He only looked down at her, jaw tight, eyes burning. “Slowly.”
She obeyed, though her hands shook.
When he came to her bare, Emmeline’s hands tightened against his shoulders.
He settled between her thighs, hot and solid against the place where her body still ached from his touch. Her breath caught high in her chest, and her knees opened for him.
His hand stilled on her hip. His forehead lowered toward hers, close enough that his breath brushed her mouth, but he did not move further. “Look at me.”
She did.
He pressed forward slowly.
Her breath caught at the first stretch, the impossible fullness of him entering her by degrees. Sharp pain flickered briefly, swallowed almost at once by the heat of his mouth on hers and the careful stillness of his body as he waited.
“Emmeline,” he said, voice strained. “Breathe.”
She did.
He moved another inch.
She clutched at him.
“There,” he murmured, kissing her cheek, her mouth, the corner of her eye. “That is it. Take me slowly. Just like that.”
When he was fully inside her, he stopped, trembling above her.
The intimacy of it overwhelmed her more than the act itself. His body joined to hers. His breath rough against her lips.
She touched his face. “Rowan.”
Something in him broke.
He moved. It was slow at first, drawing back and pressing in again until her body began to understand the rhythm. The sharpness faded. Every stroke dragged heat through her until her breath turned to soft, helpless sounds against his mouth.
“You are beautiful,” he murmured, voice rough against her skin, mouth brushing her cheek. “Perfect.”
The words wrapped around her until she could no longer remember anything else. His hand slid beneath her hip, angling her to take him deeper, and she cried out. He swallowed the sound with his kiss, then gave it back to her with a rough groan of his own.
The pleasure rose too quickly for her to prepare for it.
It gathered low and bright, every slow, deep thrust pressing it higher, every rough murmur against her skin making her body tighten around him until she could scarcely breathe. Emmeline clutched at his shoulders, then his hair, her mouth open against his as the room began to blur at the edges.
“Rowan,” she gasped, frightened by the force of it. “I?—”
“I know,” he said, voice strained and dark. “Let go.”
His hand tightened beneath her hip, holding her exactly where he wanted her, and he kept moving, deep and relentless now, each stroke dragging a helpless sound from her throat until the tension broke.
Her body arched beneath him, her fingers digging into his back as the climax tore through her, hot and blinding, making her cry his name into the side of his neck.
Rowan groaned as she clenched around him.
“God, Emmeline,” he rasped, but he did not stop.
He kept driving into her, slower but still deep, his body forcing every last tremor from hers while she shook beneath him, too undone to do anything but hold on. The pleasure softened into aftershocks, then sharpened again each time he moved, until she was gasping against his shoulder, overwhelmed, boneless, half begging without knowing for what.
Only then did Rowan’s rhythm change.
