12. Anne
ANNE
Remmen’s house was dark and warm and it smelled like woodsmoke and cold ash and the clean warm heat of a body that took up most of a room.
He’d built the place himself, every careful line of it, and there was nothing inside that said anyone really lived there.
One chair. A bed I couldn’t see yet and was already thinking about.
He didn’t turn on the lamp. He stood in the middle of his own front room, this enormous male who could have picked me up in one hand, and he held still and waited, and did not reach for me.
Like I might change my mind, and he’d let me, and never say a word about it.
I took my clothes off.
I did it plainly, and I did it fast, because I knew myself. Give the thinking part of me one second and it would start in about my contract and the last good posting I had left, and I’d be doing my buttons back up before he could blink.
I didn’t give my brain the second it needed to catch on. Jacket, then shirt, then everything else, folded into a neat square stack on the arm of his one chair. When I straightened up, bare in the dark, his breath had gone rough and his eyes had lit, and he still hadn’t moved.
He looked at me like I was something he didn’t quite believe was real.
“You’re staring,” I said.
“If you saw what I see, you’d stare too.”
He kept looking, and it should have made me shy, standing there bare in a monster’s dark house on a planet far from home, and instead it made me bold.
Nobody had looked at me like that in a long time.
Maybe nobody ever had. I let him look. I even shifted a little, so he could, and watched what it did to him, his jaw setting hard, his hands opening and closing once at his sides as if he had to remind them they weren’t allowed yet.
I crossed the floor and started on his shirt.
One button at a time, taking my time with it, and he let me, all that size and strength holding still while a woman half his size worked him out of it.
I spread it open and pushed it off his shoulders, and for a moment I just looked at all that scarred muscle, at the sheer size of him.
Then I put my palms flat on his chest and ran them down the hard ridged plane of his stomach and felt him shudder, and it went to my head, better than the cider had.
I put my mouth to the center of his chest, over the old scars, and kissed my way down.
His hands came up and pressed flat to my back and held on, careful, shaking.
The lower I got the rougher his breathing went.
I got his trousers open and his cock out and had to stop, both hands full of him, because he was enormous, thick and long and hot as a brand, the flared head of him already wet, more than I could wrap one hand around and then more still.
I was going to have that inside me, and the thought of it hit me low and wet.
He watched me sink down onto my knees in front of him. “Anne.” Rough, half a warning. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to.” I wanted it more than I’d wanted anything in longer than I’d say out loud. I wrapped both hands around him and licked the salt and heat off the wet head of him, and his whole body jerked, and the sound that tore out of him cracked in the middle.
I took him in my mouth, as much as I could, which wasn’t much with my jaw stretched wide around the thickness of him, and worked the rest with both hands, and I learned him by what made him shake.
A slow drag of my tongue up the underside and his thighs turned to stone.
An inch deeper and his breath came apart.
I looked up the whole scarred length of him and found his eyes fixed on my mouth stretched around his cock, and I moaned just to feel what it did to him, and it undid him.
One hand dropped to my hair and fisted there, holding but never steering me.
“Your mouth.” His voice had gone to gravel and ruin. “Stars, look at you. Look at you taking me.”
I felt the discipline of a lifetime start to come apart under my hands, and I chased it, greedy, drunk on it.
I took him as deep as I could stand, until the head of him nudged the back of my throat and my eyes stung, and I swallowed around him.
His hips snapped forward before he could stop them.
He froze, then eased back. I was soaking, clenching around nothing, wet just from this.
He swore, low and obscene, this huge disciplined male coming apart under the mouth of a woman a third his size, and I had never felt so powerful. I could have stayed on my knees all night. I worked him until his hips fought him and his thighs shook and he was saying my name, wrecked, over and over.
Then his hands came under my arms and my feet left the floor.
He brought me up his body without any strain at all, until my toes left the boards and we were mouth to mouth, and the hot, soaking-wet length of him dragged up my bare belly between us and left a slick smear of him on my skin.
