His thumb moved once, slow, tracing toward my ear. It permeated everything. In my throat, my chest, low where the heat had already made itself at home.
“Then we go slowly,” he said.
His other hand slid into my hair—not gripping, just settling, a warm weight at the back of my head—and my spine relaxed by degrees. My hands loosened their hold on the furs.
“Tell me what it feels like.”
I didn’t want to say it out loud. He watched me hesitate and didn’t look away or give me a way out of it.
“Pressure. Like something that needs to?—”
“Crest,” he cut me off.
“Yes.”
He held my gaze. “Let me help.”
My body answered before I did. A pulse of want, sharp and intense, made my hips shift and my face heat. I understood, with complete clarity, that he was giving me a choice. He was kneeling. He was waiting. He had been waiting since he walked through the door. He would walk away if I said no. But I didn’t want to.
“Yes,” I relented.
His mouth found mine, soft and slow, not a taking but a question, and I didn’t know what to do with my hands at first, and then I found his shoulders and held on. He kissed me as if he had time for it, as if the heat building between us wasn’t also building in him, and when his mouth opened, I followed and stopped thinking about my hands entirely.
When he pulled back, it was only far enough to breathe. His mouth moved to my jaw, my throat, and he took his time there, lips tracing the line of my neck while one hand stayed in my hair and the other slid down my back in a long, slow stroke. It was like a seam coming undone. His mouth reached the curve where my neck met my shoulder, and my head fell back, and I stopped making any decisions at all.
He guided me down into the nest, one hand cradling my head, and moved over me without covering me, his weight braced above me. He pushed the hair back from my face. Kissed me again, deeper, and something between us shifted—the thing he’d been holding back beginning to unspool—and instead of frightening me, it pulled me closer. My hands dragged at his shoulders. His mouth moved to my collarbone, the upper curve of my chest, and every press of his lips moved the heat in me from frantic toward something hungrier.
His hand traced down my ribs, my waist, over my hip, and took its time. I stopped waiting for him to rush. Started paying attention instead to what his hands found when they moved slowly, and what I felt when I let them.
When his fingers reached the hem of my shift dress, I went still.
He stilled with me. “Yes or no.”
“Yes.” Steadier than I was. “I want—yes.”
He pushed the fabric up slowly, watching my face. The cool air hit my bare skin, and then his palm covered the inside of my thigh and the warmth of it turned the shiver into something else entirely. He stroked upward without rushing to the destination. The inside of my thigh, the crease of my hip, back down. My hips moved without instruction.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. Factual, not patronizing. He could feel the tension in my legs.
His fingers found the center of the ache and I gasped.
He didn’t pull away. He stayed, the touch light, and the heat answered it like a flame catching. He read me—what made my breath break, what made my thighs try to close around his hand, what made me push up toward him instead of away—and he applied it with a patience that should have been unbearable and instead was the thing my body had been starving for. Not rushed at. Given to.
“I can’t hold—” I started.
“Don’t hold anything,” he said. “Let go.”
He lowered his head.
The first press of his mouth against me took my voice. Warm and certain and unhurried, his hands steadying my hips—not pinning me down, holding me together, and the difference was everything. He coaxed rather than demanded. Every time the tension peaked, he eased back and let it rebuild higher than before. Somewhere beneath the heat and the wanting, Iunderstood what he was doing, understood he was giving my body time to learn that the cresting didn’t mean destruction.
My fingers pressed into the back of his head. I wasn’t guiding him. I was holding on.
The pressure built enormously and brightly and unstoppable, and I turned my head.
The door was not fully closed.
Malric stood in the gap, his shoulder against the frame, still as stone in the dark of the corridor. His face was a controlled shadow. But his eyes found mine immediately and held, and what was in them was not cold or distant or tactical. It was something he hadn’t managed to put away in time.
