Chapter 25 #2
He nodded, and she reached for him. Fallen gods, if it were going to twitch, now would be the time. But it didn’t, of course.
Her hand closed gently around him. “Can you feel this, or are you numb?”
“I can feel everything.” He gritted out the words through his escalating purr, claws rending holes in the sheets. “But I can’t harden or…release.”
She nodded, her fingers tracing the length of him. She cupped his bollocks in her other palm and tested the heft with the same objective curiosity before returning her attention to his cock.
“May I kiss you here?” she asked, and the question nearly stopped his heart.
“Whatever pleases you,” he answered. In the end, she would be disappointed when he could not react to her, but he was too greedy for the sensation to turn down the offer.
She lowered her head, planting a chaste kiss at the tip. He closed his eyes. The first touch of her tongue was a line of wet heat along the underside of the soft shaft, and the sensation after years without touch was so intense and unexpected that his claws dug into the mattress on both sides.
She explored the rest of him, unhurried, tasting every inch.
Though his blood refused to answer the call and harden his cock, all the sensation was there, layered and complex, arching his back and making him sweat.
He wanted to give her everything. He wanted to take everything.
He was a mass of yearning that could never be satisfied.
The only thing close to it was satisfying her.
He pulled the ribbons from her hair so her plaits unraveled, and he could run his fingers through her hair. “Come here, lovely,” he said, voice wrecked by his purr. “Let me hold you.”
She crawled up into his arms, arranging herself with her back to him because her belly wouldn’t let her get close. He curved around her spine, his tail caressing her ankle and his wing draped over her. Her pretty patch job glinted amid the tattered rags of it.
He touched her the way she’d touched him, mapping her geography.
The curve of her hip. The tender underside of her breasts.
The taut roundness of her belly. His hand moved lower, tracing the crease where her thigh met her hip, all the way to the warm slickness between her legs.
The newness of it made his muscles shake.
Her breath hitched and her backside pressed closer.
“You like this?”
She nodded fervently. Encouraged, his lips and tongue found the curve of her neck, then her shoulder, as he mouthed over her ropy mating scars.
Gooseflesh rose on her skin. His fingertips coaxed murmurs and pants from her, the sounds of yearning that matched his own, and gradually he found the place that made her core clutch at him and took up a rhythm there.
He nosed her ear, nipping at the lobe. “You feel so good. I have never felt anything like it. So warm and wet, like there’s a candle burning at your center.”
“Feels like it,” she whimpered, reaching back to clutch at his thigh. Her blunt little fingers dug in like claws. “What about you? How can I share this with you?”
If only we had a mind bond, then I could share every sensation. If only I was your true mate.
He couldn’t say that, though. “This is it. There’s nothing more I want than to feel you take your pleasure.” He paused his strokes to bite off two claws down to the quick, testing to make sure they were smooth and wouldn’t catch on her delicate flesh.
He returned to his enviable task, stroking as he had before while nudging the clawless fingers into her entrance. “May I?” he murmured in her ear.
“Fallen gods, yes,” she gasped, hips bucking toward his hand. His fingers slipped in easily. Her warmth enveloped him, and it felt nearly as good as if his cock had entered. His skin felt alight, every part of it. He almost believed he could come if she did.
His fingers worked steadily, rubbing her inner walls as his thumb circled outside.
He instinctively responded to the catch of her breath and the subtle shifts of her hips that told him there, that angle, that depth and pressure.
His mouth stayed on her skin, claiming her with his tongue even when he couldn’t with his teeth, and his fingers continued their dance, and the tension in her body built and built.
When she finally came, she gasped his name, and that was like a release itself, the way it burst through his veins.
The climax moved through her in waves that he felt in his own body through the places they were pressed together, the tremor in her thighs and the pulse in her throat and the convulsive grip of her fingers on his thigh.
He held her through it, clamping his wing tight around them, and the purr that poured from him shook the bed frame.
Afterward, she lay against his chest, breathing hard. “That was incredible. I think you’ve created a monster.”
“That makes two of us,” he said wryly.
She turned to press her forehead against his chest, the laughter shaking through her warm and unguarded.
He stayed with her until she slept and then rose to dress for work. It was only then that he noticed that, where the repair in his wing had been, there was now a healed membrane. He would not believe it to be true except that a faint ghost of silvery leaves marked it as his wife’s handiwork.
Somehow, where all the masons had failed, Hanna had succeeded.