A bolt of heat went through me, at the size of him, at what it would feel like to have him split me open, at the woman I’d turned into out here at the edge of everything, the one who climbed into trucks and went down on her knees on a stranger’s floor and wanted a seven-foot monster badly enough to shake for it.
I could have this once. I decided it fast, before the sensible part of me could grab my sleeve.
Once, tonight, and then I’d put it away and live off it.
He carried me into the bedroom and laid me down in the middle of a bed built to his own scale, and then he took his time with me, and it was almost more than I could stand.
He knelt back between my feet and looked his fill, slow and unhurried, his eyes dragging over every inch of me spread out in his dark room, and I got wetter under the weight of that look.
Then he set his huge hands on the insides of my knees and pushed them wide, wider, until I was open all the way to him and could feel the cool air of the room where I was slick and aching, and the wait alone, the few seconds of him just looking at me like that, wound me tight enough to break.
He kissed down my belly, mouth open and hot and dragging, took his time while I shook, and then he settled those shoulders in between my thighs, so broad they shoved my legs wider and pinned me open around them, nothing to do but lie there and take whatever he decided to give me.
Then he put his mouth on my clit and my hips came off the bed.
He ate me like he’d been starved for it, slow and filthy and thorough, no hurry anywhere in him, the flat of his tongue in long drags and then the point of it right where I needed it, learning every sound I made and going back to whatever earned the loudest one.
He pushed one thick finger into me and I moaned at just the stretch of it, and then a second, so much bigger than my own that my whole body clamped down around them, and he groaned into me at how tight I was and worked them deeper, curling them up into some place that bucked my hips off the bed, and his tongue never stopped, and I came hard and fast and loud, both fists in his hair, my heels sliding on his back.
I lay there wrecked and could not get my head around it.
All my life I’d been the useful one, the steady hands, the person nobody had to worry about.
And here was this huge male with his mouth still on me, wanting nothing back, taking me apart just because he wanted to feel me come.
Nobody had ever wanted me like that, for no reason but me, and it undid something I’d locked down a long time ago.
He didn’t stop. He licked me right through it and kept going, gentle for a breath and then hungry again, and while I was still shaking he dragged the cool smooth curve of one horn slow up the inside of my thigh, the strange cold of it against all that heat, and it lit the fuse all over again.
He had me wet and swollen and so oversensitive it bordered on too much, and he would not let up, two thick fingers pumping deep while his tongue circled and flicked, and I was writhing on the bed, one hand knotted in his hair and the other twisted in the blanket, chanting something that was half please and half his name, climbing again before the first one had finished with me.
“Remmen, I can’t, I can’t—”
“You can.” The word rumbled straight through my clit. “One more. Give it to me. Let me feel you come on my mouth.”
And I did. I shattered on his tongue a second time, so hard my back came up off the bed, his name coming out of me in pieces, and the sound he made against me was pure filthy greed.
He crawled up my body then, unhurried, dragging his open mouth over everything on the way, and gave my breasts the same attention, one huge hand lifting me to his mouth while he sucked and licked and caught each nipple in his teeth and pulled, until the sharp sweet ache of it shot straight down to where I was clenching around nothing, empty and desperate.
I was wound tight all over again and rocking up against him, shameless, past pride, reaching down between us to get a hand around his cock because I could not wait one more second to be filled.
“Please.” I was begging and past caring how it sounded. “Please, I need you inside me.”
“I’ve got you.” He notched the broad blunt head of himself against me, so much thicker than his fingers had been, and braced up on his forearms and found my face in the dark. “Look at me. Yes?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
He pushed in slow, watching every second of it cross my face, and the stretch punched the air clean out of my lungs.
He was so big it went straight past full into too-much and stayed there, splitting me open by degrees, and I swore, loud and helpless.
He stopped at once, barely inside me, both palms planted hard on the mattress.
“Breathe,” he said, low and wrecked and impossibly gentle.
“That’s it. Take what you can. We’ve got all night.
