14. Chapter 14 #2
"Safe," I breathed, and felt the bond flood gold between us at the word, and gave myself over to him.
He started at my throat, unhurried, mapping the line of it with his mouth, pausing where my pulse beat hard against his lips as if the feel of my heartbeat under his kiss was a thing he wanted to memorise.
His hands moved ahead of his mouth, learning the shape of me, broad palms skimming my ribs, the dip of my waist, the curve of my hip, each touch deliberate and asking nothing back.
When his mouth closed over my breast I arched up off the furs with a gasp, and he stilled at once, checking, his eyes lifting to my face in the firelight until I made a sound that told him yes, that told him more, and only then did he go on.
He sucked my nipple slow into the heat of his mouth, worked it with his tongue until it stood hard and I was writhing under him, then moved to the other and did the same, patient, thorough, learning me one response at a time.
Where a touch made me shiver, where it made me sigh, where the drag of his beard against soft skin made me fist my hands in the furs and forget how to breathe.
Nothing was rushed, and nothing was taken; everything was given, and asked for, and given again.
I'd never in my life been touched as if I were something to be understood rather than used, and it undid the last of the frost in me.
By the time his mouth started down over my belly I was trembling, strung tight with a need I hadn't let myself feel in two years, and his name left me in a whisper that sounded like a plea.
He settled his broad shoulders between my thighs and pushed them gently wider and looked up the length of my body with a reverence that had nothing shy in it.
"Let me," he murmured, his breath warm against the inside of my thigh. "You don't lift a finger tonight. I've six weeks of missing you to make up for, and I mean to do it properly."
His beard rasped the tender skin of my inner thigh and I made a sound I didn't recognise, and I felt him smile against me.
Then his mouth found my pussy and every thought I had went quiet at once.
He licked into me slow, his tongue finding my clit and settling into a rhythm he read straight off my body.
When I moaned and rocked up against his mouth, he groaned low and did it again, harder.
One thick finger pushed into me, then a second, curling, and I clenched around them and heard him murmur something wordless and pleased into me.
"Daska, God, Daska."
"I have you." He said it against my clit, his mouth never leaving me, the vibration of it wringing a cry out of me. "That's it. Let me hear you. There's no one to be brave for tonight."
There was no performance in it, no technique being demonstrated, none of the subtle keeping-score I'd learned to expect from men.
There was only Daska, patient and focused and wholly given over to the single task of my pleasure, as if nothing in the world existed beyond the shelter's walls and the sounds I was making.
He built it in me by slow degrees, his tongue and his fingers working me together, backing off each time I climbed too fast, holding me at the trembling edge until I was past words and past the old voice and shaking apart under his hands.
And when he finally sealed his mouth over my clit and sucked, his fingers curling deep, I came hard against his mouth, gasping his name into the firelit dark, my thighs clamping round his head, and he stayed with me through all of it, gentling only when I did, murmuring low that he had me, that I was safe.
And the borrowed weight in my chest, the thing that had ridden me for weeks, that eased at my cooking-fire and flared under shame, went, in that moment, utterly quiet, banked to a deep gold glow I could almost have mistaken for happiness.
Even through the aftershocks, the change registered.
Whatever lived in me, whatever I was carrying that no one had ever explained, it was never so quiet as when I was safe, and warm, and cherished by someone who wanted nothing from me but this.
He gathered me up afterward, still shaking, and held me against the broad warm wall of his chest, and only when I'd caught my breath, and reached down between us and closed my hand around his cock, hard and heavy and slick at the tip, did I feel his tight control finally give.
Even then he wouldn't be hurried. He rolled me gently beneath him, notched himself against me, and pushed in slow, his forehead dropping to mine, watching my face the whole way as he filled me inch by thick inch until I'd taken all of him.
"There you are," he breathed, holding still inside me, letting me feel the stretch of him. "There's my Ellie."
He moved in me slow and deep and reverent, and I wrapped my legs around him and met every stroke.
The second time I came it was with him buried to the root and his name broken on my lips.
Only then did he let himself go, his rhythm faltering, his face buried in my hair as he spilled hot inside me with a low sound I felt in my own chest. I held the gentle giant through it, and felt, for the first time in two years, entirely and simply whole.
Afterward we lay tangled in the furs while the fire burned low, and he traced idle patterns on my bare shoulder with one blunt finger, and I felt his heartbeat slowing under my cheek, and neither of us said anything for a long while because there was nothing that needed saying.
The bond hummed warm and complete between us; six weeks of frayed thread had knitted whole.
"I thought I'd lost you," he said finally, into the dark, so quietly I almost missed it.
"When the river took you. When the trail died.
There were nights I..." The sentence died, and his arm tightened around me.
"I'm a man who was never chosen, Ellie, not once in my whole life.
And I kept thinking, out there, that the world had finally corrected its mistake in letting me have you at all. "
The old wound in him, laid bare in the dark. I knew that wound; I had its twin.
"The world didn't make a mistake letting you have me," I said, pressing the words against his skin so he'd feel them as much as hear them.
"It's the one thing it got right. You crossed the whole world for me, Daska.
Do you understand how that, no one has ever...
" My own voice failed, and I had to start over.
"I spent two years believing I was too broken for anyone to want, and you looked at all my broken pieces and walked six weeks through the ice to find them.
So don't you dare tell me you're the one who was never chosen.
I'm choosing you, right now, in this shelter, with a king's claim hanging over me and the whole of it in a tangle.
I choose you, I'll go on choosing you, and you'd better start believing it. "
He made a rough sound and pulled me closer, and I felt wetness against my hair that he'd never admit to in daylight. I held him while he held me, and thought that perhaps this, finally, was what people meant by home.
Then, beneath us both, the ground moved.
It was small, so small I almost took it for a shiver, or the shifting of some great animal against the shelter's frame in the dark.
A low tremor ran through the earth beneath the furs, a faint deep shudder that set the water trembling in the skin by the fire and stilled every night-sound outside at once, the whole vast settlement going quiet in the same held-breath instant.
Daska went still against me, his healer's stillness, every sense sharpening.
"Did you feel that?" I whispered.
"Yes." His arm was tight around me, his voice carefully low. " Rivik said the lions have a word for it, the deep shaking. It's happened twice since we arrived, both times worse."
And deep in my chest, in the exact place the borrowed weight sat, something answered the tremor, a low, resonant, uneasy stirring, as if whatever I carried had felt the shudder in the earth and recognised it, and did not like what it recognised at all.
I told myself it was nothing. Lying there in the arms of a man who loved me, whole after two years, I let the shaking earth be nothing at all, and I very nearly managed it.
I should have known better; out here, at the edge of the world, it was never nothing.