Chapter 9 #3
She is not serving me. She is taking something that belongs to her, and the fact that it happens to live inside my body is a complication she has decided to manage on her own terms.
"Mine." The word leaves me without permission. Low, rough, scraped from somewhere deeper than language. "You're mine when you do this."
She pulls back just enough to speak. Her lips are wet, and her breath is warm against me when she says, "Prove it."
The command snaps something loose. The wolf surges behind my ribs, and the man lets it.
I stand from the chair in a single motion, pulling her up with me, my hands on her hips lifting her until her legs wrap around my waist. Her mouth finds mine, and I can taste myself on her tongue, and the rawness of that drives me across the chamber to the bed.
I don't set her on the bed. I put her on the edge and follow her down, my weight pressing her into the furs, my hips between her thighs before she's finished drawing breath.
Pulling her tunic over her head, I strip the undergarments down her legs with a roughness that tears the lacing and leaves the fabric in pieces on the stone floor.
She's bare beneath me, and the marks from the punishment are visible in the daylight, and the sight of them should satisfy the part of me that needs evidence of ownership.
It doesn't. It makes the need worse, because the marks are mine but Eleanor wearing them is something I'm only beginning to understand I cannot own.
"Hands above your head."
She raises her arms and crosses her wrists against the pelts.
The position is known. Weeks ago it was punishment.
Here, in the broad light of midday with her gaze on mine, it is something she gives me because she wants to see what I do with it, and the exposure embedded in that gesture is a fault line in my defenses I didn't authorize and can't seal.
I pin her wrists with one hand. Press them down and hold them there, my fingers wrapped around both wrists, my weight behind the grip.
She could hold the position on her own. She proved that. Now I'm proving something else: that I want my hands on her, not because she needs restraining but because the feel of her pulse hammering against my palm while I take her apart is a sensation I'm no longer willing to forego.
I settle between her thighs and press my mouth to her belly, then lower.
Her hips lift, involuntary, and the sound she makes when my tongue finds her is small and sharp and completely unhidden.
I hold her open with my free hand, spreading her, and the first slow stroke of my tongue through her folds draws a tremor from her thighs that I feel against both sides of my face.
I don't rush. The map of what I want from this is precise: I want to know every response she's capable of, and I want to earn each one separately.
My tongue circles her clit with a pressure that makes her hips buck, then I flatten it and drag a long, measured stroke from her entrance to the peak, tasting the slickness that tells me everything her composure tries to hide.
She's drenched. Has been since the chair. The evidence of it coats my lips, my chin, and I press deeper, my tongue working inside her while my thumb finds the swollen nub above and rolls it in slow circles that make her back arch off the bed.
"Ryland." My name comes out scraped raw. Her fingers twist above her head, fighting the restraint of my hand on her wrists, and the struggle makes the muscles in her arms flex in a way that sends a pulse so raw it registers in my cock.
I add a second finger alongside my tongue, curling upward, finding the spot that makes her breath stutter and her thighs clamp around my ears.
The wet sounds of my mouth on her bounce off the stone walls, amplified, echoing back to us alongside her ragged breathing.
I work her with a focus that borders on obsession, reading every response the bond feeds me, learning the precise pressures and rhythms that make her fingers clench and her composure dissolve into sounds she can no longer contain.
She comes against my mouth with her thighs locked around my head and her back arched and a cry that fills the stone chamber and echoes off the walls. I don't stop. I carry her through it, and when the tremors begin to fade, I start again.
"Ryland." My name again. She says it with the same weight she gives everything that matters.
I release her wrists and rise over her, settling my weight between her thighs.
She's soaked, swollen, still pulsing from the orgasm.
When I position myself at her entrance and push inside her, the heat, the slickness, her body opening for me then gripping tight enough to steal my breathing—it is staggering.
I bury myself to the hilt in a single stroke, and the wet sound of it, the slap of skin on skin in the quiet chamber, is as explicit as any word I could speak.
Her hands are free now. They find my shoulders, my back, her nails dragging lines I'll feel for days.
