“I know you’re a virgin, but was there ever…?”
She swallowed. “No.”
The word sent fire through his chest. She’d given herself to the Feast—signed her body over to strangers in masks—and her innocence somehow remained intact.
Her implicit trust in him was staggering. He didn’t want to hurt her. Despite his tortured past, she was the first woman he’d touched like this. The first woman he wanted to touch.
“We can slow down.” His voice came out ravaged.
“Only if you need to.” Her hips tilted toward him, seeking. “I want your hands on me.”
Something fractured behind his ribs.
He pressed his forehead to her sternum, breathing through the weight of what she was offering. “I need you to tell me if anything hurts.” He lifted his head to hold her gaze. “Not silence. Not endurance. If there’s pain, you tell me, and I stop. Understood?”
She nodded, eyes luminous in the firelight.
“Words, Daisy. I need to hear you say it.”
“I’ll tell you. I promise.”
He kissed her then—soft, reverent, a seal on the covenant between them. When he finally pulled back, her lips were swollen, and her breath came in shallow pants.
“We’ll go slow,” he murmured against her mouth. “Tell me how it feels.”
He pressed his finger inside—barely a knuckle’s depth—and her body clamped around him like a fist. So impossibly tight. So blisteringly hot. His cock throbbed with jealous anguish, straining against the fine wool of his suit, desperate to feel her everywhere.
“Ah…” Breath shuddered out of her, equal parts surprise and discovery.
He held perfectly still, giving her time to adjust, his lips trailing featherlight down the column of her throat. “Just breathe. Let your body open naturally.”
He counted her heartbeats against his mouth, never taking his lips off of her. When her inner muscles softened, and her hips rocked in tiny, unconscious circles, he allowed himself another inch.
She gasped. Her fingers dug into the bedding above her head.
“Still okay?”
“Yes. More. I want—” Her voice fractured. “I want to feel more of you.”
It wasn’t a performance. She was a revelation in truth.
He sank deeper, curling his finger to stroke along her front wall, searching, watching her every response. Her spine arched off the mattress, and a sound tore from her throat that was almost a scream.
“There—oh God, there!”
He pressed again, her inner walls gripping his stroking finger, her slick heat pulsing against his knuckle. Her heartbeat pulsed against his knuckle—that intimate throb of blood that fluttered excitedly.
“You’re opening now.” He kissed the words into the hollow of her throat. “Can you take more?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. Just hunger.
He withdrew almost completely, swirling a second finger in her arousal, then pressed into her entrance slowly. The fit was tight and the stretch visible in the way her brow furrowed.
“Too much?”
“No, keep going.” Her teeth sank into her lower lip.
“Breathe out,” he instructed. “Push against me. Let me in.”
