“Touch me,” he says. “Explore your husband.”
Not a request. A need.
I trace the ridges of bone, the sinew strung between them. My fingers dip into the gaps, feeling the impossible heat radiating from within his open chest. He shudders above me with a groan that sounds pulled from the earth itself—and with it, two perfectly healed heartstrings that thrum along.
My gaze searches for the blackness of his, my voice thin. “Your heart is healing.”
He takes my hand from his ribs, brings it to his mouth, and presses his lips to my knuckles in a loving kiss. “I know.”
He turns my palm over and kisses the center of it, tongue darting out to taste the salt there, and something in his black hollow eyes goes so tender I nearly shatter again. Then the tenderness shifts.
He releases my hand, grips the back of my thigh, and hitches my leg higher against his side. The new angle opens me completely, tilting my hips until the next thrust drives so deep I feel it behind my navel.
“Vale…” I choke out his name—half plea, half prayer—and his restraint finally, mercifully snaps.
He drives into me hard. The hay scatters beneath us with each impact, stalks catching in my hair, on his bones, floating through the dim air like chaff at threshing. The wet slap of skin-on-skin echoes off the beams, punctuated by his low, rhythmic grunts and the keening sounds I can’t seem to stop making.
His thrusts grow erratic, each sound he makes more desperate than the last, and I feel the coil inside me winding again, impossibly, already. “Together,” I mewl. “With me.”
His jaw clenches, bone grinding, as if it takes his entire life force to slow his thrusts as he does. “No. I want you to finish what you started that night.”
The world tilts.
His arm bands around my waist. In one fluid motion, he rolls, keeping himself buried so deep the shift wrings a gasp from both of us. My knees find the hay on either side of his hips, and suddenly, I’m astride him, his enormous frame sprawled beneath me, ribs and muscle and bone rising and falling with each ragged breath.
His hands settle on my hips.
A nudge is all it takes, and I roll my hips the way I did that night, grinding my clit against his body. It makes a guttural, shattered sound rattle through every exposed bone. So I do it again. Slower. Finding the angle that drags him against that spot inside me, the one that turns my vision to sparks.
His head tips back into the hay, the column of his throat bared—half skin, half stripped tendon—and his fingers spasm against my hips. “Keep fucking me like that. Don’t stop.”
I build my rhythm. Rising until only the thick head of him remains inside me, then sinking down in one deliberate slide that seats him to the hilt. Each descent pulls another groan from him, his stomach muscles clenching into rigid planes.
His jaw falls open, bone unhinging slightly on the bare side, and the moan that escapes is so raw, so helpless, it nearly tips me over the edge right there. “Slow down.”
I can’t. The coil is winding too tight, my body chasing its own desperate rhythm, each downstroke sending me closer to the edge. His cock twitches inside me, and I feel the telltale throb, the swelling heat that means he’s close, too.
“You need to—” His grip tightens on my hips, bone pressing hard into my flesh. Not pushing me down. Pushing me…up? “Stop. Elara?—”
But I’m already gone. The coil snaps, an explosion of tingles, and I clench around him so hard my vision dissolves into ringing, shuddering light. The orgasm tears through me in waves, each one gripping him tighter, pulling him deeper, and I feel the exact moment his resolve breaks.
His hands stop lifting.
They slam me down.
He buries himself to the root with a cry that splits the air—half roar, half something frighteningly close to a sob—and I feel him pulse inside me. Hot. Flooding. Each spasm pushing deeper than the last while his hips jerk up off the hay in helpless, stuttering thrusts, his entire body convulsing beneath me like something holy coming apart.
We hang there, trembling, the silence broken only by two desperate creatures remembering how to breathe as I collapse onto his chest.
He shifts beneath me. A small movement, just enough to look down between us. Then he goes rigid.
His breath catches, stops entirely, stillness spreading through him like frost across a window. His hands find my waist, and he lifts me off him with a care that contradicts the sudden, sharp panic radiating from every bone.
Wet warmth spills from me onto his thigh. He catches some in his palm, staring down at the evidence dripping from his bare knuckles.
His bones are trembling.
His whole arm is trembling.
