Chapter 46 Eliana #2
His stubble scrapes me and I jolt with a shrieked giggle. He laughs with me, then paints a kiss to my left thigh. Then my right. He is no hurry to get where I need him to get so fucking badly.
When I moan his name again—“Bastian!”—he ignores me. His teeth graze the crease where my leg meets my hip. I feel his smile against my skin when I shudder. He’s warm and close, but not yet close enough to satisfy the ache building there.
My hips buck involuntarily, seeking friction, seeking him, but his hands lock my thighs down.
“Patience.”
“I’ve been patient,” I gasp. “I’ve been patient for so long. I thought you were dead, you absolute bastard, and now, you’re going to make me—”
“Beg?” he finishes. “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I am.”
My eyes roll back in my head as I collapse to my elbows. Lucky for me, though, Bastian may be an absolute bastard, but he’s not an evil absolute bastard. After half a minute more of his teasing, fluttering kisses, his mouth finally finds me.
My back arches off the mattress as his tongue drags through my folds.
I bury my fingers in the roots of his hair and pull him as close as I humanly can.
If I’m suffocating him in me, he shows no sign of it.
He just inhales me like perfume and then starts to lick and suck in ways that fry my circuitry.
His fingers join at some point, I’m not sure when, and I dissolve in the face of the overwhelming sensation.
The sounds I make are embarrassingly loud in the quiet room, completely undignified moans and whimpers that would mortify me under any other circumstances, but I can’t bring myself to care.
Not when his tongue is doing that, not when his fingers are there, not when I have him back with me and everything feels so damn good.
“Bastian,” I whimper, my hips grinding against his face despite his hands trying to hold me still. “Oh, God, Bastian— Oh— Oh— Wait, no—!”
He pulls back.
Just like that. Right when I’m teetering on the edge, every nerve ending screaming for release, he stops.
“No!” I wail. “No, no, no, you can’t—you asshole—!”
His laugh is dark velvet against my thigh. “I told you: You’re going to beg.”
“I was begging!” I sound desperate, completely wrecked, and I haven’t even come yet. “That was begging! That was explicitly begging!”
“That was whimpering.” His fingertip glides up and down on my inner thigh like a taunt. “Begging sounds different.”
“I will kill you. I will actually murder you this time, and no one will blame me, because you deserve it.”
“Mmm.” He presses a chaste kiss to my hip bone, and I nearly sob. “Tell me what you want, Eliana.”
“You know what I want.”
“I want to hear you say it. Out loud. With words. No dreams to hide behind, remember?”
My pride crumbles instantly. Any thoughts of resistance go right out the window. “I want your mouth on me,” I whisper. “I want you to make me come. Please, Bastian. Please.”
I can hear my own heartbeat thundering in my ears as a flush trickles down my neck and across my chest. I’ve never been good at asking for what I want—not in bed, not anywhere. Years of scarcity taught me to take what I could get and be grateful for it.
But Bastian doesn’t move.
“Again,” he commands. “Louder.”
“I want you to make me come,” I repeat, stronger this time.
“I want your tongue inside me. I want to fall apart on your face. I want—I want to feel you, Bastian. All of you. I’ve spent so long thinking I’d never get to have this again, and now, you’re here, and I need you to stop being such a smug, insufferable asshole and just make me come. ”
His mouth descends.
I scream.
This time, there’s no teasing. His tongue goes right to the spot I need him most, his fingers follow, and I’m gone.
My thighs clamp around his head and I shatter beneath his mouth with a cry that I’m sure the entire house can hear. I don’t care. Matter of fact, I want them hear. Let them know that Bastian Hale is alive and he’s mine and he’s making me come so hard I’m seeing stars behind my eyes.
“There she is,” he growls against my inner thigh as I float back to earth, pressing a kiss to the sensitive skin. “My good girl.”
Before I can catch my breath or formulate anything resembling a response, he’s climbing onto the bed.
He’s careful to keep pressure off my belly as he crawls over me. I can hear the strain in his breathing as he props himself up—the wound must be royally pissed at him—but when I try to tell him to be careful, his mouth finds mine and swallows the protest right up.
I reach for his belt buckle as he consumes me in a messy kiss.
Somehow, as our tongues clash and war, I manage to get it undone.
He helps me shove his pants down just far enough to free him.
He springs into my hand, hard as a rock and soft as satin.
I give him a few tentative strokes and he curses under his breath.
But he’s still hesitant. He must be worried about the baby, or my dignity, or apologies as yet unsaid. I don’t give a damn about any of that, though, because the one and only thought on my mind is that I’ll die if he doesn’t get inside me right this fucking second.
“If you stop again,” I warn, “I really will kill you.”
He laughs into my open mouth. Then his forehead drops to mine as he positions himself at my entrance. I feel the pressure of him waiting there, asking one final question without words.
