The feel of it lit me up from the inside out. My nipples drew tight. Everything low in me clenched down on nothing and went slick and molten, and I knew that if he slid one of those huge hands between my legs he'd find me already soaked through.
"Chloe." Wrecked, now. "Go back to your room. I'm trying to do one decent thing."
"I know what you're trying to do." I flattened my hands on his chest, and even through the worn shirt the heat of him stung mypalms, the muscle beneath shifting as his whole body strained against staying still. "You've been trying to do the decent thing. You decided what was good for me and you've been white-knuckling it ever since." I leaned in and set my open mouth to the side of his throat, just to find out, and he tasted of salt and hot iron and warm skin, his pulse slamming against my lips. A shudder rolled through his whole huge body. "I know what I need," I said against his skin. "It isn't you being decent."
And I kissed him.
The sound he made.
It came up out of the bottom of him, a groan with a growl threaded through it, the sound of a man who'd finally stopped fighting. His arms locked around me and hauled me flush against him. His mouth opened over mine, and he kissed me back, deep and graceless and starving. He tasted of smoke and heat, dark and unmistakably him, and his tongue stroked into my mouth slow and filthy while the rest of him shook with the effort of staying gentle.
Nothing about him was careful now, and all of it still was, somehow.
His mouth was rough, his hands greedy up my back and into my hair, and underneath it all that strength stayed leashed. He kissed me like he was making up for every no he'd ever handed me. I rolled my hips down into him, couldn't help it, and there he was, gone fully hard now, the thick length of his cock riding up against the seam of my leggings right where I was open and aching for it, so big it made my mouth water.
I ground down on him without a shred of shame, dragging the swollen center of me along that ridge through the cloth, the friction stoking me hotter with every pass until I was drenched, until the only thing keeping me quiet was his mouth on mine.
"You feel that," he said roughly against my mouth. "You feel what you do to me."
"Yeah." I rolled down on him again, slow and filthy, working myself along him just to feel his whole body lock up and that growl punch out of his chest. "I want it. I want all of it."
He swore, low, and stood up out of the chair with me still wrapped around him like I weighed nothing, one arm bracketing my back, and carried me down the hall.
His room was dark and warm. It smelled of him. He set me on the bed like the breakable thing he kept insisting I was, then stood over me a moment, chest heaving, fighting it one more time.
"Last chance," he said. "Tell me to go."
"Take off my clothes, Lorkin."
He undressed me slow. That was the part I hadn't braced for: how his hands shook the whole time and still went careful, easing my shirt up and off, peeling my leggings down my legs. Then he looked at me, naked in his bed, his eyes dragging down my body slow and starving, and I felt the low rumble that rolled out of his chest in my back teeth.
He looked at me like he wanted to wreck me and worship me in the same breath, like he couldn't believe he was allowed either.
Then he put those enormous shoulders between my thighs and shoved them wider, wide enough to fit the breadth of him, and hauled me down the bed by the hips until I was spread open against his mouth. The first hot flat drag of his tongue up the center of me bowed my whole spine off the mattress.
He took his time.
Careful, thorough Lorkin, who finishes what he starts.
He ate me like a man starved, with no hurry and no mercy. He licked me in long, broad strokes, the flat of that tongue dragging up from where I was drenched, circling my clit again and again, learning what pulled the loudest sounds out of me and then doing only that. When he closed his lips around it andsucked, my heels dug into the muscle of his back, and a sob ripped out of me.
One huge hand splayed flat over my belly and pinned me to the bed when my hips tried to buck up off it. I wasn't going anywhere. He held me open and feasted. The room filled up with the filthy wet sound of his mouth on me and the broken noises I couldn't keep behind my teeth.
Then he pushed one thick, blunt finger into me, slowly, while his tongue stayed working, and even that was almost too much, the drag of it stretching me as it sank in to the knuckle. He curled it, found a place inside me that made my whole body jolt, and stroked there in time with his mouth. The stretch and the suck and that deep relentless pressure stacked one on top of the other until I was clenching around him, thighs shaking, chanting his name, understanding with hysterical clarity exactly how hard the rest of him was going to ruin me.
Nobody had ever done this to me like it was the point. Like getting me off was the whole event and not the toll on the road to his own.
I fisted one hand in the blanket and got the other around the base of his horn, I couldn't help it, my hand just went, and the second I gripped it he groaned into me, deep, and the vibration buzzed straight up through my sex and lit the fuse.
I came on his tongue, hard, my spine wrenching off the bed, my thighs clamping around his head and my body clamping around his finger. He didn't let up. He licked me through every pulse and aftershock, gentling only when I was wrung out and twitching and pushing weakly at his head.
He lifted it. His mouth was wet with me, his eyes gone molten, and he looked, of all the impossible things, like he was about to be noble about it.
"That's enough," he said, rough. "You came. That can be where it ends. You don't owe me?—"
"Don't you dare."
I sat up and got both hands around the base of his horns, below the caps, all that warm, rigid weight filling my palms, and the full-body shudder that went through him nearly put him on the floor. His eyes fell shut. His breath punched out of him.
