Chapter 18 #2
He doesn’t just touch me. He lowers himself between my thighs and inhales, eyes fluttering closed for the briefest second as he takes in my scent. His hands settle on my hips, huge and splayed as his thumbs brush the crease where leg meets torso.
Then his mouth is on me.
The first lick steals my breath.
The second steals my reason.
His tongue is broad and hot. Textured, velvety ridges open and drag against me in slow strokes.
I slam my head back against the rock, fingers locking in his hair as his purr starts up low, the vibration traveling straight through his lips into me.
Sarven growls, holding my thighs open as he explores. I thought he would be hesitant. I was wrong.
His mouth closes over me as he sucks and swallows, tongue swirling through my folds. When he finds my clit and I jerk, he focuses there more, the pressure just shy of too much.
“Sarven,” I gasp.
He hums against me, pleased, then does it again.
The hum and the tongue ridges together are unfair.
My hips jerk, trying to climb up the wall, and he just tightens his grip, purring louder. The sound wraps around my pelvis like a second set of hands.
I am gone.
He is using everything he’s learned. Every gasp, every shattered “yes” from earlier, every hitch in my breath when his fingers brushed me. He remembers where I shook under his hand and reproduces it with his tongue, with improvements.
“Sarven…please…” I choke out.
He doesn’t stop.
He makes a low, wordless sound and chases my pleasure harder, dragging those ridges over me in exactly the right pattern, building the tension in my belly into something hot and unstoppable.
“Yes,” I sob.
The world narrows to his mouth and my pulse.
And then, I shatter.
My cry rips its way out of me, echoing off the stone. My hips jerk off the ground; he holds me there, mouth locked to me, drinking down every spasm like it’s sacred.
Light flares in my periphery. His glow answering my orgasm with wild, pulsing brightness that sends constellations reflecting across the cave walls.
Sarven growls his satisfaction against my thigh, a pleased little rumble that says ‘yes’.
He licks me through the aftershocks, gentler now, broad strokes that feel like worship. By the time he lifts his head, I’m whimpering and twitching with overstimulation.
Sarven looks down at me. His mouth and chin are slick, his eyes dark, the stars beneath his skin too bright. His chest rises and falls like he just ran across half the desert with a sand serpent on his back.
He crawls up my body in a slow, shaking line, bracing himself on his forearms over me. The heat of him is a whole-body sensation. Velvet darkness on brown, starfield over skin.
He presses his forehead to mine, breath hot and ragged.
“Now?” his voice echoes in my head, barely more than a scrape of sound even in the mindspace.
There is no universe in which my answer is anything but yes.
“Now,” I breathe, sliding my arms up around his neck, wrists crossing behind his head. I hook my ankles at the small of his back, pulling him in. “Please.”
He reaches down, guiding himself with a claw that is still shaking.
When the blunt head of him slides against me, even with the slickness he just coaxed out of me, the stretch is immediate.
He pauses there, just at my entrance, watching my face with feral, desperate tenderness.
“Okay?” his voice echoes in my head.
“Okay,” I press my forehead harder against his, eyes fluttering closed. “Push.”
He pushes.
The stretch is slow. A wide, hot pressure that makes my breath stop in my chest. My fingers dig into his shoulders. His jaw locks so hard I can see the cords stand out.
He is holding back with everything he has. Half of me wants him to lose it. The other half appreciates not being split in half.
It burns. But under the burn is ecstasy.
“Good,” I gasp when I can find sound again. “You’re…good. Keep going. Don’t stop.”
The relief that flashes across his face almost breaks me.
He exhales a shuddering breath and eases forward another inch. Then another. Every tiny motion has my walls stretching around him, my inner muscles clenching against his girth.
He groans, low and broken. “Tight,” he projects. “You clench me.”
“Yeah,” I manage. “You’re…not exactly…travel-sized.”
He huffs out a sound that devolves into a moan when my involuntary clench answers him.
