She stopped. Looked down at me. The hair falling around her face, the dark strands catching the grey light.
“You’re not allowed to rush,” I said. The Daddy voice. Low. The register that made her breathing change. “We’re taking our time.”
“I don’t want to take our time.”
“I don’t care what you want.”
Her pupils dilated. I watched it happen—the black expanding, pushing the dark brown to a thin ring. The response that told me everything. The response that said she wanted exactly what I was going to give her, which was slowness she’d fight against and lose.
“Sit up.”
She sat up. Straight. Her weight settling more fully on me, the pressure of her almost unbearable. I reached for the buttons of the flannel top. The misaligned ones. My fingers found the first—small, round, the same buttons I’d done up two nights ago with clumsy hands and patient concentration.
I undid them slowly.
One. Two. Three. The fabric parting in a line down her center, the warm brown skin appearing in a widening strip. My hands worked without rushing. Each button a small event.
The last button. The flannel fell open. I pushed it off her shoulders — slow, the fabric sliding down her arms, pooling at her wrists before she shook it free.
She was bare above me. The morning light on her skin. The small breasts, the dark nipples already tight from the cold or the want or both. Her ribs visible—too visible, the architecture of a body that had been underfed for years showing through the surface. Her stomach flat, the muscles there lean and defined, the body of a woman who’d been built by running and climbing and surviving.
My hands found her. Palms on her ribcage, fingers spread. I moved them up—slow, the roughness of my scarred knuckles against the softness of her, the contrast deliberate. Over her ribs. The sides of her breasts. My thumbs found her nipples and circled.
She inhaled.
I pinched. Sharp. The twist she loved—I’d learned this, filed it, the particular angle and pressure that made her back arch and her lips part. Her gasp was immediate, involuntary, the sound escaping before she could catch it.
“You’re beautiful,” I said.
“Shut up.”
“Make me.”
She leaned down. Her mouth found mine—hard this time, the kiss landing with intent, her way of shutting me up the only way she knew how. Her hands gripped my shoulders. Her teeth caught my bottom lip.
I flipped her.
One motion. My hands on her waist, my hips lifting, the controlled violence of a man who’d been pinned by something he wanted and had decided to reverse the position. She landed on her back with a small sound—surprise, not fear—and I was over her, my weight on my forearms, my body between her thighs, her hair spread across the pillow where the rabbit had been.
Her eyes were wide. Dark. Wanting.
I held her gaze. Let her feel the weight of me. Let her feel the warmth and the stillness and the specific, devastating patience of a man who had all morning and intended to use every second of it.
“Now,” I said. “We go slow.”
I started at her throat.
My mouth finding the pulse—the thin flutter under the skin. Fast. Getting faster. The rhythm of a body that knew what wascoming and was already running ahead of it, trying to get there before I let her.
I wasn’t going to let her. Not yet.
I kissed down. The hollow of her throat. The ridge of her collarbone. The space between her breasts where her heart was doing something frantic and visible, the skin moving with each beat. I took my time. Mouth open, tongue flat, tasting the warmth of her — sleep and rosemary and something underneath that was just her, just the specific salt of Cora’s skin, the flavor I’d been learning since the first night I’d held her and pressed my face to her hair and understood that I was finished.
Her stomach tensed under my lips. The lean muscles contracting, the body bracing for what came next. I kissed the ridge of her hip. The sharp bone. The soft skin just inside it, where the texture changed and her breath caught.
I settled between her thighs.
She tried to close them. Instinct—the reflexive contraction of a body that was about to be seen in the place it was most vulnerable. Not fear. Not refusal. The particular resistance of a woman who wanted something badly enough to be terrified of it, and whose first response to being terrified was to protect.
