“I want an honest opinion.”
“About honey.”
“You have opinions about everything else.”
I set the jar down and grinned. He held my gaze with an expression that was barely concealing enjoyment. The kitchen light caught the propolis stain on his wrist, the corded lines of his forearms, the frayed edge of his rolled sleeve. I wanted to press my lips to the inside of his elbow. I wanted to lick the propolis off his wrist and then keep going north. I was going to focus on the honey.
He pulled the lid and dipped a clean spoon. Held it out.
The smell reached me first: dark, layered, with an undertone of molasses and dried spice. My pregnancy nose pulled every note apart.
I took the spoon in my mouth.
The sweetness built slow. Earthy, dense, nothing like the light floral wildflower. This was honey that tasted like the last day of a long season. A warmth spread across my tongue, down my throat, pooled in my chest. My eyes closed. The sound I made was completely inappropriate for a kitchen.
When I opened them, he was beside my chair. Close. The heat coming off his skin bridged the gap between us.
“Atlas.”
He dipped his finger into the jar. Unhurried. It came out coated dark and gleaming. He raised it to my lips.
I could have deflected. A joke about tasting methodology or extraction protocols. I could have been the version of Flora who maintained professional composure and did not suck honey off a beekeeper’s finger in the fading sun of his kitchen.
I closed my lips around his finger and sucked the honey off.
His whole body went taut. I felt the change: the catch of air in his lungs, the tension locking through his shoulders and down his arms. The honey was thick on my tongue. Underneath it: salt, skin, the taste of him. I locked onto him and watched his expression darken.
“Trouble,” he said. Low, stripped.
“I’ve been trouble since I crashed into your bee yard.”
He kissed me.
The urgency from the counter a week ago had burned fast and desperate. This was measured, his hand curving around the nape of my neck, his thumb tracing the hinge of my jaw, tilting my face up so gradually my breath shook before his lips even reached mine. He tasted like knapweed honey. The kiss deepened and I felt it in my fingertips, my hip bones, the backs of my knees.
He pulled back. His finger caught my lower lip. Then he picked up the jar of spring wildflower, the pale gold, the first honey he’d ever handed me, and kept his eyes on mine while he drizzled a thin golden line along my collarbone.
The honey was languid. Heavy. It traced a path down my skin and I shivered so hard my teeth clicked.
His mouth followed the trail. Lips, the wet heat of him, the scrape of his beard from my collarbone to the hollow of my throat. I gripped the table edge. The noise that came out of me should have required a permit.
“Come here,” he said against my skin, and slid his hands under my thighs and lifted me. I wrapped around him, all limbs,all contact, flush against his full length, and he carried me down the short hall to his bed.
He set me down. Pulled my shirt off, unhooked my bra, and I lay on his sheets while late sun striped through the window in bands of gold. His gaze moved over me with the concentration he gave a frame of comb: intent, absorbed, missing nothing.
Honey fell across my breast, slow and warm. His mouth closed over my nipple and I grabbed the sheets in both fists and forgot my own name.
He took his time. He followed the honey from one breast to the other, his tongue chasing every thread of sweetness across my skin. He tipped the jar and let more run down my ribs, licked them clean, moved lower. Poured a thin ribbon around my navel, and his lips closed over the circle, and then his hand pressed flat against my stomach, low, gentle, right where I always pressed my own hand when I thought no one could see.
“I want to taste all of you.” The words rumbled against my hip. His voice had dropped to a place I felt more than heard. “Everywhere the honey goes. Tell me if you want me to stop.”
“Don’t stop. Whatever you do, don’t stop.”
He pulled my pants off. My underwear with them. Drizzled honey along the inside of my thigh, and I gasped and grabbed the headboard because the sensation, viscous and warm, trailing toward my pussy, shorted out coherent thought.
His tongue found my clit first. One long, intentional stroke. I cried out loud enough to terrify the local bird population. He traced the honey from my inner thigh in a wet, languid path and then his mouth was on me fully, honey-slick, and the combination of sweetness and heat obliterated every thought I’d ever had about anything.
He was thorough. Patient. He read every sound, every shift of my hips, adjusting until I was shaking under his grip. His palms pinned my thighs open, sticky golden prints on my skin. Histongue circled, pressed, and I came gripping the headboard with both hands and saying his name in a register I’d never visited before.
