Page 127 of Bought for Blood

She’s tight and impossibly hot against my cool flesh, and I go in slow, watching her face the whole way, until I’m buried to the hilt. She takes all of it, and her breath catches and stays caught.

“Move,” she says. Her voice has dropped.

I don’t, not yet. My forehead comes down against hers instead, and I stay there a second longer than either of us needs. Her heart is going hard enough that I can feel it against my own ribs.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Nothing.” I lift my head enough to look at her properly. “Everything.”

She doesn’t ask me to explain that. Her hands slide down my back instead, and she pulls me into the first stroke herself.

I keep it slow. Long, full strokes, all the way out and all the way back, watching what each one does to her face. The flush climbs her chest and up her throat. There’s a sound she makes at the deepest point of every stroke, small and involuntary, and I would trade the contents of all of my houses to keep it.

“Faster,” she says.

“No.”

“Bastien—”

“I’ve had you fast.” I take her hands and lace my fingers through hers and press them into the mattress on either side of her head. “I’ve never had you like this.”

She looks up at me then, and something in her face changes…as if she’s just noticed we’re doing something other than what we’ve always done. She doesn’t ask again. Her legs come around me and she matches the pace instead, unhurried, her hips rising to meet every stroke, and for a while there’s nothing in the room but that, and the lamp, and the shutters closed against the night, and the two of us moving as if we have years.

I keep her there a long time. When she starts climbing, I feel it before she does—the way her fingers tighten in mine, the way her rhythm loses its patience—and I let her build slow, stroke by stroke, until she’s pulling against my hands and saying my name and not much else.

“Please. Bastien. Please.”

I’ve never heard her beg for anything, in that ward or in this house. She’ll beg for this, and only this, and only because she knows I’ll give her anything here.

I give her what she’s asking for. My full weight, my speed, nothing measured and nothing held. The headboard knocks the wall, once, then again, then in time with us.

“Yes—” Her nails are in my shoulders. “Like that— Just like that—”

She breaks the first time with her head thrown back, and I keep moving straight through it. There’s no bite in any of this, no blood, and she’s as loud as she has ever been. The sound was never about the blood, or about what I could do with my teeth in her throat. I should have worked that out long ago.

When she goes soft and heavy under me, I slow again. Not stopping. Long and deep and easy, letting her drift on it.

“I can’t again,” she says, into my shoulder.

“You can.”

“I can’t—”

“Serenity.” I get an arm under her hips and change the angle, and her whole body seizes around me, and her eyes come open. “You can.”

I build her back up. Slower this time, crueler about it, holding her exactly where I want her, and she gives up arguing and just holds on and lets me. Somewhere in it, her hands come up and frame my face, and she keeps them there, her thumbs at my cheekbones, watching me while I move in her. Nobody has ever watched me like that. Like I’m the one who needs keeping.

“Bastien.” Her voice has gone ragged. “Bastien—”

Then she says something else.

“I’ve got you.”

The same three words she said on a concrete floor with blood coming out of her nose.

And that is when I know.

It goes through me all at once, and I stop moving.