Chapter 18 #2
I hollow my cheeks and take him deeper. His cock hits the back of my throat and I swallow around him, and the breath that fractures out of him is raw, shredded, nothing like the controlled growls of every night before this.
His fingers tighten at the back of my skull but he doesn't guide.
He holds on. The distinction is the distance between everything we've been and everything we're becoming.
I work him with my mouth until his body is trembling against the wall, until his breathing is closer to gasping than breath, until the bond is flooding me with a pleasure so intense I can feel the orgasm building in his body as if it's building in mine.
He pulls me up before he finishes. His hands under my arms, lifting me, and his mouth crashes into mine with a desperation that tastes like surrender.
He strips the tunic over my head. His hands on my bare skin are rough and unhurried, spanning my ribs, cupping my breasts, his thumbs dragging across my nipples until I arch into him and the sound I make is his name.
He carries me to the bed. Lays me down on the furs that still remember the shape of both our bodies.
Strips his own clothes with hands that are still unsteady, and when he settles between my thighs the weight of him presses me into the furs and my body answers before my mind grants permission.
Every bruise he ever left has faded. I want new ones.
His hand slides between us. Down my belly, over my hip, between my legs, and his breath catches hard when his fingers find how wet I am.
I'm soaked. The oral, the kissing, the long nights without him—all of it pooled into a slickness that coats his fingers the moment he touches me.
He presses two fingers inside me and my back arches off the furs.
The stretch after so long without him is sharp and sweet and not nearly enough.
"Look at me." His voice is ruined. Low and scraped raw. A command, but his hands are braced on either side of my head instead of gripping my jaw, and the difference between demanding and asking lives in that single restraint. "Eleanor. Look at me."
I look at him. His fingers withdraw and I feel the blunt head of his cock replace them, pressing against my entrance.
He enters me slow, and the first stroke after the drought is so intense my vision whites at the edges.
He's thick. I'd forgotten how thick, how the stretch of accommodating him borders on too much before my body remembers and opens.
I feel every inch of him filling me, the pressure spreading through my core until he's seated to the hilt and the fullness is so complete it pulls a sound from my throat that has nothing of strategy in it.
He holds there. Buried. His forehead drops to mine. Both of us breathing.
Then he moves. Slow at first, each thrust deliberate, withdrawing until only the head remains inside me, then pressing back in to the hilt with a depth that makes me grip his shoulders and pull him closer.
His hand finds my thigh, hooks it higher against his hip, and the new angle sends him deeper.
I gasp. His jaw clenches. The wet rhythm of our bodies meeting fills the chamber the way the river fills the silence beneath the walls.
His thumb finds the swollen center of me where our bodies are joined, circling with a pressure he mapped out early and hasn't forgotten. The combination of his cock filling me and his hand working me sends a heat coiling through my belly that tightens with every stroke.
I wrap my arms around his neck and hold him there. His hips roll into mine and the friction is total, the slick heat of our bodies learning each other again.
His mouth moves to my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast. His teeth graze my nipple. My hips jerk against his hand. The sound I make is raw, involuntary, louder than I intend.
The orgasm builds behind my navel, a pressure that concentrates and coils. His thumb adjusts, finding the exact spot that makes my breathing fracture. His thrusts deepen, the pace steady and relentless, his eyes on my face because he told me to look at him and I haven't looked away.
I come with his name in my mouth and my body clenching around him so hard his rhythm breaks. The orgasm rolls through me in waves, each contraction pulling him deeper.
The bond carries his response back to me raw—the sensation of my body gripping his cock in pulsing spasms nearly taking him over the edge. His hand grips my hip and he buries himself to the hilt and holds, breathing torn, fighting the finish because he isn't done.
He isn't done.
The pace builds again. Harder now. My hips rise to meet each thrust. The sounds between us are the slap of skin and the wet friction of bodies locked together and my breathing shattering against his shoulder.
His hand is in my hair, gripping, pulling my head back to expose my throat, and his mouth drags down the column of my neck with an intensity that carries the promise of teeth.
