She sat up, her face pink and earnest. “I’ve spent months learning that bodies don’t have to be perfect to be desired. Look at me! Fat and swollen and covered in stretch marks. And you still look at me like I’m the only thing worth seeing. That’s not my body you’re seeing. It’sme.You’re attracted to my existence. And I am attracted to yours. All of it. Not to the form or function of any particular part.”
He kissed her to give himself time to gather the courage. Her lips parted for him, eager and sweet, as she rubbed her ripe body against him. In another life, he’d pin her down and rut her. But this was the life he’d been handed by fate or bad fortune, one where his cock didn’t work and his wife didn’t want it inside her anyway.
“It won’t respond to anything,” he said, pulling back. “It’s soft, and it stays soft, and there is no amount of touching or looking or wanting you that will change it.”
“I know. I understand.”
He unfastened his breeches, fumbling with the leather ties. He pushed them down and held his breath, waiting for her expression to change. For the pity, or the careful blankness, or the polite avoidance that he’d catalogued in every mason who’d examined him since the reconstruction. No one else had seen it, not one of the hired harlots or eligible gargoyle females his mother thrust upon him.
Hanna’s frank gaze moved from his face to his chest, down his belly to the rough seam along his hip, and then lingered on his cock. It lolled on one of his scarred thighs, heavy and charcoal-gray.
“I like it,” she said.
He barked a laugh. “Do you?”
“Yes.” She studied it, tilting her head thoughtfully. “The texture looks very pleasant, almost like velvet. And the color is a little darker than the rest of your skin, a lovely smoky shade.”
“I’ve been acquainted with my own cock for some years, yes.”
“But you haven’t seen it the way I see it.” She sat up on her knees in front of him. “It’s beautiful to me because I have nothing to fear from it. Do you understand? A soft cock is a safe one. It can’t scare me. It can’t hurt me. It can’t do anything I haven’t consented to. And best of all, it’s part of you, and I like every part of you that I know.”
The words traveled down his spine, straight into his gut. Hanna didn’t pity him. She wasn’t pretending. She genuinely liked his cock the way it was.
“May I touch you?” she asked.
He nodded, and she reached for him. Fallen gods, if it were going to twitch, now would be the time. But it didn’t, of course.
Her hand closed gently around him. “Can you feel this, or are you numb?”
“I can feel everything.” He gritted out the words through his escalating purr, claws rending holes in the sheets. “But I can’t harden or…release.”
She nodded, her fingers tracing the length of him. She cupped his bollocks in her other palm and tested the heft with the same objective curiosity before returning her attention to his cock.
“May I kiss you here?” she asked, and the question nearly stopped his heart.
“Whatever pleases you,” he answered. In the end, she would be disappointed when he could not react to her, but he was too greedy for the sensation to turn down the offer.
She lowered her head, planting a chaste kiss at the tip. He closed his eyes. The first touch of her tongue was a line of wet heat along the underside of the soft shaft, and the sensation after years without touch was so intense and unexpected that his claws dug into the mattress on both sides.
She explored the rest of him, unhurried, tasting every inch. Though his blood refused to answer the call and harden his cock,all the sensation was there, layered and complex, arching his back and making him sweat. He wanted to give her everything. He wanted to take everything. He was a mass of yearning that could never be satisfied. The only thing close to it was satisfyingher.
He pulled the ribbons from her hair so her plaits unraveled, and he could run his fingers through her hair. “Come here, lovely,” he said, voice wrecked by his purr. “Let me hold you.”
She crawled up into his arms, arranging herself with her back to him because her belly wouldn’t let her get close. He curved around her spine, his tail caressing her ankle and his wing draped over her. Her pretty patch job glinted amid the tattered rags of it.
He touched her the way she’d touched him, mapping her geography. The curve of her hip. The tender underside of her breasts. The taut roundness of her belly. His hand moved lower, tracing the crease where her thigh met her hip, all the way to the warm slickness between her legs. The newness of it made his muscles shake. Her breath hitched and her backside pressed closer.
“You like this?”
She nodded fervently. Encouraged, his lips and tongue found the curve of her neck, then her shoulder, as he mouthed over her ropy mating scars. Gooseflesh rose on her skin. His fingertips coaxed murmurs and pants from her, the sounds of yearning that matched his own, and gradually he found the place that made her core clutch at him and took up a rhythm there.
He nosed her ear, nipping at the lobe. “You feel so good. I have never felt anything like it. So warm and wet, like there’s a candle burning at your center.”
“Feels like it,” she whimpered, reaching back to clutch at his thigh. Her blunt little fingers dug in like claws. “What about you? How can I share this with you?”
If only we had a mind bond, then I could share every sensation. If only I was your true mate.
He couldn’t say that, though. “This is it. There’s nothing more I want than to feel you take your pleasure.” He paused his strokes to bite off two claws down to the quick, testing to make sure they were smooth and wouldn’t catch on her delicate flesh.
