8. Ronan
Ronan
She thinks I can’t hear her.
Her breathing hitches every eight seconds—I’ve been counting. Each one is a small, strangled thing she swallows before it becomes a sob. Our hands are still laced together, and her pulse hammers against my fingers frantically. She’s turned her face to the window, away from me.
I stare at the ceiling and catalogue every mistake I’ve made in the last two hours.
I’ve played the gentleman—not just the gentleman, the decent human. I gave her space. Gave her her own room. Leapt up when she touched me, convinced restraint was the noble move, the move that separates me from the men of her past.
Instead, I contradicted her ingrained beliefs. In her mind, I’ve rejected her—found her lacking and unworthy.
How do we reconcile our belief systems?
I’m able to read rooms, find angles, and generally identify what a person needs to hear and deliver it.
And…I’m a dumbass.
The play here isn’t distance. It was never distance.
The play is meeting her inside the framework she already has and bending it toward something new.
She understands authority, instruction, a man who leads.
Those are the only tools in her kit. So I’ll use them—not to control her, but to carry her across the bridge from where she is to where she deserves to be.
She deserves to feel good on her wedding night, to feel wanted and worthy and deserving. Her first experience of intimacy is mine to construct, and I need to man up and fucking do it.
It’s not pure altruism. I absolutely want her. Every accidental brush of skin sends a current of sheer lust through me that I can’t explain. The way her face transformed when warm water hit her palm. The way she laughed at her own reflection on my phone screen—surprised and delighted—lit me up.
I want her, and pretending otherwise is a lie. A lie that is hurting her, apparently.
I turn onto my side. “Prudence.”
She goes rigid. Her fingers tighten around mine.
“Look at me.”
She rolls toward me until we are face-to-face on the pillows. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her lashes damp, and even wrecked with tears, she is staggeringly beautiful.
“We’re going to begin the physical side of this marriage,” I tell her. “Tonight.”
Three emotions cross her face in rapid succession—relief, wariness, confusion—layered on top of one another.
“But we do it my way.” I hold her gaze. “I lead. You follow. My first rule is that if anything frightens you, if anything hurts, you tell me and I stop. Immediately. No question. I won’t be angry or disappointed. Can you do that?”
She nods. The tension in her shoulders drops a fraction. This is a structure she comprehends—rules, order, obedience. The knowledge galls me, but I’ll use it to give her what no one has ever given her.
“Do you trust me?” I ask.
She is quiet for a long moment before she answers, “Yes.”
I release her hand and bring my palm to her face. My thumb traces the line of her cheekbone and over her bottom lip. Her eyelids flutter at the contact. “Then let’s start here.”
I kiss her.
The press of my lips against hers is soft, tentative—giving her every chance to pull away. She doesn’t pull away, but she doesn’t respond either. Her mouth is closed, uncertain, a door she doesn’t know how to open.
“Follow me,” I murmur against her lips. “Do what I’m doing.”
The second kiss, her mouth softens. The third, her lips part a fraction, and I take the invitation—angling her chin upward, deepening the kiss, tasting the salt of old tears on her lower lip.
The fourth kiss breaks us both wide open.
Her breath rushes out against my mouth, warm and shaking, and her hand comes up to rest on my bare skin. Her fingers curl against me.
I’ve kissed women. Plenty of them. Socialites, high-powered businesswomen, mafia princesses, polished women who knew exactly how to angle their mouths and when to sigh.
None of it—not one encounter—felt like this.
A current runs from her mouth through mine and into the marrow of my bones.
The sensation is electric, disorienting, a charge that rewires every nerve I have.
I draw away an inch. Her eyes are half-open, unfocused.
“Was that your first kiss?” I know the answer, but I ask anyway.
She nods. “I was never allowed to be alone with a man.” Her voice is a whisper. “You are the first person to kiss me. The first person to hold my hand.”
The first everything.
A possessive heat ignites at the base of my spine and spreads upward through me. Not desire alone—older, more territorial. Possessive. She is mine. Every first belongs to me. Every gasp, every shiver, every discovery her body is about to make—mine.
The ferocity of my own thoughts should alarm me. I’m not a barbarian. I don’t do savage caveman.
Except, apparently, I do.
My kisses migrate from her lips to her throat.
My lips graze the hollow where her pulse beats wildly.
I press my mouth there, letting her absorb the warmth of my breath against her skin.
She swallows hard. I kiss lower—the ridge of her collarbone.
When I reach the soft dip between her gorgeous, full breasts, her breathing changes, becoming shorter and sharper, but she holds herself motionless.
I move to the curve of her breast. Her nipple tightens before I reach it, taking it into my mouth and flicking it with my tongue. When my lips close over the peak, her body responds. Her whole torso flinches—a full-body jolt she tries to suppress.
“Don’t fight it,” I murmur against her skin. “Whatever you feel, let it happen. Nothing you do here will be wrong.”
A strangled sound escapes her, bitten off at the end.
I kiss lower. Down the plane of her stomach, which contracts under my mouth. Over the jut of her hip, where I let my teeth graze and she gasps audibly. Down the inside of her thigh, where the skin is softer than anything I’ve touched in my life.
She tenses when my shoulders settle between her legs. Confusion radiates through her. Her thighs lock and her spine becomes rigid.
“Ronan?” Her voice is small.
“Trust me, baby.” I press a kiss to the inside of her knee. “Relax your body. Release the tension. I’m going to make you feel good.”
“I don’t under—”
“You don’t have to understand. I’m the boss, remember?”
Her thighs part by inches, trembling with the effort.
I lower my mouth.
The first taste of her pussy is like ambrosia on my tongue. Sweet, warm, musky, and so achingly delicious that my hands grip her hips hard enough to leave pink imprints. This woman, her taste, ignites a base instinct I didn’t even know I possessed. I feel feral.
I think I’m in trouble.
I work her with deliberate strokes, and she fights herself—I read the battle beneath my mouth. Her muscles lock, obeying the programming, while her hips twitch in an involuntary roll she immediately suppresses. Her breathing has gone ragged, each inhale hitching at the top.
I flatten my tongue and press harder. A long, slow drag. Her spine arches a half-inch off the mattress before she forces it down.
“Enjoy it, Prudence. Let me make you feel good, baby.”
A whimper escapes her—wrecked and tiny, the sound of a woman pitting years of conditioning against the strongest force in the human body.
Then her hand flies to my head and her fingers thread through my hair.
She grips. Not pushing me away. Holding on. Her thighs clamp around my head with a desperate pressure that tells me everything her mouth can’t say. A sound tears from her throat—stunned, raw, a noise that I’d venture to guess she’s never made before.
She’s fighting herself. Every lesson of purity, piety, and sin versus the pleasure I’m forcing from her as she fists my hair and arches into my mouth.
Underneath her fear and backwards programming, her body does what it was designed by nature to do.
I grip her tighter, seal my mouth over her clit, and refuse to let go.
I’m definitely in trouble. Deep, irreversible, catastrophic trouble.