"You came once tonight," he said against her ear. "You will come many more times before I take you."
Chapter 15
His fingers moved through her with a patience that bordered on cruelty.
Verity's hips lifted off the furs, chasing the pressure, but his free hand pressed flat against her belly, his palm spanning nearly the full width of her, and held her still. The weight of that single hand was a command she could not argue with. Her body obeyed even as her mind raced ahead, cataloguing sensations.
Slick.The word appeared in her thoughts.Engorged. Tumescent.Medical terminology she had memorized from treatises written by men who had clearly never experienced what she was experiencing now.
His thumb circled the swollen bud at the apex of her sex, and every word she had ever read about arousal dissolved into white noise.
"You are thinking," he said.
"I can't help it." Her voice came out fractured.
"What are you thinking?"
His thumb pressed harder. She gasped, her fingers clawing at the furs, but the furs had been displaced by his body, and her hands found his forearms instead. Her fingers could not close around them. The muscle beneath his green skin was dense as oak, warm as hearthstone.
"That the—" She had to stop, breathe, try again. "The anatomical descriptions I read were insufficient."
His chest vibrated against her. It took her a moment to realize he was laughing.
"Insufficient," he repeated.
"Dramatically." She was babbling now, words spilling out because if she stopped talking she would have to fully inhabit what was happening to her body, and that felt like standing at the edge of a cliff. "The treatise on comparative anatomy described the female arousal response as 'a warming of the tissues and increased secretion of—'"
His finger slid inside her.
The sentence died in her throat. Her back arched, pressing her breasts against the hard plane of his stomach. Her mouth fell open, a sound escaping that was not a word at all. He was inside her. One finger, and she felt filled.
"Breathe," he said.
She dragged air into her lungs, felt her body clench around him, felt him hold perfectly still while she adjusted to the intrusion. His free hand stroked up her side, thumb tracing the curve of her waist, the swell of her hip, the soft flesh that spilled over onto the furs.
"Does it hurt?"
"No." It didn't. It felt strange. Full in a way she had never been full before, stretched around something that did not belong to her. But not painful. "It feels..."
She searched for the word. Her vocabulary, usually so reliable, had abandoned her entirely. Above her, his iron-gray eyes tracked the expressions crossing her face.
His thumb resumed its slow circles, and she felt her body soften around him, the tension easing. He withdrew his finger almost entirely, then pressed back in. The slide was easier this time, slicker, her body opening for him. She made a sound she didn't recognize, high and broken and hungry.
"There," he said. "That is what I wanted to hear."
He added a second finger.
The stretch was sharper now. She felt the burn of it, the way her body resisted and then yielded, accommodating him by degrees. His thumb never stopped moving, keeping her pleasure high enough that the discomfort registered only as a counterpoint. Her thighs had fallen open around his hips, the width of him forcing her legs apart, her knees barely reaching past his flanks.
"You are so tight." His voice was strained in a way she hadn't heard before. "So small inside. I will have to prepare you well."
Small. She had never been called small in her life. But caged beneath the bulk of him, his shadow swallowing her entirely, she understood.
"How—" She swallowed. "How much preparation?"
"As much as you need." His fingers curled inside her, and her vision went white at the edges. "I will not rush this. I will not hurt you."
His fingers moved in a rhythm she could not predict—sometimes slow and deep, sometimes shallow and quick, always accompanied by the relentless pressure of his thumb. She felt the tension building again, coiling low in her belly, tighter than before.
