Page 73 of The Iron Alpha

The noise he makes is guttural, wrecked, pulled from behind every wall he's spent the drought rebuilding. His head drops back against the stone.

His hips jerk forward and then lock, because the alpha in him wants to take my mouth as he's taken it before, one hand on my jaw, pace his to set, and the man in him understands that this time is different.

This time, I set the pace.

I take him deep. My tongue presses flat against the underside, tracing the ridge that makes his thighs lock. I pull back to the head and swirl my tongue around the crown, tasting salt and skin and the evidence of how much the drought cost him too. His breathing comes apart above me, ragged and rhythmless, and his hands in my hair are shaking.

Shaking.

I've felt those hands discipline me. Hold me down. Grip my hips hard enough to leave bruises that lasted for days. I've seen them sign orders that sent wolves to war and hold steady on a blade that took a man's life in the days before Dover was forced to surrender.

They're shaking now because I'm on my knees by choice, and that is a power he doesn't know how to command.

I hollow my cheeks and take him deeper. His cock hits the back of my throat and I swallow around him, and the breath that fractures out of him is raw, shredded, nothing like the controlled growls of every night before this. His fingers tighten at the back of my skull but he doesn't guide. He holds on. The distinction is the distance between everything we've been and everything we're becoming.

I work him with my mouth until his body is trembling against the wall, until his breathing is closer to gasping than breath, until the bond is flooding me with a pleasure so intense I can feel the orgasm building in his body as if it's building in mine.

He pulls me up before he finishes. His hands under my arms, lifting me, and his mouth crashes into mine with a desperation that tastes like surrender.

He strips the tunic over my head. His hands on my bare skin are rough and unhurried, spanning my ribs, cupping my breasts, his thumbs dragging across my nipples until I arch into him and the sound I make is his name.

He carries me to the bed. Lays me down on the furs that still remember the shape of both our bodies. Strips his own clothes with hands that are still unsteady, and when he settles between my thighs the weight of him presses me into the furs and my body answers before my mind grants permission. Every bruise he ever left has faded. I want new ones.

His hand slides between us. Down my belly, over my hip, between my legs, and his breath catches hard when his fingersfind how wet I am. I'm soaked. The oral, the kissing, the long nights without him—all of it pooled into a slickness that coats his fingers the moment he touches me. He presses two fingers inside me and my back arches off the furs. The stretch after so long without him is sharp and sweet and not nearly enough.

"Look at me." His voice is ruined. Low and scraped raw. A command, but his hands are braced on either side of my head instead of gripping my jaw, and the difference between demanding and asking lives in that single restraint. "Eleanor. Look at me."

I look at him. His fingers withdraw and I feel the blunt head of his cock replace them, pressing against my entrance.

He enters me slow, and the first stroke after the drought is so intense my vision whites at the edges. He's thick. I'd forgotten how thick, how the stretch of accommodating him borders on too much before my body remembers and opens. I feel every inch of him filling me, the pressure spreading through my core until he's seated to the hilt and the fullness is so complete it pulls a sound from my throat that has nothing of strategy in it.

He holds there. Buried. His forehead drops to mine. Both of us breathing.

Then he moves. Slow at first, each thrust deliberate, withdrawing until only the head remains inside me, then pressing back in to the hilt with a depth that makes me grip his shoulders and pull him closer. His hand finds my thigh, hooks it higher against his hip, and the new angle sends him deeper. I gasp. His jaw clenches. The wet rhythm of our bodies meeting fills the chamber the way the river fills the silence beneath the walls.

His thumb finds the swollen center of me where our bodies are joined, circling with a pressure he mapped out early and hasn't forgotten. The combination of his cock filling me and hishand working me sends a heat coiling through my belly that tightens with every stroke.

I wrap my arms around his neck and hold him there. His hips roll into mine and the friction is total, the slick heat of our bodies learning each other again.

His mouth moves to my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast. His teeth graze my nipple. My hips jerk against his hand. The sound I make is raw, involuntary, louder than I intend.

The orgasm builds behind my navel, a pressure that concentrates and coils. His thumb adjusts, finding the exact spot that makes my breathing fracture. His thrusts deepen, the pace steady and relentless, his eyes on my face because he told me to look at him and I haven't looked away.

I come with his name in my mouth and my body clenching around him so hard his rhythm breaks. The orgasm rolls through me in waves, each contraction pulling him deeper.

The bond carries his response back to me raw—the sensation of my body gripping his cock in pulsing spasms nearly taking him over the edge. His hand grips my hip and he buries himself to the hilt and holds, breathing torn, fighting the finish because he isn't done.

He isn't done.

The pace builds again. Harder now. My hips rise to meet each thrust. The sounds between us are the slap of skin and the wet friction of bodies locked together and my breathing shattering against his shoulder. His hand is in my hair, gripping, pulling my head back to expose my throat, and his mouth drags down the column of my neck with an intensity that carries the promise of teeth.

RYLAND

She is beneath me and she is looking at me and her eyes are open.

In every night before this, there was a moment when Eleanor closed her eyes. During the discipline. During the sex. At the peak, when her body took over and her mind let go, her lids would fall and she'd surrender to sensation with her gaze shuttered.

Her eyes are open now. Gray-green and unguarded and watching me with a clarity that strips every thought from my head except one: she chose this. She chose me. She's looking at me while I'm inside her because she wants to see the man she's accepting, and the exposure of being seen is more devastating than anything I've done to her in this bed.