” So I breathed, and made myself go loose around the thick intrusion of him, and my body opened and took another inch, and another, that heavy burning drag lighting up every nerve I had, right at the knife-edge of too-much, until he was seated in me to the root and we both went dead still.
Full. I could feel my own heartbeat pounding around him.
So stretched, so utterly stuffed full of him that the burn of it tipped clean over into a pleasure so sharp it was almost pain, and the smallest shift of him inside me sparked all the way up my spine.
I had never been so full, so completely taken up by another person, and it should have frightened me and it didn’t.
“That’s it,” he breathed, ragged. “You took all of me. Every inch. Look how well you take me.”
He started to move, and I lost hold of everything but the feel of him.
Slow at first, dragging almost all the way out until just the head of him stretched me and then pushing back in an inch at a time, so I felt every thick inch of his size over and over until I was mindless with it.
He slid a hand under my hips and tilted me and drove into some place deep that tore a cry out of me, and he stayed there, hitting it again and again, the old bed frame knocking under all his weight.
I hooked my legs as high around him as they’d go and dragged him deeper.
“Harder,” I heard myself beg, “please, I can take it—” and for once he quit being careful and gave me his whole weight and the whole brutal size of him, and I stopped being anyone I knew.
I’d have done anything he asked. I’d have stayed there forever.
Under the wanting I understood I was in real trouble, that this was the opposite of putting it away and living off it, and I didn’t care one bit.
His ruined voice stayed in my ear, my name and that’s it, take it and you were made for this, made to take me.
It wound up in me again, deeper than his mouth or his fingers had reached, bigger and darker than the two before, building past where I thought I could go, until I was clinging to him and shaking and saying things I’d never say in daylight.
When it broke, it broke through all of me, wave slamming into wave, and I clamped down around him so hard he groaned and lost the rhythm.
That finished him. He drove in to the hilt and held there, his whole huge body seizing, his face buried in my throat, and I felt him come, felt his cock pulse thick and hot inside me, once, and again, spilling into me, filling me up, my name the only word left in his mouth.
And through all of it, wrung out and full of him and shaking, I let myself believe it, just for a minute.
That it was real. That I was his. That I got to keep this. I knew better.
He stayed over me, keeping his weight on his forearms, breathing into my hair, still inside me, his heart slamming against my chest. When he rolled us at last so I was sprawled across the furnace of him, one enormous hand traveling slow up and down my spine, I found enough breath to talk.
“So,” I said, to the dark ceiling. “That’s going to be a problem.”
A low rumble under my ear that might have been a laugh. “Yes.”
He pulled the blanket up over both of us without my asking, tucked it around my shoulder with a care that had no business coming out of hands that size, and I lay there listening to his heart come down under my ear. It would have been so easy to fall asleep right there, warm and wrecked and wanted.
And it was. Because I couldn’t walk away from this now, lying there wrung out and warm and wanted, wanted like I was worth the wanting. I’d promised myself just the once. I’d already lied.
I slipped out at first light. Shoes in my hand, down his back step, out into a settlement gone blue and silent in the hour before anyone stirred.
I crossed it quick and small and went up my own stair a board at a time, and every creak was a gunshot, because Chelsea’s dark window was right there and Giles’s just past it, and either one of them could have looked out and seen the Agency counselor coming home barefoot at dawn from the wrong end of town.
I should have been scared the whole way, and part of me was, but under the fear I was lit up, sore in places I hadn’t been sore in years, wearing his smell on my skin and in no hurry at all to wash it off.
I got my door open. I got it shut. I stood with my back against it in the thin gray light, breathing like I’d run the whole way.
I didn’t feel ashamed. I kept waiting for the shame to come, and it didn’t.
I felt turned inside out and put back together some better way, handled like I was precious by a male who had every reason to be careless with me and wasn’t.
I was terrified. I was in more trouble than I’d ever been in my life.
I was also happier than I’d been in years, and all I wanted, standing there in the cold with my shoes still in my hand, was some way on this whole hard planet that I got to keep him.