Chapter 13 #2
She isn't hiding from me tonight. Whatever wall she maintains in the Tower, whatever careful distance she preserves between the Eleanor who strategizes and the Eleanor who opens beneath me, is absent.
Every version of her is on this bed at once, and I have no framework for the Eleanor who contains all of them.
I lower my mouth to her breast and take her nipple between my lips.
Her back arches, pressing into me. Her pinned hands clench.
I work the hardened peak with my tongue, circling, flattening, drawing it between my teeth with a pressure that makes her jerk against me.
My free hand moves lower. Over the flat plane of her belly, over the jut of her hip where bruises from the passage are already darkening, to the heat between her thighs.
She's wet. Still wet from before, slick with the evidence of what we did against the wall, and when my fingers part her folds and slide through the gathered moisture the slickness coats my knuckles. Her breath catches, devastated and stripped of pretense.
I press two fingers into her and curl them forward.
The fit is tight, still swollen from the first round, and her body clenches around me with a reflexive hunger that makes my cock throb against her thigh.
I work her with slow, measured strokes, my thumb finding the swollen nub above and circling with a pressure I've learned makes her breathing fracture.
She's drenched. The slickness spreads across my palm as she rolls against my hand, the motion unhurried, nothing like the frantic grinding against the stone.
She moves like she's trying to feel every detail, every ridge of my fingers, every pass of my thumb, as if sensation is the only thing she trusts right now and she intends to have all of it.
I give her all of it. My mouth moves to her other breast. My fingers hold the pace she's set, steady and thorough.
When her thighs begin to tremble and her wrists strain against my restraining hand, I don't accelerate.
I let her ride it until the orgasm takes her in a slow, shuddering roll, her inner walls contracting around my fingers in spasms that match the bowing of her spine off the bed.
A cry pulls from her throat that I've never heard before.
Something lower than the sharp sounds of the discipline nights.
Longer than the bitten-off gasps from earlier.
Threaded with grief, as if the pleasure and the loss are moving through her on the same current and she can't separate them.
I bring her down slowly. My fingers ease their pressure but don't withdraw. She trembles around me in diminishing waves, and the bond transmits every tremor with a fidelity that makes my own breathing unsteady, her aftershocks echoing beneath my ribs as if the orgasm were mine.
I release her wrists. Free myself from my trousers. Position myself between her thighs and push into her in one long stroke that seats me to the hilt. She resists for a heartbeat, sore and swollen, then yields and takes me with a slick heat that steals the air from my lungs.
I hold there, buried, feeling her contract around me in slow involuntary spasms, and through the bond every tremor registers in my own body with a precision no human man could know.
The supernatural awareness should give me an advantage. Instead it strips me, because I can feel how exposed she is, how thin the walls have gone, how much of her is open beneath me, and I have no defense against that intelligence.
I take her apart. Slowly. Thoroughly. Every stroke deliberate, angled to reach the place that makes her breathing stutter, and the pace I set owes nothing to urgency and everything to a precision that is costing me more than she knows.
I want to drive into her until the bed frame cracks against the stone.
I want to pin her and take what the bond is demanding with every beat of my blood.
Instead I hold the pace, because the anger that brought us into the corridor has burned down to something else, and the grief underneath it deserves a tempo that lets her feel every second of what we're losing.
Her hands find my back. Her nails drag lines from my shoulders to my waist, and the sting of them is a language I've learned to read across her body.
When she claws, she's still fighting. When her fingers spread flat and press, she's surrendered.
Tonight the marks alternate, digging in and then opening, fight and surrender running parallel, and the cadence of her indecision mirrors the motion of my body against hers.
"Harder," she says against my neck. Her voice is raw.
I give her what she's asking for. I increase the force without increasing the pace, each stroke driving into her with a weight that fills the room with the wet slap of skin meeting skin.
Her teeth close on my collarbone where the ridge of an old scar gives her something to bite down on. The pressure registers as a bright, specific pain that runs straight down my spine and tightens every muscle in my lower back.