“You…joke,” he projects.
“You’ll love my jokes.”
“Later,” he promises. “Many jokes. Now…” He inches forward. “Now I must not die.”
Against all odds, I giggle. It turns into a gasp as he passes the tightest point.
Tilting his head back, Sarven slides in, deeper, the pressure cresting and then changing, less burn, more full. Full in a way I didn’t know was possible; full in layers. Full in stretch, in pressure, in heat.
When his hips finally meet mine, there’s a distinct bump at my entrance, a thicker ring of flesh pressing against my opening.
I suck in a sharp breath at the knot.
He’s filling every empty space.
And then—
The world explodes.
Something in my chest, something that’s been tight and clenched and humming since the crash, since the caves, since that first migraine in the dust, that something snaps.
The fog lifts. And suddenly there is light.
A knowing that slams through me with the weight of gravity.
And a word.
Mine.
I gasp, eyes flying open.
Sarven freezes above me, eyes blown wide. His glow surges in response, stars brightening under his skin like someone just flung open every curtain in his soul.
“Mine,” the voice comes again, inside my skull. Deep and awed. “Finally.”
It’s him.
Not his halting English. Not his rough Drakavian. No forehead pressing.
Him.
His thoughts, unfiltered, barreling straight into my brain and translating themselves on impact.
“Holy shit,” I think, lids fluttering. “I can hear you.”
Sarven jolts.
“You can hear?” his mental voice echoes, stunned. “Mih-kay-lah?”
The sound of my name in that space is…intoxicating. It’s like hearing a song I’ve forgotten the lyrics to, suddenly played in surround sound.
“I hear you,” I think back, tears pricking my eyes.
And as if he’s been waiting ages to be able to say it, Sarven lets me know one thing.
“Life,” he thinks, staring down at me. “You are my life.”
I sob out loud.
His forehead drops to mine again, our breaths mingling.
“Feel this,” he sends, rough and tender and a little wild.
He begins to move.
And oh.
Oh fuck.
Every time he withdraws and pushes back in, friction tears a gasp from my throat. Deep, sure strokes, each one sending sparks up my spine, each one resonating back through him into me.
My eyes roll over as the pleasure keeps building. Higher. Sharper.
He is close. I feel it. The taut, electric edge in his spine, the way his control is beginning to fray.
“Mine,” he thinks again, the word a low, possessive brand. Like the dust itself is stamping that word into our bones.
“Yours,” I answer without hesitation. “Yours, yours, yours.”
The orgasm slams into me with no warning this time.
My vision goes entirely white. Sound cuts out. There is only the feeling of my body clenching down, milking him, and through the bond, the sense of his pleasure rocketing off the charts.
“Sarven!” I scream, mental and verbal and everything in between, nails raking down his glowing back. “I—I—I love you!”
I fall apart in his arms, and for a moment I am nothing but shuddering sensation. I feel his awe in the bond, his fierce possessiveness rising to meet those three words.
He follows a split second later.
His body locks, burying him as deep as he can go. I gasp as the wide, pulsing ridge at his base slides past my entrance. The knot pops inside, stretching me to my absolute limit, and then immediately swells.
Oh…fuck.
The sensation is overwhelming. The knot expands, locking us together, sealing the connection so tight that not even a breath could pass between us.
He spills into me with a groan that sounds like he’s being broken open and put back together at the same time. We collapse sideways in a graceless, sweaty heap, still joined, limbs tangled. The stone is unforgiving under my shoulder, but I barely feel it. Every inch of my skin is buzzing.
I nuzzle into the curve of his neck, my cheek pressed to the warm hollow above his collarbone.
“Safe?” his mental voice asks.
I smile against his skin.
“So safe,” I think back.
He hums, satisfied. I close my eyes, letting the darkness take me, listening to the dual rhythm of his heartbeat against my ear and his voice in my mind.
“Rest,” he projects. “I guard.”
He’s not going anywhere. And neither am I.