Chapter 11 #2
The sharp inhale she got in response was deeply satisfying.
“Oh,” she said against his mouth. “That got your attention.”
“You are sitting in my lap,” he said, voice considerably rougher than it had been sixty seconds ago, “looking at me exactly like that. ”
“How am I looking at you?”
“Like you’ve already decided how this ends.”
She had. “Maybe I have.”
The runes blazed.
She pulled back and looked at them—both arms, shoulder to wrist, blazing silver-gold in the firelight, the patterns shifting like something alive. She traced one with her fingertip and felt the shudder move through him all the way to his hands.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” he said.
“I’m curious.”
“You are not curious. You are—” he stopped, jaw tight. “—you know exactly what you’re doing.”
She looked up at him from under her lashes. “Maybe I do.”
He made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a groan and tipped her backward against the pillows.
He followed her down slowly. Careful. Like he was conscious of his own size against her and was being careful not to hurt her. She reached up and pulled him down by the back of his neck and kissed him until the carefulness started to give way. His hand slid beneath her sweater.
Oh .
Warm skin against warm skin, his palms rough from years of knives and hot pans, and she felt every callus as he moved with unhurried precision across her ribs, her waist, the curve of her hip—learning her the way he learned flavors. Complete. Attentive. Nothing wasted.
“You’re thinking again,” he murmured against her jaw.
“You’re very distracting and also somehow methodical about it, which is—” she caught her breath as his mouth found the hollow beneath her ear, “—actually extremely characteristic of you.”
A low, pleased sound rumbled in his chest .
She worked his shirt over his head and was briefly, entirely distracted by the runes spreading across his chest and shoulders—not just his arms now, branching outward, illuminating him in patterns that shifted with his breathing.
She pressed her palm flat against his sternum where they clustered densest, over his heart, and the bond surged through the contact like a current finding its path.
Stenrik’s breath left him completely.
“Sorry,” she said, not very sorry.
“Don’t stop,” he said, which she suspected cost him something to admit, and which she found devastating in the best possible way.
She didn’t stop.
Clothes were shed in increments—not frantically, not with the rushed desperation of people afraid of losing their nerve.
They were two people who were both entirely sure and neither willing to hurry.
When she got tangled in her sleeve, Stenrik helped her.
When he nearly concussed himself on the headboard trying to remove his shirt, she laughed hard enough that he ended up laughing too, the sound filling the firelit room with something warm and unguarded.
She realized she’d never heard him laugh like that before.
Completely. Without reservation.
Her chest ached.
Stenrik kissed his way slowly down her body while his hands explored with increasing confidence, learning her reactions carefully. He paid attention to everything. Every breath she caught. Every small movement. Every soft sound she couldn’t quite hold back.
He spent time at her breasts, worshipping the soft mounds as if they were the finest delicacy. His lips teased her, his tusks framing the soft shapes, grazing them with their tips gently. Under his care, she writhed, the feelings washing over her with a new sensations.
And somehow that intimacy felt even more dangerous than the desire.
Because he cared.
Elise threaded her fingers through his hair, tugging lightly until he looked up at her again.
He gave her a teasing grin, his tusks flashing white in the firelight.
Then he kissed his way down her body, planting kisses along the way until he reached the juncture of her thighs.
Slowly, he spread her legs and opened her with his thumbs.
He tasted her with his tongue, keeping his tusks grazing her outer lips.
His thick tongue caressed her thoroughly, teasing her opening and up to her clitoris until she was shuddering and her cried echoing in the cave.
When he finally joined their bodies together, it happened slowly.
His hand stayed tangled with hers while he watched her face with intense concentration, making sure she stayed with him through every inch of it. He notched his cock at her opening and slowly pushed inside. Her eyes widened at his size, significantly bigger than she’d expected.
“Relax, Elise. We’ll take it slow.”
He kept his eyes on her face, his hand tangled with hers, watching her with an intensity that would have felt overwhelming from anyone else and from him felt like the most careful thing anyone had ever done.
He slowly pushed inside, advancing ever so carefully until he was fully seated and she felt so completely full.
“Are you okay?” His voice was strained but he was patient.
She nodded. Then he moved, glided out and her nerve endings exploded with pleasure. She gasped and arched into him, wrapping her arms and legs around him. “More, please. ”
He chuckled and obliged, moving in and out, faster and faster. Her climax was fast approaching and she exploded around him, a scream tearing from her throat. He gave a shout and stiffened above her.
The runes blazed white.
The entire room lit silver-gold, patterns racing across the stone walls in shifting waves, and she understood distantly that something significant was happening and also couldn’t bring herself to care about anything except the weight of him and his voice rough in her ear and the bond pulling them together with the patient certainty of something that had always known.
She came apart again with his name in her mouth, trembling, the bond flaring brilliant through every nerve.
For a long time afterward neither of them moved.
The runes faded slowly to a soft, steady glow. His face was buried in the curve of her shoulder, his breathing gradually evening out against her skin. She lay with her fingers in his hair—thick and dark and still slightly damp—and stared at the cave ceiling lit faintly gold by the runes.
Not the held-breath stillness of someone managing their own anxiety.
Just still.
Home , something in her said, quietly, satisfied.
She let it.
The mountain rumbled.
Low and deep. Not violent—just a slow, resonant vibration through the stone, like something shifting far below.
Elise blinked at the ceiling. “Was that?—”
Stenrik went very still.
“Us?” she finished.
A long pause.
“…Partially,” he said .
She turned her head to look at him. “What’s the other part?”
Another pause, longer. Then, from somewhere deep in the mountain, muffled by several hundred feet of basalt but unmistakably present: the sound of distant cheering.
Elise stared at the ceiling.
“Stenrik.”
“Yes.”
“Is your family?—”
“I have never,” he said, with the careful enunciation of a man constructing his own dignity from whatever rubble was available, “hated them more than I do at this precise moment.”
She pressed her lips together.
“Don’t,” he said.
She lasted approximately three seconds.
The laughter, when it came, was helpless and complete, and after a moment—she felt it through the bond first, a reluctant warmth, and then heard it—Stenrik laughed with her, low and rueful, his face still buried in her shoulder.
The rune over his heart glowed on, steady and warm, entirely unbothered.