RYLAND
She is beneath me and she is looking at me and her eyes are open.
In every night before this, there was a moment when Eleanor closed her eyes. During the discipline. During the sex. At the peak, when her body took over and her mind let go, her lids would fall and she'd surrender to sensation with her gaze shuttered.
Her eyes are open now. Gray-green and unguarded and watching me with a clarity that strips every thought from my head except one: she chose this.
She chose me. She's looking at me while I'm inside her because she wants to see the man she's accepting, and the exposure of being seen is more devastating than anything I've done to her in this bed.
I thrust deeper. Her breath catches and her fingers dig into my back and the sensation of her nails scoring my skin sends a bolt of heat through me that makes my jaw clench.
She hooks one leg over my hip, changing the angle, and the adjustment seats me so deep inside her that the pressure borders on pain for both of us.
"Don't close your eyes," I tell her. The words are ragged. Half-breath. "Don't look away from me."
"I'm not going anywhere." She says it against my mouth. Her hands catch my jaw, hold my face where she can see it, and the reversal makes my heart slam against my ribs. She's holding me still. She's making me be seen.
I've taken Eleanor in every position this bed and this room and this Tower have allowed. I've bent her over furniture and pinned her against walls and put her on her knees and commanded her body into configurations designed to prove my authority over every inch of her.
None of it felt like this.
This feels like being claimed.
I slow the pace. Not because the urgency has faded but because the urgency has changed shape.
I want to feel this. Every part of it. The slick grip of her body around me as I withdraw and press back in.
The catch in her breath when I hit deep.
The way her fingers trace the scratches she's leaving on my back, not apologizing for the marks, claiming them.
Her hips roll to meet mine. The rhythm we find isn't the punishing pace of every night before this, the fury and the discipline and the desperate tenderness that was really a farewell.
This is slower and heavier. This is two people who nearly lost each other and are proving with their bodies that the losing is over.
I brace on one arm and look down at her. Her hair is spread across the furs in dark tangles. Her lips are swollen from kissing me. Her skin is flushed from her throat to the tops of her breasts, and the color is more honest than anything I've seen in this room since the night I brought her here.
She's not performing. She's not resisting. She's not calculating.
She's here. With me. Looking at me while I move inside her.
I drop my mouth to the hollow of her throat. Her pulse kicks against my lips and her hands slide into my hair, holding me to her skin, and the permission in the gesture nearly breaks me open.
I've bitten this spot before. Kissed it. Laid my mouth there while she slept and pretended the tenderness belonged to the wolf. Now she's pulling my face to her throat and the offering is so deliberate it makes the wolf surge against my spine.
Her legs tighten around my hips. She says my name on a breath, not loud, not desperate, just my name spoken into the dark above my head as if she's saying it for the first time.
My hips stutter. I thrust deep and hold there. The sensation of being buried to the root inside a woman who is keeping her eyes open, saying my name like it means something other than "alpha" or "captor" or "the man who owns me," is the most dangerous thing I have ever felt.
I could stay here. In this exact moment. Her body around mine and her hands in my hair and her voice saying Ryland like it belongs to her instead of to the pack.
The knotting urge hits with a force that locks my spine.
I feel it building at the base, the swell that demands completion, and the decision is immediate.
I choose this. I chose it on the ride south when the numbers finally told the truth.
I choose to lock inside her because she looked at me while I entered her and she said my name and the name wasn't a concession. It was an acceptance.
I thrust deep. Hold there. Let the knot form.
The swell begins. Eleanor feels it. Her eyes widen and her lips part and her hands grip my shoulders hard enough to bruise. The knot expands at the base, thickening inside her, stretching her wider than my cock alone ever has.
She gasps, her body clenching around the pressure, and the bond delivers the intensity of the stretch from her end—the fullness that verges on overwhelming, the burn of accommodation, and beneath it the pull that demands more. Her hips press down against me. Taking it. Wanting it.
"Stay with me," she whispers. Her legs lock around my hips. Her forehead presses to mine.