26. Chapter 26 #2
"Mm." The hum of it went straight through me.
He found my clit and circled it with the flat of his tongue, unhurried, reading every sound and following it, and when he'd learned exactly the rhythm that made me shake he kept to it without mercy.
Two fingers pushed up into me, thick and sure, curling, and I clenched around them and heard him groan against me.
"You're so wet. I could do this all night.
I might. You taste like the best thing I've ever been given and I'm not remotely finished being greedy about it. "
I couldn't have formed a word if my life hung on it.
He built it in me by careful degrees, his tongue on my clit and his fingers working deep, and each time I climbed too fast toward the edge he only laughed low against me, gentled me back down, and started again, until I was strung tight and sobbing his name and past every word but that one.
He'd told me he'd take his time and he'd meant it, and the old voice that had policed my every good feeling for two years couldn't get a word in past the sheer patient joy of what he was doing to me.
"Please," I got out at last, my hand fisted in his hair, my whole body wound to breaking. "Tau, please, let me—"
"Since you asked so beautifully." He sealed his lips around my clit and sucked, his fingers curling hard inside me, and I came apart on his mouth with a cry I didn't try to muffle, my back arching off the furs and my thighs clamping round his golden head.
He worked me through the whole shaking length of it, gentling only when I did, and when he finally lifted his head his mouth was wet with me and his grin was pure wicked triumph.
"That," he said, hoarse, "was worth every month of waiting. I've a great deal more planned. I hope you weren't attached to sleeping tonight."
Then he rose over me, and settled between my thighs, and paused there with his forehead dropping to mine and his breath gone ragged, and asked me one more time, as he'd sworn he would. "Still with me?"
"God, yes. Don't you dare stop now." I reached down between us and wrapped my hand around his cock, hard and hot and already slick at the head, and stroked him once, and felt him shudder and break against me.
"I want you inside me. I've wanted it all summer, if you must know, which I'll deny to my dying day. "
The laugh that punched out of him was half a groan.
He caught my wrist, moved my hand, and notched the head of his cock against me, and pushed in slow, watching my face the whole way.
I felt every thick inch of him fill and stretch me, and the sound he made when he seated himself fully was so unguarded, so purely undone, that I understood I was watching a man feel something he'd spent thirty years making certain no one could give him.
"Oh," he breathed, forehead to mine, holding still inside me. "Oh, that's… Ellie… I had a great many clever things to say and I've forgotten all of them."
"Good." I rolled my hips up, taking him deeper, and watched his eyes go dark. "Move, Tau. Show me the man under the king."
He began to move, deep and slow and thorough, exactly as he'd promised, his cock dragging through me on every long stroke.
He chased my pleasure ahead of his own as though the pleasure itself were the point and not the toll.
He watched my face in the gold light with a wonder that never once flickered into performance, murmuring my name, telling me in two tongues that he saw me, that he'd never stop seeing me, that I'd ruined him for anyone who couldn't. He got a hand between us and found my clit again, rubbing tight circles in time with his thrusts.
I felt the second wave gathering low and hot and inescapable.
"Come for me again," he said against my mouth, his rhythm going ragged, his control finally starting to slip. "I want to feel it. I've wanted to feel it for months. Let me have it, love, come on..."
I came apart a second time with him buried deep and his thumb on my clit and his mouth catching the cry off my lips, clenching hard around his cock, and only then did he let himself go, a few last uneven thrusts and then he spilled hot inside me with my name broken against my skin, his golden head dropping to my shoulder.
I held the great trembling king of the mound through it and felt him shake with something far larger than pleasure.
* * *
And the borrowed weight in my chest went quiet.
I noticed it as I'd noticed it that first night with Daska, even through the aftershocks, the thing that had ridden me all summer, that eased at my cooking-fire and flared under Nathan's poison and had sat low and heavy for three nights since the trade caravan came, went, in that gold-lit shelter, quieter than it had ever been.
Not just quiet, either, gone, near enough, banked to nothing, so that for the first time in longer than I could remember there was no low ache under my breastbone at all, only warmth, only the golden lassitude of a body thoroughly loved and a heart that had, against every instinct, let itself be.
I lay in the deep furs with Tau's arm heavy across me and his heart slowing under my ear, and I turned the fact over and filed it, as I filed everything now: it's quietest when I let myself be loved.
I'd have to look at that properly one day, what it meant, why the thing I carried eased under tenderness and clenched under guilt.
There'd be no looking at anything tonight, though.
Tonight I was too warm, too wrung-out, too full of a happiness I hadn't the first idea how to hold.
"You've gone quiet," Tau said, into my hair, and I heard the smile in it, and under the smile that same fine thread of nerves that hadn't quite left him all evening. "Tell me it's the good kind of quiet. I've a fragile royal ego and it's been a long summer."
"It's the good kind." I pressed the words against his chest so he'd feel them. "It's the best kind, actually. You've gone and… Tau, I don't have words for what you just—"
"Now that is a first," he said gravely. "The chef, lost for words. I shall treasure it to the end of my days."
I laughed, and he gathered me closer, and for a while we lay tangled in the gold-lit warmth while the fat-lamps burned low, and I let myself simply be held by a man who'd stripped off thirty years of armour to lie here with me honest. And then, because I was learning the shape of him, I felt it, a shift, a returning warmth, his hand beginning to move again over the curve of my hip with unmistakable intent.
I lifted my head and looked at him; "You cannot possibly be—"
"I'm a lion, Ellie." The grin he gave me now was pure wicked delight, the frightened boy gone and the joyful one in his place.
"We're not built like your patient bear or your brooding wolf.
Give me a few breaths and I'm quite ready to worship you all over again, and I intend to, several times, because I have weeks of restraint to atone for and a very great deal of you still to learn.
" His mouth found my throat, and I felt him smile against my racing pulse.
"You did say show you the man under the king.
I'm afraid the man under the king has considerable stamina and no intention of wasting a single hour of the first night you've ever let him have. "
"Several times, he says." A disbelieving laugh escaped me, delighted and scandalised at once, some last knot of the careful joyless woman I'd been dissolving in the warm gold dark. "Tau, I'm not entirely sure I'll survive you."
"You'll survive me magnificently." He rolled me under him, measured even through the grin, his cock already thickening hard against my thigh.
A buried part of me that had spent two years believing pleasure was a debt you paid for later simply let go, and decided, for one whole golden night, to be greedy and unashamedly glad of it.
"I'll see to it personally. Now, where was that spot on your wrist? I did promise we'd come back to it."
He was true to every word of it. He took me a second time slow and a third with my knees hooked over his golden shoulders, and somewhere near dawn he pulled me on top of him and held my hips and told me, breathless and grinning, that a king ought to let his people do some of the work.
I rode him until we both came apart in the guttering lamplight.
By the time he finally let me rest I was boneless and laughing and so thoroughly, astonishingly happy that the old voice which had policed my every good feeling for two years went quiet enough that I could barely hear it at all.
But I did hear it, once, right at the edge of sleep, faint under all that warmth.
Just a whisper, as it always came. A life this good was never meant for you, it murmured, while Tau slept golden and spent beside me and the lamps guttered low.
No woman gets to have this much; you know how these things end.
I pulled Tau's arm closer around me and I didn't answer it, and I very nearly didn't believe it.
But it had found the one crack all my happiness couldn't quite fill, as it always did, the small cold certainty, buried too deep for any amount of love to reach, that a woman like me didn't get to keep a life like this, and that somewhere out past the gold-lit dark, the reckoning for all of it was already on its way.