So that was a thing worth knowing. I used it, dragging him up the length of me by the horns until his face hung over mine.
"I did not climb into your lap to stop here," I said. "You're going to give me the rest of it. All of it."
Whatever was left of the decent, disciplined man went out of his eyes.
He came up over me, braced on a forearm, and notched the broad blunt head of his cock against me. And even then, even gone, he went slow.
He pushed into me by degrees, thick and blunt and relentless, so much of him that I felt every inch of the stretch, my body giving around him in a burn that bled straight into something better. I felt the flared head of him part me, then the thick shaft of him following, dragging at swollen nerves the whole way, filling me past anywhere I'd been filled before. He watched my face the whole time, holding still each time my breath stuttered, sinking another slow inch into me only when I rocked down greedy for more.
"I've got you," he said, ragged. "That's it. Take it. Take all of me." When he was finally seated to the hilt, so deep I couldn't breathe around it, we both held there, shaking, his forehead dropped to mine.
Then he drew back and drove home, and I stopped being able to think.
He fucked me slow and deep, dragging nearly all the way out until just the head of him stretched me and then sinking back to the root, every thrust forcing a sound out of me. I felt all of him, the drag and the stretch and the blunt nudge of him hittingsomething so deep it turned my voice to nothing. Somewhere in it the last of his control burned away and something older took him, something that had been pacing behind his ribs for weeks, and it drove into me like it had every denied night to make up for.
His tail brushed my thigh, warm, hitching my leg up over his hip so he could grind in even deeper, never pinning me. He bottomed out against something that punched the air out of me, and I could feel the slick of us where we were joined, could hear it, the slap of his hips meeting mine getting harder and faster as he came apart. He pounded into me, and the words started spilling out of him against my throat, my jaw, my mouth, low and wrecked.
"Mine." Like it was torn out of him. "Tell me you feel that. Tell me you're mine."
I couldn't say it. I wanted to say it so badly that my eyes stung.
"I'll keep you." He hooked a hand under my hips and tilted me up into every thrust, and now every stroke dragged the thick head of him over a spot that whited out the room. "I'll keep you right here. I'll keep you full, I'll keep you safe, and nobody is taking you off this planet. You hear me? Mine."
They were promises he had no right to make.
Tomorrow there was a transport, a record, a woman with gold eyes, and not one of those things was within his power to stop. Every man who'd ever wanted me had wanted me right up until the cost came due. I knew all of it. I knew it in my bones.
And with him buried in me to the root, and his promises breaking against my skin, and his horns under my hands, I wanted to believe him so badly I could have wept.
The pressure wound tighter and tighter with every drive of his. That spot inside me was lit up raw, his cock dragging over it again and again until there was nowhere left to go. I held on andlet go at once, and came apart around him so hard it tore a sob out of me, my body clamping down on the thick length of him in waves while he kept fucking me through every clench. And almost, almost, I gave him the word he was begging for. He went over a thrust later with a roar half-buried in my hair, slamming deep and grinding there as he spilled, his cock pulsing inside me, the heat of him flooding deep, my name and that one word, mine, breaking out of him.
For the length of it, the long, bright, unspooling length of it, I believed every word he'd said.
8
LORKIN
I wokewith Chloe's weight on my chest and didn't move, in case moving was the thing that ended it.
She was asleep on top of me, naked, one leg thrown over both of mine, her cheek over my heart and her dark hair everywhere. The first thing I did, before I was even properly awake, was hold my breath. If I moved, she might wake, and if she woke, the whole night might turn out to be the kind of thing a male like me only gets when he dreams.
So I lay there in the gray light and made myself look at the evidence. The ache in my back from a bed built for one. A bite mark coming up sore on my shoulder. Her breathing slow against my ribs, drooling a little on my chest, which no dream of mine had ever been good enough to invent.
It happened. I'd had her. All night, and half of it twice.
Two weeks I'd spent crushing this flat every hour, telling myself it would ruin her, telling myself a better male would do better by her, and the whole time it had been waiting on the other side of one word.
One yes. Hers.
I'd never have had the nerve for it myself. My cock remembered all of it at once and stirred against her hip, hopeful and stupid, and I had to lie very still and think about cold iron until it gave up.
I'd spent my whole life being careful not to want anything I couldn't keep. And now I'd had her, and there was no putting it back.
Whatever came, I wasn't going to be able to hand this one off and walk into the dark like it cost me nothing. That door was shut. She'd shut it herself, climbing into my lap with a mug of cocoa going cold on the table.
Which left the fear. It rose up under the wanting, cold and patient.
There was a list somewhere with her name on it and a date beside it, and a transport that came whether or not I'd learned how to be happy overnight. There was the wall in the forge, with blades hung against a war nobody else believed was coming, and the kind of male who builds a thing like that is not the kind you trust with something breakable.
