Chapter 19 #3
I shift, testing, and the painful stretch between my legs bleeds into something else, something molten that makes me roll my hips up against him without deciding to. He hisses out a breath he doesn't need. "Calypso."
My eyes roll back. The thick length of him dragging along my aching walls is like a godsend. I’ve never felt sexier and more in control. "Move," I tell him, breathless. "I want you to move."
And he does. He draws back and slides into me again, deep and slow, and it stops being anything I could manage.
It isn't smooth. It isn't practiced. It's better than that—it's real, the two of us learning the shape of this together, his breath coming ragged against my throat, my nails dragging down his back.
Every stroke drives him deeper inside me, and the tether hangs wide open between us so every wave of it doubles: his pleasure in me, mine in him, feeding back and forth until I genuinely can't find the seam.
For once I stop hunting for it. I let it be ours.
His rhythm builds, that careful control fraying at the edges. Then he pulls out of me—I make a sound of protest that turns into a gasp when he flips me over, guides me up onto my hands and knees, and slides back in from behind in one deep stroke.
"Oh—" The new angle has him hitting somewhere that whites out my vision.
"Fuck, baby." His voice is a wreck against my shoulder, one hand splayed over my stomach, holding me right where he wants me.
"That's the sound. I've wanted that sound for months.
" He drags his teeth—blunt, careful—along the curve of my neck.
"Say my name again. I want to hear it while you fall apart. "
"Aamon—please—"
"I know." He thrusts deep, unhurried, ruining me by degrees. "I've got you. Let go. I won't let anything break but you."
And I feel it start again—the heat winding tight and low in my belly, the pressure climbing, my magic rising with it hot enough to spark.
This time he doesn't wait for the warning.
His power's already threaded through mine, holding the surge steady even as he drives me higher, and the doubled sensation of it—his pleasure crashing into mine through the tether, his cock hitting that spot inside me over and over, his magic cradling the thing in me that could kill us both—tips me straight over the edge.
I shatter around him, and I feel him break right after, feel it flood through the tether as he buries himself deep and groans my name into my skin, his whole frame shuddering, all his years of iron control finally, completely gone.
He says my name like it's the only word he ever learned. Into my hair, my throat, the corner of my jaw, again and again, like he can't stop. I throw my head back against his shoulder, groaning into his ear as his cock throbs and milks the last pulses of pleasure out of both of us.
I lay flat and he follows me down. Then just when I think the moment is over…Aamon doesn't pull out.
He gathers me back against his chest, both of us on our sides, still buried deep, and he holds me there—one arm banded across me, his hand splayed warm over my stomach—and he doesn't let go.
He just stays inside me and rolls his hips, slow, unhurried, a lazy grind that isn't chasing anything, that's only there to keep me full of him.
I let go. All of it. For the first time I can remember there's no exit to find, no threat to count, no part of me standing watch. Just his chest against my spine and the slow deep drag of him and the blanket he pulls up over us both.
"How do you feel?" His mouth is at my ear, and his hand slides lower, two fingers finding my clit and circling, gentle, drawing the pleasure out long and slow so it never quite ends. "Tell me. All of it."
"Good," I breathe. It's inadequate. I try again. "Wrecked. In a good way. I didn't know it—" A helpless sound as he rolls his hips again, deeper. "I didn't know it could feel like that."
"It's supposed to feel like that." He kisses the back of my neck. Keeps up that slow rhythm, those slow fingers, coaxing little aftershocks out of me until I'm boneless. "You did so well. Look at you. Let me take care of you."
And he does. He keeps me right there on the warm edge of it, no urgency, no end, his hand and his hips and his low voice in my ear telling me how good I was, how good I feel, how he's not going anywhere.
Every threat-counting, exit-finding piece of me the facility ever built goes quiet under it.
Silent. I feel safe, and I have so little practice with that feeling I can barely stand it.
I go loose and heavy and warm. Somewhere in it I start talking—babbling, really, half-sentences with no landing, your hands and stay and I didn't think I got to have this—and he hums low against my skin and keeps me held and full and moving, never breaking the slow rhythm, until my eyes won't stay open.
"Sleep," he murmurs.
"You don't," I mumble. "Sleep. Ever."
"Tonight I might." His lips brush my temple. His hand goes still, spread warm and possessive over my stomach. And the last thing I hear, already sinking, is his voice gone soft and certain against my hair:
"You're not leaving this bed again, Calypso. Not ever."
I fall asleep with a smile on my lips.
∞∞∞
I don't know how long I’m out. Dreamless, heavy, wrapped in cedar and old paper and him—and I surface out of it slow, disoriented, still held exactly where I fell asleep.
But a sound brings me back to reality. Not loud. Just wrong—out of place in a house that runs on silence. Below us, down through the floors, a door that shouldn't open at this hour opening. Low voices, clipped, hurried.
“What–”
Aamon is already awake behind me. Not the tender stillness from before. The other kind. Alert. His head turned toward the sound.
"Couriers," he whispers. "At this hour."
I sit up, the blanket sliding off my naked body. Beyond the wall, muffled voices filter in and out. Low under my sternum the old wrongness climbs—except this one isn't the tether. This one's just my gut.
“What time is it?”
“Three,” Aamon answers.
“What do you think Leopold is up to?”
Aamon shakes his head, then pulls me back down and tucks me against his chest. “Go back to bed. I’ll wake you if anything changes.”
I blink, my eyelids still heavy and my body weighing a thousand pounds. He’s right.
I don’t want this night ruined by Leopold Vassard. Or whatever nefarious shit he’s up to.