I hold still inside her, the pulse of her orgasm still fading around me, the bond transmitting every detail of what she's experiencing with a fidelity that erases the boundary between her sensation and mine.
"This," I tell her, pulling back and driving forward with a stroke that pushes the air from her lungs.
"This cunt. This is mine. Every time you walk through my Tower, every time you stand in my hall with your chin up and your spine straight, every wolf in this fortress knows what I do to you in this bed.
My marks on your skin. My scent on yours.
You walk through these halls and every wolf you pass knows exactly who owns you. "
Her expression catches fire. There it is. The defiance beneath the need, the blaze that burns hotter when I pour fuel on it. Her jaw sets; her gaze locks on mine and she says, "Then make it worth my while."
The sound I make is closer to a growl than language.
I hook her knee over my forearm, spreading her wider, changing the angle so every thrust hits deeper.
The pace I set has nothing to do with tenderness.
It has everything to do with the primal fact that Eleanor told me to prove it, and I am proving it with every stroke.
I command her onto her hands and knees. She turns without hesitation, and the sight of her on all fours in my bed, her back curved, her hair falling forward, open to me, is a weakness I will never be able to fortify against.
I grip her hip with one hand and enter her from behind, and the angle is deeper, tighter, and she drops to her elbows with a gasp that carries.
I hold her hip hard enough that my fingers will leave marks, and the thought of those bruises on her hip where my hand gripped her while I took her from behind sends a surge through me that darkens my vision at the edges.
"You feel what you do to me." I thrust deep enough that the impact pushes her forward into the pelts.
My other hand slides around her hip, between her legs, finding the swollen center of her where our bodies are joined, and I stroke her in time with my thrusts.
"You feel how hard I am inside you. How deep.
You built escape routes through my Tower and I'm so far inside you right now that there's nowhere left for either of us to run. "
She makes a sound. Raw, involuntary, pulled from somewhere beneath every wall she's built. She presses back against me, meeting my thrusts, and the slap of her hips against mine sets a rhythm between these ancient stones that is as possessive as any claim I've spoken.
"Don't hide from me." My hand finds her jaw, turns her head so I can see her face.
Her look is glazed, her lips parted, and the expression has nothing left between it and me.
No armor. No calculation. Just the raw want of Eleanor stripped of every strategy she's ever worn.
"I want to see you when you come for me. "
She holds my gaze while I take her. The eye contact sustained while I drive into her from behind, my fingers still working between her legs, is more naked than any position or act.
She lets me see what this does to her, and the need and the fury and the surrender tangled together on her face are a weapon she's handing me without conditions.
The second orgasm builds in her before her body shows the signs.
I feel it gathering through the connection, a tightening behind her navel, a heat that concentrates and coils, and I adjust my angle and the pressure of my fingers to hit the place that makes it crest. She comes with her gaze on mine and my name on her lips and her body clenching around me so hard the sensation nearly takes me with her.
Nearly. Not yet.
I pull out. Guide her onto her back. Settle between her thighs again, face to face this time, and the new angle changes the geometry of everything.
Her arms come around my neck. Her fingers thread into my hair.
She pulls me closer until the space between our bodies collapses into nothing.
Her heartbeat pounds against my chest, rapid, unsteady, matching mine pulse for pulse.
The knotting urge hits like a wall. It has been building since the first night.
Every time I've taken her, the instinct has surged at the peak, demanding what the wolf has known since Dover: that she is mine, that the lock is the only honest expression of what I've been circling for weeks, that every time I've suppressed it, I've been lying to the most fundamental part of my own biology.
I've held it back. Every night. The discipline required has cost me more than she knows and more than I'll admit. This time, I don't hold it back.
The decision is deliberate. Not instinct overriding strategy.
Not biology overwhelming the man. I choose this.
I choose to lock inside her because Eleanor went to her knees in front of my chair, took me in her mouth, and said ‘prove it.’ This is the only proof that means anything in the language my body speaks.