Slow, thorough, one hand at the nape of her neck and the other at the small of her back. She opened for him without prompting. Her lips parted and her tongue met his, clumsy at first, then surer when he angled his head to give her room. The tusks grazed the corner of her mouth and she made a small sound that went straight through him.
He'd kissed women before. He'd taken women to bed, shared pleasure, parted without regret. He knew the mechanics of desire, the way a body responded to touch, the sounds a woman made when she was enjoying herself.
This was different.
This was the pull wrapping around his spine and pulling tight.
Mine.
Chapter 9
Mab had never been carried before.
She had walked everywhere she'd ever gone, her own two feet on stone and dirt and kitchen floor, and if she was tired or hurt or sick, she walked anyway because no one was going to carry her.
Varek carried her like she weighed nothing.
One arm beneath her knees, one behind her back, her body tucked against his chest as he shouldered through the door of the lady's chamber. His breathing hadn't changed. His stride hadn't slowed. He'd lifted her in the kitchen yard and walked the entire length of the servants' passage without a single grunt of effort.
The door swung shut behind him with a heavy thud. Varek crossed the room and set her down on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath her weight.
Then he stepped back.
Mab blinked up at him. The distance felt wrong after the heat of his chest against her side, the iron band of his arms around her. She started to reach for him.
"No." His voice was rough. "Stay there."
She stayed.
Varek stood at the foot of the bed, arms loose at his sides, and looked at her. Not at her face. At all of her. His gaze moved from her bare feet to her knees to the place where the nightgown had ridden up around her thighs, and then higher, slower, tracing the curve of her belly through the thin linen, the swell of her breasts, the rapid rise and fall of her chest.
"I've been thinking about this since I pulled you out of that hole," he said. "What you'd look like spread out on a bed. What sounds you'd make when I got my hands on you."
Mab's breath caught. Her fingers curled into the bedding.
Varek's hands went to the laces of his tunic. He pulled them loose without looking, his eyes still fixed on her body. "I told myself to wait. Give you time. Let you choose."
His tunic hit the floor.
Mab couldn't look away.
She had seen him in the hall, felt the breadth of him beneath her hands, but she hadn't seen this. The green skin stretched taut over muscle that looked carved from stone. Scars everywhere, pale lines and puckered ridges that mapped a lifetime of violence across his chest, his ribs, the hard plane of his stomach. A dark trail of hair ran from his navel down beneath the waistband of his leathers.
He was enormous. Not just tall or broad, but built on a scale that made the lady's chamber feel small around him.
"You chose," Varek said. "In the yard. You looked at me and told me what you wanted."
He stepped closer. The bed frame creaked when his knee pressed into the mattress.
"Now I'm going to give it to you."
His hand closed around her ankle.
"I'm going to take this nightgown off you," he said. His voice was conversational, like he was explaining how to truss a haunch or bank a fire. "I'm going to look at every part of your body. And then I'm going to put my mouth on you until you scream." His thumb traced a circle against her ankle bone. "After that, I'm going to work you open with my fingers. One at a time. Until you're wet enough to take me." His hand slid up her calf, pushing the nightgown higher. "And you will take me, Mab. Every inch. I'll make sure of it."
The words landed somewhere beneath her ribs and stayed there, pulsing. She should be afraid. Some distant part of her brain was cataloguing reasons for fear: his size, his strength, the casual way he'd just described taking her apart. The scars on his chest. The hands that had killed men she had once known.
But the fear wouldn't come.
