“Not yet.” Ragged. Hungry. “You first. I need to taste you first.”
He lifts me, one arm beneath my knees, the other supporting my back. I loop my arms around his neck as he carries menot toward the bed but through a doorway and into a bathing chamber.
“You're covered in that cage.” His jaw tightens. “I want nothing on your skin but me.”
The shower is large enough for a Draveki frame, all dark stone and metal fixtures that gleam in the low light. He sets me on my feet and reaches past me, and water cascades from overhead in a rush of heat.
Steam rises around us. He strips off his remaining clothing, and then he's stepping into the spray with me, seven feet of solid muscle.
His cock juts toward me, the ridges along his shaft pronounced with arousal. The charcoal skin darkens to near-black at the head, flushed with blood, and at the base, his knot already swells with the promise of what's to come. I've had him inside me before. I know how those ridges drag against every nerve ending, how that knot stretches and locks and holds me captive while he spills into me.
I want him. Want him so badly my hands shake with the need to touch, to stroke, to wrap around that thick length and feel him pulse against my palm. I want him on his knees before me and above me and behind me. I want him in every way a body can take another body, and I want it now.
His nostrils flare. He can smell my arousal, I realize. Can scent what the sight of him does to me.
“Soon.” He reaches for a cloth, for soap that smells of herbs I don't recognize. “First, I wash them off you.”
He starts at my shoulders. The cloth moves over my skin in slow circles, gentle pressure that loosens muscles I didn't realize I'd been clenching. Water sluices down my body, carrying away the grime of stone floors and cold hours and hands that touched without permission.
“I keep seeing you in that cage. The bruises on your face. The way you looked at me when I tore the bars apart.”
“How did I look at you?”
“As if you knew I'd come.” He turns me, runs the cloth down my spine, over the curve of my ass. “As if there was never any doubt.”
“There wasn't.” I lean into his touch as he traces lower, over my hips, down the outside of my thighs. “You promised you'd always find me. I believed you.”
A sound rumbles from his chest. Not quite a growl. Not quite a purr. Then seven feet of apex predator, of muscle and scale and lethal grace, sinks to the shower floor before me. Water streams over the breadth of his shoulders, traces the darker striping along his ribs, pools in the hollow of his collarbone before cascading down his chest. His silver eyes never leave mine as he lowers himself before me.
This male has killed without hesitation. Has torn through enemies and carved a path of blood and fear across Vahiri Prime. His hands have ended lives. His claws have shredded flesh. He commands enforcers and strikes terror into the hearts of those who cross House Draven.
And he kneels before me as if I'm the one with power here.
My heart slams against my sternum. The submission in his posture contradicts everything his body was built for, every instinct that drives Draveki males to dominate and claim and conquer. He's offering me this. Giving me something I didn't ask for and don't know how to hold.
“Drazex.” His name catches in my throat.
“Let me worship you.” He presses his lips to my hip bone, and the tenderness in the gesture makes my eyes sting. “Let me show you what you are to me.”
He lifts one of my feet, runs the cloth over my ankle, my calf, the sensitive skin behind my knee. Then the other. Thorough.Unhurried. Worshipping every inch of me. He washes the front of my legs with the same attention. Up over my knees. My thighs. The cloth brushes the crease where my thigh meets my hip, and my breath stutters.
“Drazex...”
He sets the cloth aside and looks up at me, silver eyes burning through the steam. “Put your hands on the wall.”
I press my palms flat against the wet stone. The surface is warm from the water, smooth beneath my fingers. He lifts one of my legs and drapes it over his shoulder, then the other, until I'm spread open before him, supported by the wall and his strength and nothing else.
“I've been thinking about this.” His breath ghosts over my center, and my hips jerk toward him. “Every hour you were gone. Every minute I spent hunting. This kept me sane.”
The first stroke of his tongue drags a moan from my throat that echoes off the stone walls. Hot water cascades over my shoulders while his tongue traces through my folds, tasting, learning, driving me toward an edge I can already see approaching.
“So sweet.” He groans against me, and the vibration makes my thighs clench around his head. “You were made for my mouth.”
His tongue finds the bundle of nerves at my center, and the first stroke makes me scream. He pins me on his shoulders, his claws dimpling my thighs. His tongue is hot, slick, relentless. He licks through my folds in long strokes that gather my arousal and spread it over every sensitized inch of flesh.
“Drazex...” His name dissolves into a moan.
He doesn't answer. His mouth is too busy destroying me. He sucks my clit between his lips, and my spine arches off the wall. He releases it, flicks his tongue across the swollen bud, then sucks again. The rhythm he builds is merciless, pushing me higher with every passing second. His stubble scrapes againstmy inner thighs, rough against the slick heat of his tongue, and the contrast shorts out my thoughts.
