“Daska!” she gasped. “What are you…oh!”
I kissed the inside of her thigh, and felt her whole body jolt. Her skin was warm and damp from the spring, impossibly soft against my lips, and I pressed another kiss higher, then another, working my way up with the same deliberate patience I brought to everything that mattered. She was trembling.
"Daska, you don't have to—"
"Want to," I said against her skin, my voice rough even to my own ears. "Want to taste you. Please."
She stared at me. Her lips parted. I watched her throat work as she swallowed.
"Yes," she whispered.
The word barely left her mouth before I lowered my head.
The first touch of my tongue against her drew a sound from her that had my cock jerking under the water. She was slick and hot, the taste of her sharp and sweet and utterly intoxicating, and I groaned against her, the vibration making her hips buck. I pressed one hand flat against her hip to hold her steady and settled in, drawing my tongue in a slow, broad stroke from her entrance to the swollen bud at the top.
Her back arched off the deerskin. Her hand flew to my hair, fingers threading through the strands and gripping hard enough to sting, and I didn't care. I did it again, slower this time, learning the landscape of her with my mouth the way I'd learned it with my fingers that first time in the cave. Every fold, every curve, every place that made her breath hitch or her thighs clench or her fingers tighten in my hair.
"Please," she whispered. "Daska, please…"
The sound of my name in that voice, wrecked and wanting, made something primal and possessive roar through me. I sealed my mouth over her and sucked gently, my tongue working in slow, firm circles against the sensitive peak of her, and her hips came off the rock.
"Oh God,there—"
I stayed there. Circling with the tip of my tongue, light and steady, not chasing it, not rushing. I slid my other hand beneath her, cradling the curve of her backside, holding her where I wanted her, tilting her up toward my mouth so I could reach deeper, taste more. I had dreamed about this. Lying awake in my cave while she slept on the other side of the hearth, I had imagined exactly this—her thighs around my head, her fingers in my hair, the taste of her on my tongue. The reality was better. Infinitely, devastatingly better, because in my dreams she hadn't made these sounds. The real ones. The soft, hitching gasps thatcame with every stroke, the way her breath caught and held when I found the right spot, the broken moan that spilled out of her when I sealed my mouth over her.
I could feel her getting close. Not just in the way her body tightened, the fine tremor building in her thighs, the quickening rhythm of her breath—I could feel it through the bond. A building wave of heat and pressure that echoed through my own body like sympathetic resonance, like two drums struck at the same frequency, and the sensation was so overwhelming I had to press my forehead briefly against her thigh and breathe.
"Don't stop," she gasped, her fingers pulling at my hair. "Please don't stop—"
I would sooner have stopped breathing.
"Daska—" My name came out shattered, barely a word, more breath than sound. "I'm going to—I can't—"
She came with a cry that echoed off the rocks around us, her back arching, her thighs clamping tight around my head, her fingers twisted so hard in my hair that I felt strands pull free at the root. I didn't care. I held her through it, my mouth gentle now, easing her down with slow, soft strokes while her body shuddered and pulsed against me. The bond was a living thing between us, a current of shared sensation that made my own body throb with sympathetic pleasure so intense that it took all I had not to straighten up and thrust deep inside her.
I pressed one last, reverent kiss against the inside of her thigh. Then I rested my forehead there, my own breathing unsteady, my body wound so tight with want that every nerve felt like a live coal. She was still trembling. I lifted my head and looked up at her.
She was propped on her elbows, watching me with wide, dark eyes, her chest rising and falling rapidly, the beads in her braids catching the light. The ochre marks on her brow and the driedlines of my blood on her cheekbone. My mate. Claimed and trembling under my hands.
"Safe?" I asked.
"Safe."
CHAPTER 24
DASKA
I'd spent thirty-two winters learning to live without being chosen. Learning to make myself useful enough that people kept me around, careful enough that they didn't send me away, quiet enough that I never became a burden. Thirty-two winters of earning my place with steady hands and healing salves and the kind of patient, reliable competence that people valued but never loved.
And then Ellie had looked up at me in that spring like I was something, like I was someone, and had spoken those words that had me falling apart like a snowbank in a spring thaw.
I chose you.
I kissed my way back up her body. Slowly. Her hip, the soft curve of her belly, the dip of her waist where the skin was so thin I could feel her pulse fluttering beneath my lips. She threaded her fingers through my hair again, gentler now, not pulling but guiding, and when I reached the hollow of her throat she tippedher chin up to give me access and I pressed my mouth there and felt her heartbeat against my tongue.
"Daska," she murmured.
"Mm."
