“Stop holding back,” I say, somewhere between a request and a demand.
Chapter Twenty
CHARLIE
His hands tighten.
A sharp, immediate response that moves through me like a current.
“I’m not holding back,” he says against my throat, low and roughened. “I’m taking my time.”
“Those are the same thing.”
“They’re not.” His mouth traces downward, deliberate and specific. “When I hold back, you’ll know.”
“How will I—”
His hand slides between my thighs, and the sentence abandons me entirely. The warmth of him there is its own category of sensation, in a way that my vampire-sharp nerves have absolutely no framework for managing it.
Every touch is too much information.
Every touch is something to withstand rather than receive.
His hand between my thighs is not something I can withstand.
It’s something I fall into.
He’s the same patient, methodical attention he brings to training, to strategy, to everything he decides deserves his full focus, and I am apparently something he has decided deserves his full focus. My body has incredibly strong and immediate feelings about that. His fingers move with a certainty that is worse than urgency, that is more than urgency, because urgency I could match and meet and get through. But this… this slow, specific, devastating knowledge of exactly what he’s doing and exactly why strips away every form of composure I was still pretending to.
“Rogue.” His name comes out wrong… too rough, too much.
“I know.” He doesn’t stop.
I delve my free hand into his shoulder, my nails digging in.
The vampire-sharpened sensitivity that has been a liability for days, that has made every accidental contact a negotiation and every loud sound a small catastrophe, turns out to have a different emotional value entirely when the input is this. When it’s his warmth and his hands and his specific, unhurried attention. Every nerve ending I have is reporting at full capacity. Instead of the overwhelm of too much information arriving with no purpose, there is only this, only him, only the sensation that builds in slow, deliberate increments until I stop having thoughts that are not made of heat.
His mouth finds the curve of my throat, and his hand doesn’t stop.
I make a sound that I categorically do not try to manage. The ceiling of the dark bedroom receives my complete loss of dignity and keeps the secret.
“There,” he says, low, against my pulse. He notes something, the same way he notes things in training, quietly and with attention.
“Don’t,” I manage.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t be…” The thought breaks apart. “Don’t act like you’re…” then the thought dissolves, “… calm,” I finish, considerably later. “Don’t be fucking calm about this.”
“I’m not calm.” His voice has roughened, and his breathing has changed. The patience is costing him. I can feel it in the tension of his jaw against my temple and the quality of his restraint, the effort it takes, and the knowledge that it costs him is its own thing running through me, another layer of warmth on top of the warmth that’s already building low in my stomach, spreading outward.
“You sound calm,” I tell him.
“Charlie…” My name in his mouth, rough and specific. “Stop talking.”
The sound that replaces my response is not a word, but a fractured moan. The sensation builds with his attention, steady and deliberate, like there’s no question of where it’s going. I can feel every individual component of it, vampire-sharpened and specific, the warmth of his palm. The exact pressure, the rhythm he has found and is maintaining with the same focused patience he brings to everything, and, underneath all of it, the slow-building heat that starts at the base of my spine and radiates forward, outward, turning my thoughts into something non-verbal and my hands into things that grip.
I grip him. His shoulder, his arm, wherever my hands land, and he makes a low sound against my throat.
