"None of those," she said.
His hand, which had resumed work on stripping her naked, stilled. "What do you want then?"
"I want you inside me. I want—" Her voice caught and she pushed through it. "I want you to put a baby in me."
His hand didn't move. He stayed exactly where he was, half-kneeling over her with his palm flat on her ribs and her dresspulled open and the firelight cutting hard lines across the planes of his face.
"You're sure?" he asked.
"I'm sure."
His jaw flexed. The muscle in it jumped once. Then his hand left her ribs and went to the laces at his waist and he said, "Take the rest of that off."
She pulled the dress down over her hips while he stripped above her. Tunic over his head in one motion. Boots kicked off the edge of the bed. The laces gave and the leather dropped and he was naked and hard and she could see his pulse beating in the thick vein that ran the length of him, could see the ridges standing in hard relief, flushed dark green and slick at the tip where his body had already answered for him.
He came down over her and she reached for him and he caught her wrist. "Say it one more time. So there's no mistaking it later, when you're green in the mornings and cursing my name for it."
"I want your child, Varek. Put it in me."
Whatever he'd been holding all day came loose.
"Then that's what I'll do," he said, his mouth dropping to the hinge of her jaw. "I'm going to fuck you hard, Mab, and finish so deep it takes, and tomorrow you're going to walk through my fortress bred and sore, and you're going to hold your head up the whole way."
His teeth grazed her throat, and she tilted her head back to give him access.
"Yes," she breathed.
"Open your legs."
She opened them.
He knelt between them and put his hand on her, two thick fingers sliding through the wet of her. She was so ready they went in easy, and he worked her open without hurry. A third finger when she could take it, stretching her, his thumb circlingthe swollen knot above until her hips lifted off the furs to chase it.
"Look at you," he said. His voice had dropped into the register that lived below speaking, the one she felt in her sternum before her ears caught up. "Soaking my hand."
His fingers curled inside her and she clenched around them.
"More," she said.
He gave her more. Spread his fingers wider, pressed a fourth inside. The stretch was just shy of too much, and she moaned and pushed down onto his hand.
"That's it," he said. "Take it. Show me you're ready for what's coming."
She bore down and his hand opened her in a slow, relentless press that lit up every nerve she had. His thumb found her again and she jerked, her spine bowing, her fingers twisting in the furs beneath her.
"Come on my hand first. Then you get what you asked for."
She broke on a sound she didn't recognize as her own, raw and open-throated, her body clenching so hard around his fingers that his knuckles ground together. He held her through it, his other hand flat on her belly, pressing down, and the pressure inside and out met in the middle and she shattered again before the first wave had finished.
He pulled his hand free while she was still shaking and put it on the inside of her thigh, wet, and pushed her wider.
"Keep your eyes open," he said. "I want you to watch."
She watched, or tried to. He'd pulled her hips to the very edge of the bed and lifted them, her knees hooked over his elbows, and the tilt of her raised her enough that when she came up onto her own elbows she could see down the length of herself: the swell of her breasts rising and falling with each ragged breath, the round pale landscape of her belly, and past it, where the angle laid her open, the dark shape of him standing at the edgeof the bed with one hand guiding himself to her. She felt it before she saw it—the blunt, broad head of him pressed against her entrance, slick and hot, and her body tightened reflexively at the size of it even after everything his fingers had done.
There had been a time, not so many weeks ago, when this view would have made her close her eyes. The belly she couldn't see past, the breasts that fell to either side of her chest with their own weight, the soft width of her thighs held open by his hands. She would have looked at the ceiling or the wall or the inside of her own eyelids and waited for it to be over.
She looked.
