"Beautiful," he says, almost to himself.
Then he lowers his mouth to my collarbone, and I stop thinking about training and obligation and councils and contracts. His lips trace a path down the center of my chest. Between my breasts. Over my stomach and hips.
He settles between my thighs. His breath is warm on my skin, and when he looks up at me from there, eyes glinting silver in the dark, I feel something inside me break wide open.
"This first," he says.
He puts his mouth on me, and I come apart.
I gasp and arch and grab fistfuls of the sheets, and he holds my hips down with one arm and takes his time like the council and the contract and the whole world outside this room have stopped existing. Like the only things that matter are the sound I'm making and the way my body is heating under his mouth.
When I come, it's sudden and overwhelming and I cry out his name without meaning to. He works me through it, slower,gentler, until I'm trembling and spent and staring at the ceiling with my chest heaving.
He pulls himself up. Braces over me on his forearms. His face is flushed, his jaw tight, and I can feel him hard against my thigh.
"You ready?" he asks.
I nod. I can't speak yet.
He pushes into me slowly. Carefully. Watching my face the entire time. It hurts, a sharp, bright sting that makes me suck in a breath, and he stops immediately.
"Keep going," I urge.
He does. Inch by inch, giving me time to adjust, his arms rigid on either side of me, his breathing harsh and shallow. When he's fully inside me, he drops his forehead to mine and holds there. Still. The effort of not moving is written in every line of his body.
I adjust myself beneath him, moving my hips until the pain eases and the angle feels like the most natural thing in the world. The stretch, the fullness. All of him. A shiver runs through me, my nipples tighten. I didn’t think it could feel so… otherworldly.
He starts to move. Slow at first, then deeper, finding a rhythm that makes my breath catch and my fingers dig into his biceps. I make that sound again. The one I didn't know I had in me.
"There," he murmurs against my throat. "That's it."
He keeps that angle. Keeps that rhythm. And I feel it building again, tighter than before, coiling low in my belly like a wire being wound. I wrap my legs around him and pull him closer, and he groans, low and broken, his control finally, finally cracking open.
"Kira." My name in his mouth like a prayer. Like a curse. "I can't... I need..."
"Yes," I say. "Yes."
He buries himself deep and holds there, and I feel him let go, the heat of it, the pulse of it, and the feeling of being filled and claimed and chosen pushes me over the edge right after him. I shake apart beneath him.
He doesn't pull away immediately. He stays where he is, still inside me, his weight half on me and half on the mattress.
“You’re so beautiful,” he says so quietly I wonder if he said it at all.
Anton
I shouldn't have said that.
The words slipped out before I could catch them, quiet enough that I can pretend I didn't say them at all. But I did. And the way she went still beneath me, the way her breath hitched, tells me she heard.
I pull out of her carefully. Roll onto my back. Stare at the ceiling while my heartbeat comes down from wherever the hell it just went.
She's lying beside me, silent, her breathing still uneven. I can feel the warmth of her skin from here. Can still taste her on my mouth. Can still hear the way she said my name when she came apart, like she didn't know she was going to say it until it was already in the air.
This was supposed to be simple. A transaction. Fulfill the obligation, give the council what they want, and keep my distance from the woman they shackled me to.
Instead, I took my time with her. Instead, I put my mouth on her like I had something to prove. Instead, I held myself still inside her and told her she was beautiful, because she is, and because the way she looked up at me with those wide brown eyes made something crack open in my chest that I don't have a name for.
I need to get a grip.
