“Yes,” I say. I took my contraceptive elixir in the morning, like every morning.
I press my foot into his back. I’m so wet, the head of his cock slips into me, and I feel the reverberation of our desires for him to slam into me to the hilt echo between us.
He doesn’t slam in though, not at first.
He moves achingly slowly, taking me a little at a time, letting me relax around his length, in and out, just a bit more each time,until he finally slides all the way in, his body pressed against mine as close as it can be.
He holds me there for a long moment, stroking my hair and kissing my lips. “You feel so fucking good.” He groans and leans off to the side, straining to control himself. “The way you feel inside. The way you take me. Fuck, Sylvie. It’s incredible. You’re incredible.”
I sigh at the praise, desperate for him to fuck me. To claim me. To make me his. He waits until I push against him, begging for him with my body and mind, before he moves.
“Ronan,” I gasp as he relinquishes control. The feelings echo between us, longing and the nameless other thing, the pleasure of his body and mine, endlessly repeating in my body and my mind. My body clenches around him as I squeeze my legs—finally fully free, finally fully moving—around his back, as I claw at his shoulders, as I ruin his damp hair with my tugging grasp.
Finally.
Finally he slams into me, guided by my desire for it, plunging in deep and working in me there, pressing himself against the center of my pleasure, building me to a place of exquisite release. The heat flows into my back, my hips, my thighs. I drive him into me with my heels, raising my hips to him, begging him to get closer, to lose himself in me, to find his release with mine.
He groans in my ear, holding me down to his bed, gripping the back of my neck like he’s holding on for dear life. I gasp as he lifts my right hip to bury himself even further, his movements becoming erratic, pulling out and plunging back in with wild abandon. He’s gasping in my ear, moaning my name, and it sends me over the edge, my body tightening and then releasing in waves of starlight behind my closed eyes, waves that send spasms into my muscles until I’m shaking, trembling beneath him. Until I feel the pleasure echoed in his body, his frantic thrusts culminating into a deep, gasping plunge as his releasefills me with warmth and light, the aftershocks of his climax shaking and jolting us until he finally, breathlessly, collapses on top of me.
I stroke his hair—almost dry and mussed beyond his worst imaginings—as he kisses my breast; soft kisses tinged with yearning that tell me this night has only just begun.
I press a kiss to his forehead.
This is the man I was sent here to kill.
I hear my own words in my memory, the Sylvie from months ago swearing she’d never take him into her bed. I don’t know her. I don’t recognize her anymore.
But I remember her loneliness.
I wish I could go back and talk to her. To tell her that the thing she fears, the worst thing she could ever imagine, is exactly what she needs. To tell her she isn’t alone. There’s someone like her, someone who will see her in ways she’s never been seen, if only she’ll just let him.
Ronan lifts himself above me and brushes a soft kiss to my lips, a question in his eyes. What am I thinking?
I tell him. Not the thing I can’t name for myself, not yet, but I tell him the only thing I can think of right now, the only thought I’m capable of having when I’m near him.
“I’m yours, Ronan,” I say, and he takes me in his arms again.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Iwake in the morning on my side with Ronan’s arms wrapped around me, his body pressed against mine.
There’s a chill in the room where the fire has gone out, though I can only feel it on my cheek, the rest of my body shielded from it by his embrace. The morning light is streaming through airy white curtains, casting soft shadows through the room.
Ronan’s bedchambers. A place I’d thought about so many times, and I’m finally here, waking up with him.
The space is smaller than I had imagined. The four-post bed takes up most of it, leaving only enough room for a velvet chair and a small table near the fireplace. The furniture in here, as I expected, is all Nithyrian wood. The sheets against my body are smooth white silk, and the comforter over us is soft and wine-colored, with golden threads running through it.
Ronan stirs against me, and I feel the length of him as he shifts my hips back to him. We woke each other twice more in the night, and I thought that after the last time had left me so satiated I couldn’t see straight that we’d taken care of our desires at least until the evening came again. But feeling him against me, my body responds, sending warmth between my legs once more.
He kisses my shoulder as I pull him into me again. We’re both so exhausted, our bodies so spent, that we stay exactly where we are. We take turns, him thrusting into me, me shoving my hips back and taking him in, until we find our release again in moaning gasps, our bodies slick with sweat and each other.
By the time I wake again a little while later, the windows have been opened, allowing a warm, late morning breeze into the room. The bed beside me is empty, but Ronan hasn’t gone far. He’s wrapped in a loose robe, sitting at the small table eating breakfast.
When he hears me sit up, he comes over to me, kissing me on the cheek. “Good morning,” he says. It wasn’t a dream, then. Thank Kerensa for that. “I hope you don’t mind that I started without you. You looked too peaceful to disturb.”
Another chair has been brought into the room. Ronan shows me to his washroom through an absurdly large chamber dedicated entirely to his clothes—which do exist in colors other than black, although black predominates—and I take the opportunity to freshen up, donning a silk robe of my own in a sage green color.
I notice that he’s already fixed his hair. I muss it up as I join him at the table, eliciting a very adorable, “Hey!” and a lot of frantic smoothing.
