Chapter 5 #2
"That proves nothing."
"It proves everything. Thirteen."
I bring my hand down again. She lurches forward, her hips pressed hard against the edge of the bed, and this time the count comes out on a half-sob she can't contain.
Not a cry. Eleanor doesn't cry. Something more dangerous.
Something that tells me she's losing her grip on the wall she's built between what she wants and what she'll admit to.
I give her sixteen. By the last one her voice is barely a whisper, her face pressed against the bed, her fingers twisted in the pelts. Her skin is blazing under my palm when I rest my hand against the heat and feel her pulse hammering through inflamed flesh.
I don't give her time to recover. I free myself from my breeches and press the head of my cock against her entrance, sliding through the slick heat of her until the tip catches and holds.
She's soaked. The wetness coats me before I'm even inside her, and the sound she buries against the bedding when I make contact is raw enough to make my grip tighten on her hip.
I push inside her in one long stroke. Her body resists for a heartbeat, sore from the night before, then yields and takes me to the hilt.
Every muscle inside her clenches around me as I seat myself fully, and the intensity of it locks my breath in my chest. My hips press flush against the welted skin of her backside, and the contact against the fresh marks draws a strangled hiss from between her teeth.
I hold there. Buried to the root, feeling her contract around me in involuntary spasms. The fit is staggering.
"Feel that." I press my weight over her, my lips brushing the back of her neck. "That's what you did to yourself all day. Every hour your mind was running strategy, and your body was already waiting for this."
She fights.
She pushes back against me, grinding her hips, trying to take control of the angle, and then drives her elbow toward my ribs. I catch it, pin her forearm against the bed beside her head, and lean my weight into the pressure.
She bucks beneath me, twisting, trying to unseat me or punish me for what I'm making her feel. Every movement drives me deeper, her hips rocking against mine, her resistance working against her until she's fucking herself on my cock while she fights me.
"Hold still."
"Make me." The words come out on a breath, guttural and raw, and the defiance in them sends a bolt of heat straight down my spine.
I pull out to the tip. Hold there with just the head of me stretching her entrance, thick and slick, and watch her hands tear at the pelts. She rocks backward, searching for more, and I don't give it to her.
Outside the narrow window, a raven calls from the battlements. The gate watch answers with a low whistle. The Tower is still running. My pack is still on duty. The world beyond this chamber hasn't stopped because I'm inside the woman I took from Dover.
"Ask me."
"I'll die first."
I slam back in. She cries out, her forehead dropping against the bed frame, her free hand twisting in the furs, and I set a pace that is nothing like the night before.
Harder. Faster. Each thrust driving deep enough that I feel the head of my cock hit the end of her, and every impact rocks her forward against the edge of the bed.
The sound of our bodies fills the chamber, rhythmic and obscene, and the friction on every withdrawal makes my vision pulse.
The bond makes it unbearable. The burn of stretched flesh, the ache of the discipline layered under the fullness of me inside her, pain and pleasure running so close together they're nearly the same signal.
She fights me hardest when the pleasure sharpens, and the moment it overtakes the pain registers through the bond like a flare: a surge of heat, a gathering tension that tightens her around me until I have to lock every muscle below my waist to keep from finishing too soon.
This is what fascinates me. Her mind is still at war with me.
Her body surrendered before I touched her tonight.
Two campaigns running simultaneously inside the same woman.
She's losing one while winning the other, and the question of which victory matters more is something neither of us can answer yet.
"You hate this." My voice is against the curve of her shoulder, my hips grinding deep, the full length of me buried and pressing against the place inside her that makes her legs shake. "And you're dripping down my cock."
She turns her face to the side, pressing her cheek against the bed, and the noise she makes is anguished and hungry at once. She drives back to meet me, taking me deeper, and the contradiction between her fury and her body's greed is the most honest thing in this room.
I pull back and drive forward again, angling my hips, finding the spot that makes her breath shatter.