Can I?
My legs wrapping around his hips say, Yes.
He sinks into me slowly, inch by inch by thick, hard, devastating inch. I groan as my body adjusts around his girth. The stretch is different now—well, everything about my body is different now—but the fullness, the completeness of having him inside me again? That’s exactly as I remember it.
“Fuck,” he groans into the curve of my neck. “You feel—God, Eliana, you feel—”
“I know,” I gasp, because I do. I feel it, too. The rightness of this. We fit together like nothing in my life has ever fit me.
Tremors run up and down Bastian’s arms from the effort of restraint.
He’s scared to cross some final line in the sand, though God knows why he thinks that matters anymore.
Doesn’t he feel me falling to pieces? How can he not smell my desperation?
I’ve never wanted anything more than I want him right now.
“Move,” I whisper. “Please move.”
Thank God, he does.
The first thrust begins tentatively. But when I dig my nails into his shoulders and arch up to meet him, something in him snaps. The last line gets crossed. His hips pop forward and he crashes into me.
“Yes!” I cry out. “Like that. Just like that.”
The next thrust is harder. The one after that is harder still. Soon, he’s fucking me, pistoning me into the mattress like he can fuck me right out of my thoughts. I cling to his shoulders and keep begging him for more.
His hands grab mine and cage them to the mattress. “Right there,” I beg. “Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”
“Never,” he promises against my throat. “I’m never stopping again.”
Tears prick my eyes as the beginnings of the orgasm start to accrue. I’m so wet, so full, and he’s so hard and so big. I’m filled with him in every way that could ever possibly matter, and as long as he stays here for five more thrusts, we’ll make it to our happily-ever-after.
Four more. I’m sweating.
Three more. So’s he.
Two more. I’m tightening all over, my nipples puckered, mouth wide open, gasps winging out from somewhere deep in my throat.
One more. Bastian is a rumbling roar, like distant thunder coming closer and closer, and closer and closer, and I’m close, and he’s close, and then—
The final one takes us both there.
I break. Bastian breaks.
We fall to pieces together.
He unleashes in me just as I gush around him, the two of us matching each other spasm for spasm. It lasts longer than any climax I’ve ever had before. I almost start to think that this is how the rest of my life will be: just coming with my love, locked together, unbreakable, inseparable.
But all good things must eventually come to an end, and this orgasm, as heaven-sent as it is, ends, too. We stay sealed together hip-to-hip until all the shudders are gone and the sweat has cooled. Then he adjusts his weight to land beside me.
Bastian and I lie alongside each other as our breath goes silent. His heartbeat thunders beneath my ear like a two-note reminder—alive, alive, alive. The more I hear it, the more a tiny knot in me can unclench.
After a while, he reaches out to graze the arc of my belly. “Still can’t believe there’s a whole person in there,” he murmurs.
“Your person,” I remind him. “Our person.”
“I like that,” he says. “Ours.”
Sleep is circling around me, ready when I am, but I don’t want to let go of this moment, even though my eyelids are heavy and my limbs are made of peanut butter.
These past few days, I’ve slept as much as I can, because dreams were better than reality.
But the difference between dreams and real life no longer seems so important.
I have everything I’ve ever dreamed of right here, don’t I?
His hand stays plastered over the swell where our child sleeps, and then—so quietly I almost miss it—he begins to sing.
“Spi, mladenets moy prekrasny, bayushki bayu…”
The Russian words roll off his tongue like honey dripping from a tasting spoon, low and hoarse, barely above a whisper. It’s haunted me for weeks, surfacing in dreams I couldn’t explain and memories I couldn’t quite hold onto.
But this is different.
He’s not singing to me.
He’s singing to us.
His palm presses against my belly as the lullaby continues. I think of all the mothers and fathers over the centuries who’ve sang these same words to their own children in the dark, and I feel like I’m part of a great human tradition in a way I haven’t ever felt before.
I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stop from making a sound. The tears come anyway, sliding silent and hot down my temples and into my hair. I don’t try to stop them. Some moments are too sacred for pride.
I stay perfectly still, eyes closed, heart breaking open in the best possible way.
The lullaby goes on, verse after verse. Bastian’s voice starts to waver on certain syllables in a way that tells me he’s crying, too.
After everything he’s done and everything that’s been done to him, after the blood and the bullets and the brother who tried to kill him, Bastian Hale is lying in the dark and singing a lullaby to a baby who hasn’t even been born yet.
He needs this as much as we do.
It’s not that we’ve solved it all. There are so many things left to say, and so many obstacles yet to overcome. Aleksei is still out there. The world is still dangerous. Nothing has actually been fixed.
But right now, in this moment, Bastian is alive and warm beside me, his hand on our baby, his breath stirring my hair.
Right now, that’s enough.