I press her hand harder against my chest so she can feel my heart kick up. The morning light is grey and soft through the curtains. Her face is close, serious, and beautiful.
“Then we go slow,” I say.
Slow is a different kind of destruction.
Last night was a collision. Two bodies driven together by separation and need, over too fast for either of us to catalogue what was happening. This is not that.
This is Phoebe pulling me down by the back of my neck and kissing me with her eyes open. She maps my mouth the way she does everything: methodically, attentively. Her tongue traces the seam of my lips, then slips between them, not asking permission, but testing a hypothesis. The hypothesis is that she can take me apart with just her mouth. She is correct.
I let her lead. It costs me. The Alpha in me wants to roll her beneath me and take her the way instinct demands. But she asked for slow, and slow is what she gets.
Her palms move across my shoulders, mapping the musculature with focused attention. Her fingers pause at the junction of my neck and shoulder, pressing into the tendon there. The groan that pulls out of me makes her eyes go dark.
She finds the scars again. Kisses each one, her mouth warm and deliberate against my skin.
She moves lower. Her lips graze my stomach, and I feel her smile when my muscles tense under her mouth. When she wraps her hand around my cock, Imake a sound I’ll deny later. She strokes me from base to tip, watching my face the whole time.
“You’re studying me,” I manage.
“Obviously.” Her thumb circles the head, and I nearly lose it right there. “Tell me what you feel.”
“You. Your curiosity. How much this is—” She strokes down again, and I forget how to speak. “How much this is turning you on too.”
“The bond makes it reciprocal,” I tell her. “You feel what you do to me.”
“That explains a lot.” Her voice drops lower. A flush spreads across her throat to her collarbones. Her thighs press together.
“You can touch me,” she says. “I’m not going to break.”
I ease her back against the pillows. Run my hands up her sides, over her ribs, cupping her breasts. When my thumbs brush her nipples, she gasps, and I feel that sharp spike of pleasure.
“You can feel what I feel?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“That’s—” She arches into my hands.
“Unfair?”
“Extraordinary. Do that again.”
I press my mouth to her breast, the bond amplifying every slick, heated pulse as if it’s on my own skin. She gasps, fingers tangling in my hair, holdingme close. I learn how to make her moan, how to drive her to dig her nails into my shoulders until they sting.
Slowly, I trail kisses down her sternum, along her ribs, into the soft hollow of her waist. My hands slide up the inside of her thighs. She shivers, legs parting instinctively.
I silence her with my mouth on her pussy. She’s slick, swollen, impossibly hot against me. I draw a slow line with my tongue from her entrance to her clit, and her breath hitches in a sound that’s pure need. I taste her arousal, the tight coil of tension winding in her belly. My strokes start broad and slow, then narrow and precise as her thighs tremble and her hips push into me.
One arm holds her steady while my other slides a finger inside, then a second, curling to find that perfect spot. She arches, breathless, words lost in a shuddering moan.
Her pleasure surges back into me, bright and raw. I keep kissing, keep fingering, guiding her over the edge until she cries out, her body clenching around me. I ride out her waves of bliss until she’s soft and shaking.
“Come here,” she whispers, voice rough with need. She pulls me up, pressing her lips to mine. The bond burns with her possessive heat, and I growl low.
Her legs wrap around me, the wet slide of her against my cock shatters my control.
Slowly, inch by inch, I sink into her pussy filled with that gorgeous tasting slick.
The world reduces to this. The tight, wet heat of her body around mine. The sound she makes against my mouth is a long, shuddering exhale with my name buried in it.
