She sat.
He knelt in front of her.
The bed was low enough that her knees came to the middle of his chest, and he set his hands on them and pressed them apart, watching her face. Her breath caught. Her fingers curled into the furs beneath her.
"This," he said, "doesn't make children."
He pulled her forward by the hips until she was at the edge of the mattress, her thighs open over his shoulders, and put his mouth on her.
She made a sound like she'd been hit. Her hand flew to the back of his head, fingers digging into his hair, and he felt her whole body pull taut and then release in a single rolling shudder. He pressed his tongue flat and held it there, letting her feel the texture of it, the breadth, and when she rocked against him he followed the motion and gave her more.
She was wet and swollen and he could taste the change in her, that ripe undercurrent threading through everything else.
"Varek." His name cracked in her throat.
He pressed his tongue inside her and her spine arched off the bed so hard her weight dropped into his palm, and he held her there, one-handed, and ate her like she was the first thing he'd tasted in weeks.
She came with a choked sound and a full-body clench that ground her against his mouth. He didn't pull back. He flattened his tongue and rode the pulse of it, and when the first wave dropped he shifted to the swollen knot above and sucked it between his lips and she screamed into her own fist.
"Hand down," he said against her. "I want to hear you."
Her fist dropped to the furs. The sound she made on the next stroke was open-throated, wrecked, the kind of sound that carried through stone walls, and he didn't care. Let the garrison hear. Let them know what he did for her.
He worked her through the second crest with his mouth and both hands anchoring her hips to the bed's edge, because she was shaking hard enough to slide off. Her thighs clamped against his ears. Her heel dug into his back between the shoulder blades. He could feel the muscles in her belly jumping under his forearm where it pressed across her, and he stayed until the last flutter of it had gone quiet and her legs fell open and her breathing was the loudest thing in the room.
He sat back on his heels and looked at her. Undone and flushed and his, the dress shoved up around her waist, the knifestill belted at her hip. His own want was a hard, steady ache he had no intention of acting on. He'd waited longer for less.
"You're going to be late," he said.
She laughed. It came out broken and airless, more breath than sound, and her belly shook with it under his forearm. He watched the motion. He would never tire of watching the motion.
"I can't feel my legs," she said.
"Good."
He eased her thighs off his shoulders, pressed his mouth to the inside of her left knee where the skin was thinnest and the freckles ran in a line he'd traced with his tongue enough times to know the count, and stood.
She pushed up onto her elbows and looked at him. "What about you?"
"I'll keep."
She gave him a look.
"I'll keep," he said again. He pulled the dress off her hips where it had bunched and dropped it over the back of the chair. Went to the basin and wrung out the cloth, came back, cleaned her thighs with slow passes. "Go to the baths. Sit with the women. Come back to me after."
"And then?"
"And then I'll have thought of something that doesn't risk putting a baby in you before you've decided you want one."
Her gaze dropped to where he was straining against his trousers. The leather did nothing to hide it and he didn't try. She looked for a long time, her lips parted, her breathing still uneven.
"Something like what?" she asked.
"Like your mouth," he said. "Or your hands. Or here." He set two fingers in the valley between her breasts and drew them slowly down through the soft weight of them. "I've thought aboutthis one. Slicking myself between these and watching you hold them together for me while I fuck them. You'd feel it against your chin at the end of every stroke."
Her breath stuttered. The flush that had been fading climbed right back up her chest and throat.
"Or your throat," he said. "I'd have to be careful. But I'd like to feel you swallow around me. I'd like to watch your eyes water and know you chose to stay."
