Chapter 13 #3
She’d asked him to bring the lamp, had wanted the light because she was hungry to know all of him so that she might store away each separate memory one by one for lonely times ahead: his masculine beauty and the power in his body, the scars that underscored his vitality.
The intensity of his eyes, unguarded. Had it been a conscious choice on his part, to allow her to read bare on his face exactly how she roused him?
He hadn’t kept it from her, hadn’t held himself behind a cool, impenetrable mask.
And oh, had she reveled in her power to be his undoing. So willingly had he ceded his superior physical strength and size to her. The memory of the heat in his gaze as she caressed and teased him with fingers and mouth sent a pulse through her core even now.
His breath was even, but his body’s alertness said he was not asleep either.
Unbearably intimate, suddenly, to be nude against him in the dark, both of them awake, the echoes of their joining humming through her still.
His arms were around her, cheek against her hair.
His cock was hard again where it nestled against her rear. She quelled a restless need to move.
For as long as she could bear, she lay quiescent in purposeful awareness, but eventually she did move, although only enough to deliberately increase the pressure of her bottom against him.
Below her navel, his fingers began gently playing over her skin, but he made no move to do more than that despite the evidence of his arousal.
She ran fingertips along his arm. Languidly he shifted one leg over and along her own. She felt each separate breath he took. The banked embers of desire flared fully to life again, the anticipation nearly stealing her breath.
She willfully narrowed her mind to encompass only the dark world of the bed: the heavy, muscled thigh resting partially atop her own, warm breath beside her ear, the slow paths he traced over stomach and hip and rib cage.
Tingles chased across her skin ahead of his fingers.
Her breasts tightened and ached, anticipating his touch, although he did not caress her there yet.
When the spreading lightness suffused her head to toe, when the aching emptiness at her core demanded appeasement, she rolled to face him. His cock pressed against her belly, hot as a brand, and she hooked a leg high over his hip, opening herself against him in silent invitation.
She speared fingers through his hair to revel in its surprisingly silky texture and rubbed the other hand across his jaw just for the pleasure of stubble rasping her palm.
He exhaled and cupped her cheek in response, thumb stroking along her cheekbone, and sought her mouth with his own.
He kissed her deeply and unhurriedly as though that were the end in itself; the unexpected sweetness of it nearly undid her.
When at last he rolled her onto her back and pressed his forehead into her shoulder, entering her fully on a sharp intake of breath, some emotion welled up, something too elusive and fragile to name.
Then it was gone as he started to move strongly in her; there became only the give-and-take of their bodies working together.
So complete was the darkness of the room that even with her eyes adjusted to the lack of light, she couldn’t make out his features.
She discovered instead his muscles moving beneath her hands; her fingertips found the scars that creased and nicked the warm skin of his back.
Every inch of him against her was alive and hers to touch for these stolen moments in the dark.
The short hairs at his neck curled, sweat-damp, as she learned the shape of his head beneath her hands.
She traced his lips with her tongue, took his sigh into her mouth as she matched the lift of her hips to the movements of his.
Sweat trailed between them; although the room was cold, under the blankets was nothing but heat. She slid a foot up along his calf to the outside of his thigh, tilting herself to take him deeper before twining her legs around his.
Slow sweet tension built, not so steeply as before but just as commanding; he read it in her altered breathing and shallowed his strokes to give her more friction where she yearned for it, purposeful fingers between them finding her nipples until she bowed up against him.
The pulses of pleasure still rippled through her as she set her heels alongside his thighs, offering him his own release.
More urgent now, fast, hard strokes until his rhythm faltered and broke.
On a groan, he spilled in a hot rush against her stomach.
She welcomed his full weight, arms wrapped around his back.
He turned his face into her throat, his hair soft against her lips as he caught his breath.
Well after his breathing had evened out, he lifted his mouth to hers for a devastatingly soft kiss before rolling to his back and pulling her half atop him.
As he arranged the blankets over them, she dropped her head against him to listen to his heartbeat steady beneath her ear.
One of his hands curved over the small of her back while the other combed gently through tangles in her hair.
She let him lull her thus with hands and the warmth of his body, and at last she slept.