He spreads his fingers wide across the curve and holds them there. “I missed so much,” he says. “I missed so fucking much.”
I thread my fingers through his hair. “You’re here now. That’s what counts.”
I reach behind me to unclasp my bra and let it fall. The vulnerability of standing bare before Bastian, unable to see his reaction, sends a shiver down my spine. My nipples tighten in the open air, even though he’s still baking me in his heat.
With a strangled inhale, he lowers his mouth to my collarbone and drags it, hot and open, down to the swell of my breast. Just like that, all self-consciousness goes out the window. I stop caring about anything except the sensation. His lips drag across my skin and that tortured moan drags with it.
My head sags back. My fingers clamp onto his shoulders for balance as his lips close around one nipple, tongue swirling, teeth grazing with just enough pressure to make my breath hitch.
A moan escapes me before I can catch it.
“There she is,” Bastian chuckles against my skin. The vibration of his voice sends more heat arcing between my thighs.
He walks me backward toward the bed, hands on my hips to keep me steady. When my calves hit the mattress, I sit down hard. He catches my wrists and presses them gently into the comforter on either side of my hips, pinning me in place.
“Stay,” he orders against my throat. “Let me look at you.”
He steps back, and the loss of him makes me whine, a plaintive little “Bastian” that sounds so meek and submissive that he can only growl in response.
“I know,” he says. “I know, baby. Just give me this. One minute to remember what I almost lost.”
So I stay. I let him look. And even though I can’t see his eyes on me, Ifeelthem, burning trails across every inch of skin.
Then I hear him sink to his knees on the floor. The position puts his face level with my belly, and his breath fans across the stretched skin before his lips follow. He kisses a path from my navel to my hip bone. When he runs out of skin, he slowly peels my leggings down my legs and sets them aside so he can keep going south.
My hands fist in the comforter beneath me, fighting the urge to cover myself, to hide the belly that’s changed so much, the body that feels foreign even to me now.
But Bastian doesn’t give me time to spiral. His palms slide up my calves, my knees, my inner thighs, and spread them gently apart as he settles between my legs.
His stubble scrapes me and I jolt with a shrieked giggle. He laughs with me, then paints a kiss to my left thigh. Then my right. He is no hurry to get where I need him to get so fucking badly.
When I moan his name again—“Bastian!”—he ignores me. His teeth graze the crease where my leg meets my hip. I feel his smile against my skin when I shudder. He’s warm and close, but not yet close enough to satisfy the ache building there.
My hips buck involuntarily, seeking friction, seekinghim, but his hands lock my thighs down.
“Patience.”
“I’vebeenpatient,” I gasp. “I’ve been patient forso long. I thought you weredead, you absolute bastard, and now, you’re going to make me?—”
“Beg?” he finishes. “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I am.”
My eyes roll back in my head as I collapse to my elbows. Lucky for me, though, Bastian may be an absolute bastard, but he’s not anevilabsolute bastard. After half a minute more of his teasing, fluttering kisses, his mouth finally finds me.
My back arches off the mattress as his tongue drags through my folds. I bury my fingers in the roots of his hair and pull him as close as I humanly can. If I’m suffocating him in me, he shows no sign of it. He just inhales me like perfume and then starts to lick and suck in ways that fry my circuitry. His fingers join at some point, I’m not sure when, and I dissolve in the face of the overwhelming sensation.
The sounds I make are embarrassingly loud in the quiet room, completely undignified moans and whimpers that would mortify me under any other circumstances, but I can’t bring myself to care. Not when his tongue is doingthat, not when his fingers arethere,not when I have him back with me and everything feels so damn good.
“Bastian,” I whimper, my hips grinding against his face despite his hands trying to hold me still. “Oh, God,Bastian— Oh— Oh— Wait, no?—!”
He pulls back.
Just like that. Right when I’m teetering on the edge, every nerve ending screaming for release, hestops.
“No!” I wail. “No, no, no, you can’t—youasshole?—!”
His laugh is dark velvet against my thigh. “I told you: You’re going to beg.”
“Iwasbegging!” I sound desperate, completely wrecked, and I haven’t evencomeyet. “That was begging! That wasexplicitlybegging!”