Her legs wrap around me. She pulls me in and grinds against me. I hold her there, my body bearing her into the pelts, my mouth at her throat.
I withdraw. She makes a protest she doesn't bother disguising.
"Turn over," I tell her.
She doesn't move. Her eyes hold mine, dark and glittering in the firelight. "Ask nicely."
She's testing me. Even now, even here, she's probing for the edges of my authority with the same instinct she applies to every structure she encounters. Testing it for give.
"I don't ask." I hold her gaze until the silence between us thickens with a heat that has teeth. "Turn over."
Her mouth twitches. Not a smile. Something sharper. Then she turns. Slowly. Settling onto her belly, her cheek against the bedding, her spine a long pale line in the low light.
I run my hand down her back. Over the ridge of each vertebra, the hollow above her waist, the curve of her backside where bruises from nights at the Tower have faded to faint shadows.
I push her thighs apart with my knee and settle between them.
The sight of her spread open on the pelts, flushed and swollen and glistening with her own arousal and what I left in her earlier, is a view I will carry into every tactical meeting for the rest of my life.
I lean over her, my chest against her back, my lips beside her ear.
"Look at you." My hand slides between her thighs from behind, parting her, and the slickness I find there coats my fingers, warm and copious.
"Soaked through. After tonight, after what you saw me do in that courtyard, after what I am.
This cunt is still mine. Still dripping for the wolf who tore out a man's throat in your father's courtyard.
" I push two fingers into her from behind and she lifts off the bed with a choked cry that the bedding swallows. "And you're still here."
She turns her head enough that I can see her profile. The line of her jaw. The set of her mouth. "I'm still here," she says. And the words carry the weight of every reason she shouldn't be, and the single reason she is.
I withdraw my fingers and replace them with my cock, pushing into her from behind in a single measured stroke.
The angle is tighter from this position, the pressure different.
What she buries against the bedding is guttural and animal and nothing like the composed woman who rides beside me through settlements and sits at my table with her spine straight.
I brace one hand beside her head and grip her hip with the other, setting a pace that's slower than she asked for and more precise, each stroke bottoming out with a force that makes the bed frame creak against the stone wall.
Her fingers claw the fabric. She rocks back to meet me, and the slap of my body against her backside fills the room alongside the slick, obscene noise of every thrust.
"Every man in Dover heard what I did today," I tell her, my mouth against the back of her neck, maintaining the cadence that's making her thighs shake.
"Every man in Dover knows what I'm doing tonight.
The alpha's woman, in the alpha's bed, in the castle the alpha owns.
And you're making noises that carry through stone. "
Her orgasm hits without warning. A cry she can't muffle, her face pressed into the bedding, her body clenching around me in waves so tight I have to stop moving or follow her over the edge.
I lock every muscle and hold still, feeling the contractions ripple through the bond like an echo in my own body. My free hand fists in the fabric beside her head while I fight to hold back what her pleasure is trying to drag out of me.
I ease out of her. She breathes. She's trembling with the kind of full-muscle exhaustion that follows a release drawn out past its natural length, and the sheen of sweat on her spine catches the firelight.
She rolls onto her back. Looks up at me. And then she slides down the bed, her hands on my thighs, and takes me in her mouth.
I've had her mouth before. On her knees in our chamber at the Tower, my hand in her hair, commanding the depth and the pace.
The resentment she usually brings to the act has its own charge, a defiance that translates into pressure and technique and the way she watches me from below with fury in her eyes.
This isn't that.
This is Eleanor using her mouth as a weapon, her teeth dragging along the underside of my cock with enough pressure that the line between stimulation and damage blurs.
The edge of her incisors catches the ridge below the head, and the bright flare of it makes me buck.
She doesn't ease up. She takes me further in, her cheeks hollowing, her tongue working the length while her teeth maintain that dangerous friction.
Every stroke is a negotiation between wanting to bring me pleasure and wanting to make me pay for what she saw on those flagstones.