Page 78 of Coyote

"I want to bite you. Not like before. I want to bite you so that it scars. I want you to have a piece of me on you always, right here, above your heart." I put my hand flat on his chest. His heart was going fast, too. Good. "And I want you to do the same to me. So I always have a piece of you."

He sighed. "Little one. I don't know if I can do that. I don't want to hurt you."

"Every mark I carry, somebody put there to hurt me." I shook my head. "Bites. Burns. Knives. All of it from people who wanted me small. I want one mark on this body that got put there on purpose, by somebody who—"

Somebody who loves me. The words stuck in my throat. He watched me fight it and didn't finish it for me, didn't cheapen it by saying it first. My jaw worked once.

"By you," I finished. "That's not hurting me for the sake of hurting. That's hurting me because I'm yours. Same as you're mine. It's like..." I looked around the shed like the word might be sitting out on a shelf. "Like a wedding ring you can't take off."

He let out a long breath through his nose. Then his fingers left my pulse, and his hand closed around the back of my neck. He hauled me across the arm's length between our bedrolls, and his lips came down on mine.

He took his time kissing me. He took his time with everything, and it drove me half out of my mind. I let him have it for as long as I could stand it. Then I climbed onto him, knees on either side of his thighs, and pressed him back into the saddle stack, careful of the right side, my palm flat over his dressing.

He laughed low into my mouth. "Playing doctor?"

"Checking my property."

He dragged my shirt over my head. Then his hand came up and closed around my throat where Nimue rides, thumb settled under my jaw on the pulse, and held. Not squeezing. Holding what was his. My cock jerked in my jeans. His hands went down my back, over the old scar lines, without stopping, without asking, without being too careful. My skin warmed everywhere they passed. Nobody else's hands had ever crossed those scars like they were just skin. I worked his shirt open and pushed it off him and took a second to look, because I was allowed to now, and I still couldn't quite believe it. His chest was one of my favorite things about him: big and sun-browned, silver hair scattered across it, nothing carved or showy anywhere. He wasn't built like Linc or Joe, and he wasn't soft either. He was just big and warm and mine.

I put my hand flat over his heart and felt it beat against my palm. "Right here," I said.

"I figured."

I stripped out of the rest of my clothes and helped him out of his, making him lift instead of twist. The lube sat in the crate beside his bedroll, between the gauze and the spare batteries, because after last time neither of us pretended it belonged anywhere else. I slicked my fingers and reached back and worked myself open, kneeling over his lap, where he had to look at it. He looked. Jaw tight, breath gone ragged, cock hard and heavy against his belly and leaking onto his own skin, both hands running up my thighs and staying there, gripping. I went fast and rough, less than I needed, because I wanted the burn waiting for me, and he knew me well enough not to tell me to take it easy.

"Now," I said.

He held himself steady for me, and I sank down onto the head of his cock. The stretch punched a groan out of me. Fuck, the burn of it. I wanted more of it. I wanted it to hurt going in so my body would remember him tomorrow, mid-stride, halfway down a fence line, wanted to feel exactly where he'd been. He was so damn big and so damn patient, holding still under me while I took him an inch at a time, his hands wrapped warm around my thighs, holding me steady.

Mine. That was all I was thinking. Not the trade, not Zaroff, not the boy sweating out his fever across the yard. Just mine, mine, this big warm man splitting me open and letting me set the pace like I was something worth waiting for. By the time my ass came down flush against his balls, I was shaking all over and leaking on his belly without a hand on me. I ground down there and felt them draw up tight under me, and he said fuck into my hair. I dropped my forehead to his collarbone and breathed him in, sweat and antiseptic and horse, and thought, let Zaroff come. Let him see what I go home to.

"All right?" he said into my hair.

"Quiet."

I rode him while he kissed me, chest to chest, one arm hooked around his neck. I kept my lips on his the whole time, dragging, breathing what he breathed, catching his bottom lip in my teeth every time I came down. It was a mistake, and I made it on purpose. Fast burns off. This built. Every drop of my hips dragged him over my prostate and set my thighs shaking, and my cock rubbed slick against his stomach. The heat pulled up out of my thighs and knotted low in my gut until I was whining into his neck, thin and high, a sound nobody else would ever have heard out of me. He kept his ribs still and let me do the work, his hands flexed hard on my thighs every time I sank down. His breath was harsh and broken near my ear. I did that to him. Me.

"Little one." His voice came out rough. "When you're close."

"I know."

It built until my thighs quit and I was dropping onto him more than riding him. I pressed my open mouth over his heart and felt his pulse against my tongue, quick as mine now. He cradled the back of my head and pressed me into his chest, and he didn't guard himself. Not one muscle in him braced against me.

"As hard as you need," he said.

I bit down as I came.

His blood ran hot over my tongue, and he groaned so deep it came up through his chest into my teeth, and his arms locked around me, and his hips drove up hard, and that shoved the orgasm through me all over again. I spilled hot between us with his heart pounding against my teeth and his arms crushing me to him, and I held the bite through all of it. Then I held it longer, because letting go wasn't something I'd been made to do my whole life, and I wasn't doing it now. When it was over, I eased my jaw open and licked the wound clean.

The mark sat high on his left chest, deep, bleeding thin dark lines where my teeth had been. Mine. It would scar and it would stay under his shirt. However this ended, some piece of me got to stay on him.

He stroked my hair, and his chest heaved under my cheek. He was still hard inside me.

"You didn't finish, big man."

"Not yet." He gripped my hips and lifted me off him and laid me down on my back on the bedroll. His breath caught when his ribs took the weight. He did it anyway, and God help me, my spent cock stirred. His weight came down after me, propped on one forearm, his knees pushing mine wide, and he slid back into me in one long push that arched me off the wool. I was loose and slick and already wrung out, and he still filled me past where I had room for it. He worked deep and took his time, and lowered his lips to my chest, to the same place, high on the left, over my heart.

"Here," he said against my skin.