tonight. You may sort me in the morning.”
Suddenly, he woke hard and aching against the twisted sheet, his own hand fisted uselessly in the linen at his hip, the wet evidence of how near the dream had brought him cooling against his stomach, his breath sawing in the dark of a room with no one in it but himself and the wreckage of his discipline.
The library was three floors below. The woman was a wing away, behind a door he had insisted upon, sleeping without knowing that she had unmade a man without lifting a finger towards him.
He lay still and let it subside, as he had learned to let everything subside, by main force and the slow count he used in the dark.
He did not finish what the dream had started, because finishing would be too much like taking from her a thing she had not offered, even here, even alone, even in his own ruined bed with the taste of her still phantom on his tongue and the ghost of her voice still telling him to stop governing and take.
He set his forearm across his eyes.
He had told himself the restraint was for her sake, and it was, and he had believed it the whole of the disciplined day.
He lay awake at three in the morning with the want still hard and unspent against his stomach and her name still shaping itself in the dark behind his teeth, and the truth of it reached him for the first time.
The restraint was not only for her. The restraint was the last wall between himself and the man in the dream, the man who pinned her wrists, set the pace and took what was offered without once asking whether it was wise, and that man was not the monster he had feared.
That man was simply him, ungoverned, and that version of him loved her with a greed the governed one could never admit to, and the greed was as honest as the discipline, but the two of them would have to learn to share the room.
He would wait. He had decided it awake, and he decided it again now, grimly, in the dark, with his body in open mutiny against the decision.
He would wait until she was certain, beyond any doubt of hers or his, of the difference between forgiving him and wanting him.
And he would learn, in the waiting, to stop being afraid of the man who stood behind the noble one, the man she had been knocking for, who answered only in the dark, and whom she, alone of everyone he had known, preferred.
He lay there until the candle-grey of morning, wanting her, and waiting.