Chapter Nineteen #3
Then the dominance arrived, and it arrived as a decision she could watch cross his face, the surrender of letting her lead in favour of the thing he had been holding back.
“Come down here.” He drew her down by the back of her neck until her mouth met his, and the change of angle changed everything.
His hips rose to meet hers, and the rhythm that had been hers became his, deeper, harder, the force of each upward thrust lifting her knees off the linen.
His hand fisted in her hair and held her mouth to his while he drove into her from below.
The kissing and the taking happened at once, his tongue matching the rhythm of his hips, and the doubling of it broke the last of her composure.
“More,” she gasped against his mouth. “Royce. More. I am not made of paper.”
“You are made of better paper than any I ever stole.” He rolled them without breaking the stride, his weight settling over her, his hips between her thighs, and the position put him deeper and the depth made her cry out, one sharp sound that he swallowed with his mouth.
He braced himself on one arm above her and drove in with a measured force that told her the careful man had not left the room at all, only changed where he spent the care, every thrust angled to find the place that made her voice climb.
“There. I have you. I am not going to lose you.”
“You never lost me. I was here the whole time. You were the one standing on the far side of every room.”
“I am on the near side now.” His hips snapped forward and the wet sound of him moving inside her filled the small stone room with a frankness no catalogue had ever held.
“Tell me what you want. Anything. I have spent my whole life deciding for other people what they should be given, and tonight I give you only what you ask for. Say it.”
“Harder. And do not look away.”
“I am looking at you. I have not looked at anything else since you misfiled treason.” He gave her harder, the headboard meeting the wall in a rhythm she would think of in every quiet room for the rest of her life, and his free hand slid between their bodies to the place where they were joined, his fingers finding the swollen peak and circling it with the same deliberate pressure he had used with his tongue.
The two together, the deep, relentless stroking and the precise friction of his fingertips, built something in her that had no ceiling, no mercy and no patience left in it anywhere.
“Royce. I am close. Do not stop, do not change anything, do not.”
“I am here. Let it take you. I want to feel it.” His voice had gone to gravel, and his rhythm had gone to ruin, the controlled strokes shortening into something urgent and graceless, and the gracelessness of it, the plain evidence that the governed man was gone and only the wanting one remained, was the thing that tipped her.
She broke beneath him with a cry that reached the rafters, the pleasure slamming through her in waves that gripped the length of him inside her in hard rhythmic pulses, her thighs locking at his hips, her nails scoring his shoulders, her whole body arching up into his as though to take him deeper than deep.
The grip of her pulled his own climax out of him before the last of hers had ebbed.
He drove into her twice more, hard, graceless, past governing, and came with her name between his teeth, spending himself deep inside her in long hot pulses that she felt at the very end of her.
The warmth of him filled her while his body shook in her arms and his forehead dropped to her collarbone, and he breathed her name into the exact place his gaze had rested the night he checked her locks and walked away.
They stayed that way while the trembling passed out of them both, his weight on her, her arms around him, the candle guttering its last inch.
His lips moved once against the collarbone; a kiss so quiet it was almost a thought, and the tenderness of it after the force of everything that had come before undid her in a place the pleasure had not reached, somewhere deeper, somewhere that had been waiting since a foundling house and a pendant and three letters signed by a woman she would never meet.
He rolled to keep his weight off her and took her with him, her head on the old scar at his shoulder, his hand moving slowly in her hair, the last of the candle surrendering to the dark.
“Report,” she said eventually, because one of them had to begin and he was plainly incapable.
“The witness is not yet able to give evidence. The witness requires a quarter hour and possibly a new spine.” His hand kept its slow road through her hair. “You are laughing. I can hear you laughing. It moves the whole bed.”
“I am laughing because you said we would call the night consummated in every way that mattered, and then you delivered a closing argument. Twice.” She propped her chin on his chest to look at him in the dark. “Tell me a true thing. The habit of the hour.”
“A true thing. I thought this room was the secret I would die holding. It turns out the room was only ever the box.” His hand stilled in her hair. “You are the secret. The good one. Everything before tonight was rehearsal in an empty theatre.”
“That is two true things and a metaphor. You are improving at an alarming rate.”
“I have an excellent teacher and a powerful motive. Your turn. A true thing, Duchess. Last one of the night.”
“A true thing.” She listened a moment to the rain beginning against the shutters, soft, the world carrying on with its weather as though everything had not changed.
“I have spent my whole life learning to need nothing, because everything I needed was taken or never came. I planned to manage you the same way. A marriage of terms. Mutual use, honestly accounted.” Her palm flattened over his heart, which was still settling.
“I have torn up the terms. I need you, Royce. I will need you tomorrow in Vale’s chambers, and I will need you when this war is over and there is nothing left to be useful about.
It is the most frightening sentence I own, and you may have it.
File it wherever you keep the things you will not give back. ”
He did not answer with wit, which told her it had landed where she aimed it. He drew her up and kissed her once, slow, with the whole night still in it.
“Filed,” he said at last. “Under the things I will not give back. It is a short shelf. It holds one item, and a pendant has more company.”
“Two items. I am keeping the dressing-gown.”
“The dressing-gown was a gift; it cannot be kept; it is already yours. Sleep, Duchess. Tomorrow, we go and take your name back, and I intend to watch you do it rested.”
“Seventeen years,” she said at last, into his skin. “Ended. The record will show it was thoroughly done.”
His chest moved under her cheek, the laugh, the breath and something larger underneath both. “Enter it in the catalogue, Duchess. This night, this room, this woman. The first item in twenty years of keeping that I did not have to steal, and the only one I will be buried still owning.”