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He moved faster. I clung to his forearms, urging him on. So good. Much too good. I was going to explode before I’d pulled down every last bit of this heady sensation.

Partway through, he rolled us, him lying on his back. I rose over him and took him back into me an inch at a time, on my own weight, and watched his eyes roll back in his head.

“The fit was never a problem to solve,” I told him, braced on his sternum with both hands, his heartbeat coming up through my palms. “It’s a harvest. You bring it in slow.”

He watched me the entire time. One hand stayed on my waist, steadying without steering, while the other stroked my clit.

In no time, I was going to be the one with my eyes rolling back in my head.

“Still with me?” he ground out, and his fingers slid up to cup my breast.

“If you stop to ask again, I’ll bite you.”

“That’s a yes.”

“That’s a yes, Goran⁠—”

My orgasm came from a long way off, roaring through me and into him as far as I knew.

The bells, when they came for me, were internal, and they rang for a while.

He followed me down, my name spoken in the guttural voice he’d used at a wall in my shop.

After, he tugged me down onto his chest, both of us slick and laughing and undone. Snow fell outside, the quilts were in ruins, and one lamp still burned down the hall for nobody.

We lay in the quiet.

He slid his fingers through my hair. Under my ear, his rumble ran on, and I lay absorbing it all.

“The bed,” I said eventually, into his chest.

“Hm.”

“You built it. To this height. Hoping.” I propped my chin on his chest and looked up the length of him to his face. “You planted this night like a crop, Goran Brack. The stool, the shelf, the moonbell, the bed. Two years of stones sitting in a bowl by my register, and the one detail you never mentioned is that ogres build the bed for the wife they’re hoping for.”

“Hoped,” he said. His hand settled on my back. “Got.”

His rumble carried me down to sleep on the finest thing he’d ever built.

And the last thing I knew was his hand, holding me in place.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

GORAN

Iwoke in the middle of the night, which I never do, and lay a while trying to discover what had roused me.

Everything had. That was the plain answer. The lamp had burned out down the hall. The snow had stopped, and the hush of a world under fresh snow had come in through the walls. The only sounds left in the county were the frost ticking at the glass and, nearer, the breath of the woman asleep on top of me. Rain lay across the length of my chest with her hair spilled everywhere and one hand still curled at the base of my right horn.

The ruin we’d made of the bed lay tangled at our feet, and my chest was running on without me, telling the dark what I’d not known how to say out loud in two years.

A male didn’t know the true weight of anything until it was lifted off him. I’d slept alone my entire life. I’d built this house alone and banked its fires alone and lay in this bed alone through every winter it had stood. Then a storm took the roof off a tea shop, and here I was in the middle of the night with the warmest weight in three counties breathing against my heart.

I held very still underneath her so it would never end.

She woke all at once and started talking, which was how she did everything.

“You’re awake.” She said it muffled, into my chest. “Your purr gave you away. It’s gone all smug.”