Page 84 of The Witch They Crave

I breathe. And then I stop bracing and let myself want it—want him—with nothing held back for the first time in my life.

He spins me and walks me backward. The backs of my knees find the edge of the bed and he follows me down onto it, careful, bracing his weight on one forearm so he doesn't crush me, and I get both hands into the wet mess of his hair and pull. His mouth crushes onto mine.

His control comes apart under my hands and I'm greedy for every degree of it. The muscle of his shoulders shifting as he holds himself over me. The old silver scars under my palms, a history I drag my fingers across. The sound he makes—low, wrecked, nothing like his level daylight voice—when I flatten my hand on the cool skin of his ribs and slide it down. Just watching him react to my touch has me arching into him.

"Tell me if you want to stop." His mouth is at my throat, and I feel the careful press of fang behind his lips—restrained, never breaking skin. "Any moment. You say the word and it stops. I need you to know that's true before—"

"I know it's true." I drag his mouth back to mine. "Stop asking me for permission like this is an exam. I'm here. I want this. I want you—so quit being so damn careful and touch me like you mean it."

Something in him snaps its leash. It hits me through the tether—a surge of want so total it stops being shaped like a feeling and more like a basic necessity.

He undresses me slowly, like the unwrapping is half of it, like he won't be rushed through a single inch. My uniform comes off, and the cool air of the room raises goosebumps everywhere his hands aren't. But then he’s everywhere—warm, slow, moving over me like he's trying to memorize the whole of me by touch. No one has touched me like this. No one has touched me like anything—twelve years of clinical hands, of contact that meant procedure, of being handled like a live wire—and now a man is taking me apart with the whole weight of his attention, and my body lights up.

"You're shaking," he says, mouth at the hollow of my throat.

"I'm fine."

"I know you're fine." He drags lower—my collarbone, the swell of my breast, the plane of my stomach, unhurried, thorough. "I'm not asking because I doubt it. I'm asking because I want to know every true thing your body does, and this is one of them."

God. He’s so sexy when he talks to me like this. Keeps me present in the moment. Wants me to feel everything he has to give.

He takes his time like time is the one thing he has in endless supply. His hand slides down my stomach, unhurried, and lower, and when his fingers find me I'm already slick for him—embarrassingly so, and the low sound he makes against my throat tells me he's felt it too, felt what he does to me. He strokes through the wet heat of me, slow, learning the shape of what makes me gasp, and when he pushes one finger into me my hips come off the bed.

"There," he murmurs, like he's found something he was looking for. "That's it."

He works me open like he has all night to do it, one finger, then two, curling into a spot that makes the breath punch out of me, his thumb circling the aching knot of nerves until my thighs are shaking around his hand. And then his mouth follows—he moves down my body, presses my legs wide with his shoulders, and puts his tongue on me, and I whimper at the jolt of electricity.

I fist my hands in his hair. He groans against me and it vibrates through my whole body, and he doesn't stop, doesn't slow, tongue and fingers working me in tandem, patient past the edge of reason.

My magic awakens, answering his call. Climbing. Cresting. The ring starting up in my ears that always used to mean danger and now means only this.

My magic surges hard enough that the lamp gutters and the window glass hums in its frame. I gasp out a warning I never finish—because his power sweeps in under the surge and holds it, folds it back down, keeps me from bringing the room down around us even as I fall apart on his mouth. Both things at once: the pleasure and the containment, his tongue and his magic, the shattering and the safety of it. I come with his name in my mouth and the whole room trembling and nothing, for the first time in my life, actually breaks.

I'm still shaking when he rises back over me. His eyes have gone dark, the control hanging by a single visible thread.

"Still yes?" he asks. Rough. Barely holding. He reaches down and palms his bulge through the towel and my mouth waters.

"Still yes."

He sheds the towel. I let myself look at him—all of him, the hard length of his cock, and my breath catches somewhere between want and nerves. He notices, because he notices everything. He settles over me, braced on one forearm, and I feel him nudge against my entrance, and he goes still.

"Look at me," he says.

I do. His eyes are black with want and steady on mine, and he pushes into me slow, giving me every inch by degrees, watching my face the whole way.

“Oh, fuck,” I hiss.

There's a bright edge of pain I expected and breathe through, and he feels it—of course he feels it, the tether carries it straight into him—and he stops, buried deep, jaw tight with the effort of holding still.

"Breathe," he murmurs, forehead dropping to mine. "I've got you. I'm not moving until you tell me to."

I breathe just like he tells me to and then he gives me something else to focus on. His tongue slides up the length of my neck before he suckles gently below my ear. The electricity resumes, my entire body lighting up in flames for him.

I shift, testing, and the painful stretch between my legs bleeds into something else, something molten that makes me roll my hips up against him without deciding to. He hisses out a breath he doesn't need. "Calypso."

My eyes roll back. The thick length of him dragging along my aching walls is like a godsend. I’ve never felt sexier and more in control. "Move," I tell him, breathless. "I want you to move."

And he does. He draws back and slides into me again, deep and slow, and it stops being anything I could manage.