I work it. Slow grinding strokes that press the head of my cock against the swollen place inside her with a deliberateness that isn't kindness.
Her thighs are trembling. Her fingers are white knuckled in the pelts.
The wet, rhythmic sound of my cock moving inside her echoes off the stone walls, filling the chamber alongside the crackle of the fire and her ragged, broken exhales.
"Every sound you're making right now," I tell her, my voice lower than I've heard it, "your body is telling me what your mouth won't. That this cunt was made to take me. That every inch of you that says no is squeezing my cock like it's trying to pull me deeper."
She bites down on the edge of the furs and screams through her teeth. A single, muffled, devastating sound, and I feel her tighten around me so hard the world narrows to the grip of her body and the roar of blood in my ears.
She comes around my cock with a violence that nearly destroys me.
Her inner muscles clench in rhythmic, crushing waves that squeeze me from root to tip, and what comes out of her is beyond words.
Beyond control. The release rips through her so hard her legs buckle.
I hold her up with one arm across her hips while she shakes apart, pinned between me and the bed.
She convulses against me, her back arching, her knuckles white on the bed frame.
Every wave of her orgasm rolls through the bond: the pleasure cresting and breaking, the fury underneath it that she wanted it, the devastation that she couldn't stop it.
My wolf wants the knot. The urge hits harder than it did last night, a demand that starts at the base of my cock and roars up through my spine like a fist closing around my will.
Lock inside her. Hold her there. Fill her so completely she feels me for days.
The swelling is mine to control, mine to choose.
Every instinct I have is howling for me to let it happen while she's still convulsing around me, while she's open and clenching and pulling me deeper. One decision. That's all it would take.
I don't. The knot is mine to give, and I'm not giving it tonight. The cost of holding back is a locked jaw and a taste of iron where I've bitten the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood. She'll never know how close she just came to something that can't be undone.
I drive into her twice more and finish with a groan that comes from somewhere I didn't know I had.
I pull out at the last moment and spill against the inside of her thigh in hot, streaking bursts, my hand locked on her hip hard enough to leave new bruises.
My cock jerks against her skin, and my forehead drops between her shoulder blades while my breathing tears itself apart.
For five heartbeats, the room holds nothing but the sound of two people trying to breathe.
I pull back. Stand. My legs are less steady than I'd like.
She stays bent over the bed, her face pressed to the pelts, her body trembling from exertion and aftermath and something she's not going to name for me.
My seed is on her thigh, running slow, and she doesn't wipe it away.
I don't know if that's exhaustion or defiance. With Eleanor, it could be either.
"On your knees."
She lifts her head. Turns enough to look at me over her shoulder, and the expression on her face is murderous. Flushed dark from her collarbones to her temples. Wet-eyed with effort. Lips swollen where she bit them to keep from screaming louder.
"You're not serious."
"Knees."
She slides off the bed. Her legs are unsteady and she catches herself on the bedpost before she goes down. She kneels on the stone floor and looks up at me, and the hatred in her eyes is so bright it's nearly beautiful.
I'm hard again already. Looking at her on her knees with her hair wrecked and her gaze leveled at me like a blade and my marks on her skin, softening isn't possible.
My cock is slick from her body, shining in the firelight, and her gaze drops to it.
Holds. Her lips press together, and I see the same calculation she made last night: the consideration of biting, weighed and discarded.
"Open your mouth."
She does. Slowly. Her lips part and she holds my gaze while she does it, making me watch her choose this, making sure I register that what comes next is a decision and not compliance.
She wants me to know she could have clenched her jaw and made me force it.
She didn't. And the fact that she chose to open her mouth instead of making me pry it open makes the heat in my blood surge harder than if she'd fought.
A woman who submits by choice is more dangerous than a woman who submits by force, because the choice can be revoked. She's reminding me of that on her knees with my cock in front of her face.
I step forward and guide the head of my cock past her lips. The first contact is devastating. Her mouth is hot and wet and tight, and she closes her lips around me with a suction that is immediate and punishing.