My lips bump against his. A kiss, but not quite. Messy and open-mouthed, gasping and wet.
“I’m already going slow.”
“Not slow enough.”
I buck my hips and he grips me tighter, the tips of his claws pricking against my skin.
“Star,” he warns, then groans when I grab his horns, tip his head back, and kiss him deep and dirty.
But I’ve still got a little mercy in me.
I still my hips, give him time, givemetime because fuck, he’s big. He’s barely inside and the stretch is already there. Not uncomfortable, not yet, but the thought of taking more, of taking his freakingknot, gives me a moment of pause.
“Too much?” Callum asks, stroking my cheeks and brushing my hair back from my face.
“When has it ever been too much?”
He smiles, and the devastating tenderness of it somehow makes me feel even more naked than when I stripped in front of him.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
True to his word, he rests his hands back on my hips and helps me take another inch, then another, until I’m seated on him as far as I can go without taking his knot.
One of these days, I’m going to learn not to be so cocky.
Today’s not that day, though, and all I can do is try to breathe through it while I get used to the stretch of him.
I move on him, rolling my hips, arching into him, raising and lowering myself on his thick length and trying to let my body adjust.
It’s not easy.
Even with as soft and wet as I am for him, it’s not an easy fit.
There’s just so much of him. And with each downstroke, when I feel the swell of his knot stretching me, I have absolutely no idea how the hell I’m going to take all that.
Maybe Callum and I weren’t meant to fit together after all.
Maybe there’s still too much about us that will just never fit, that we can’t make work.
With a strangled, desperate little sound, I press closer, forcing myself further down on his knot.
I earn absolutely nothing but a sharp twinge of pain and pointless frustration wrapping tight around my chest, stealing my breath.
“Easy,” Callum murmurs, hands on my hips to hold me still. “Slow down, Seren.”
“I need you—” I pant. “To help me. I’m—I can’t—it’s so—”
“I know, my star. I know.”
Gently, he flips our position so my back is on the mattress, sinking into the soft furs. He hitches one of my legs over his hip, shifts himself so the angle is different, so he slides deeper, so his knot presses right up against my—
“Callum,” I gasp.
“Just look at you,” he murmurs. “So pretty like this. So desperate to have me knot you.”
“Yes.” There’s quite literally nothing he could say right now that I wouldn’t agree to. Not with this magick running fast and heavy through my veins. Not when his knot is right there and I want it, I need it. If I don’t have it inside me, I’ll—
Another strangled cry leaves my throat as he grips my thigh, spreads me open, pushes forward. As the swell of his knot stretches me, close, so close, until he pushes again and—
