Unwilling to miss anything.
Her hands slid up into his wet hair and her head fell back against the stone. He moved downward, mouth tracing the swell of her breast, tongue finding the tight peak of her nipple. She arched hard into his mouth and made the sound he’d catalogued last night as the one that cost her the most composure.
He filed it under repeat frequently.
He sank to his knees in front ofher.
The position wasn’t submissive. Not remotely. It was possession. Like claiming territory no one else would ever touch.
She went still. Her fingers tightened in his hair in a way that wasn’t directing. It was surprise. He looked up at her through the water, through the steam, and found her staring down at him with wide eyes and slightly parted lips, the expression of a woman who hadn’t expected this and didn’t know what to do with the reality ofit.
“Magnus—”
“Hold on to me,” hesaid.
A beat passed. Then her grip shifted, steadied. Trusting.
He turned his attention to the task with the same focused patience he applied to everything he intended to master. Here, with water running over his shoulders and her thighs trembling on either side of his face, patience was the only thing worth deploying. He took his time. Learned her responses.The way her respiration changed when he pressed closer, the specific sound she made when he found the right angle, the way her hips rolled forward involuntarily when he used his tongue in a dragging circle that reverberated through her entirebody.
She said his name.
He kept going.
Her thighs began to shake in earnest. One of her hands released his hair and braced against the stone wall instead, needing the anchor. He pressed closer while she tried to contain the sound building in her and failed completely. It broke out of her, ragged and helpless and honest, and the wave of it moved through her body against his mouth. She came apart with a shuddering intensity that gripped every muscle and left her cryingout.
He rose, steadying her against him as the last quivers moved through her. Her face was pressed into the side of his neck. Her breathing was wrecked.
He felt extraordinarily satisfied.
“You could’ve warned me,” she managed.
“Where’s the value in that?”
She laughed again—another real one, fractured and delicious—and the sound hit him the same way it had before.
He turned off the water butdidn’t reach for towels. Instead, he pulled her dripping from the shower and walked her backward across the cool marble floor, through the bathroom door, and into the bedroom where the morning light was still pale through the curtains. She made a soundof protest that he swallowed against her mouth. The backs of her thighs hit the edge of the mattress and they went down together in a tangle of wet limbs and damp sheets that he was going to have to apologize to housekeeping for and didn’t remotely care about.
She pulled him over her immediately. Her wet hair spread across the pillow like dark ink, her skin flushed from the heat of the shower, water still gleaming in the hollow of her collarbone and along the curve of her waist. She looked at him with an openness she hadn’t possessed yesterday. Something in the night had shifted the last layer of her careful distance. She wasn’t waiting to be told what happened next. She wasn’t braced forcost.
She reached for him.
He caught her wrist. Turned it gently. Pressed his mouth to the inside of it, over her pulse.
The trust in her body still surprised him. She moved toward him instead of away, as if somewhere during the night she’d decided he was safe towant.
“Turn over,” he instructed.
Her eyes widened. Asmall hesitation. Not fear, he’d learned to read the difference. It was curiosity edged with the awareness of new territory. Then she moved, rolling onto her stomach with a trust that tightened something deep in his chest.
He took a moment to simply look at her. The long line of her back. The curve of her waist flaring into her hips. The beautifully rounded cheeks of her ass. Water still beadingon herskin.
He pressed his palm flat between her shoulder blades—not restraining, just present—and she exhaled into the mattress.
He kissed the back of her neck. Her spine. The small of her back. She shivered under each point of contact, the tension rebuilding in her despite what he’d already done to her in the shower. Her fingers curled into the damp sheets.
He brought her hips up with both hands, gentle and certain. She shifted to accommodate him, reflexive and willing. He pressed close, testing, giving her time to adjust to the angle, and heard her moan into the pillow that pulled a rough exhale from him in response.
He moved slowly at first. Letting her sense him. Letting himself sense his possession of her without the urgency that had driven him the night before, when she’d been shaking and aching and saying please and he’d been barely holding himself together.
