Page 52 of Remmen

“Every morning,” he continued. “Forever.”

Forever didn’t scare me. His arms were warm and enormous around me. The coffee smelled right, and there was a second chair at the table.

He wasn’t going anywhere. He’d chosen me every single day in a hundred ways I hadn’t let myself count until now, and not one of them had been a performance.

He was mine.

Screw the coffee.

I spun around and wrapped my arms around him, then my legs.

He caught me like I weighed nothing, one hand under my thighs and the other spread flat across my back, and I kissed him. Not careful, not testing. I kissed him hard. He made a rough sound into my mouth and met me with enough force to curl my toes.

He tasted like the boiled root he drank every morning and like himself, clean and warm, and his tongue was hot against mine. I got both hands in his hair and pulled, and he groaned, and I felt it vibrate through his whole chest into mine.

He sat me on the counter without breaking the kiss. The stone was cold on the backs of my bare thighs and I didn’t care because he was between my legs, the solid width of his hips holding my knees apart, his arousal hard against me through his trousers. I locked my ankles behind his back and pulled him closer.

I got my fingers on the buttons of his shirt. They were too big for their holes, or my hands were shaking, or both. I yanked the last two open and shoved the fabric off his shoulders and he let it fall. All that warm skin, the scars I’d learned by touch in the dark, the muscles jumping under my palms when I ran my hands down his chest.

He pulled my shirt up over my head in one easy motion, and I wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. I hadn’t put on a stitch before I came out to find him. The cool air hit my bare skin and my nipples went tight, and Remmen’s eyes dropped to my breasts and went molten gold.

“Nothing under it,” he said, rough. “The whole time you were standing there making coffee.”

“I was in a hurry.”

He scooped me off the counter so fast I yelped, one arm hooked under my ass and the other banded across my back, and I got my fingers around the base of one horn and held on as he carried me through the front room.

It felt like a threshold. His bedroom and him carrying me into it with my legs wrapped around his waist and my hands on his horns and nothing between us. A bride being walked into her house, except the house was already mine and the groom was seven feet of scarred minotaur and I’d never wanted anything this badly.

He set me down on the bed so gently it almost undid me. The mattress dipped under my weight and the sheets were cool and smelled like him, like his skin and the soap he used and something underneath that was just Remmen, warm and dark.

He knelt on the bed over me and cupped one breast in his hand, his thumb dragging across the nipple until I arched up into it. Then his mouth followed, hot and wet, his tongue circling slow, and I fisted my hand in his hair and held him there because I wanted more of it and I was done pretending I didn’t.

“Mine.” His mouth was warm against my breast. He moved to the other and his lips closed around the nipple and he sucked gently, and his hand covered the breast he’d left behind, big enough to hold the whole of it. “Mine, mine, mine.” Each word pressed into my skin like he was trying to leave it there. The last one barely made it out, and I pulled him closer.

His mouth trailed lower, down the center of my ribs, and his breath was hot on my stomach, and I could feel his horns dragging cool against my skin on either side, tracing down my body as he went. The smooth curve of one grazed the inside of my breast and I shivered hard. He paused there and did it again, deliberate this time, the polished bone warm from my skin now, dragging slow across my nipple, and the sound I made was embarrassing and I didn’t care.

I pulled at his waistband. “Off. Now.”

He stood up long enough to strip his trousers off, and I watched. I always watched, and I would never get used to it. The width of his shoulders, the narrow hips, the thick dark hair that trailed down his stomach. His cock was hard and heavy, flushed dark, jutting away from his body, a drop of slick shining at the head. I’d had him inside me plenty of times now.

I sat up on the edge of the bed and reached for him. My hand barely closed around the base, and when I stroked up he went perfectly still. Not tense-still. Held-breath still, waiting still, every muscle locked.

I closed my hand around him again and drew it up, smearing the drop at the head with my thumb. His exhale came out shaking. His hands were at his sides, not touching me, letting me have him. The muscles in his thighs were rigid and I could see a vein ticking in his jaw.

I leaned forward and pressed my mouth to his stomach, just above his cock, and licked a line across the warm skin there. He made a sound like I’d hit him. I did it again, lower, my lips brushing the coarse hair below his navel, my hand still working him slow. His cock kicked against my palm and his stomach pulled taut.

I wanted to spend a whole day doing this. Learning exactly what it took to break Remmen’s control, finding every trick that made the composed, patient, steady mayor come apart under my fingers. The slow stroke that made his jaw go tight. The thumb across the head that made his hips jerk forward into my hand. The grip at the base that dragged a sound out of him I’d never heard before, deep and desperate, and I felt it between my legs like a fist closing.

Not today. Today I just wanted him.

“Lie down,” I said.

He blinked. I pushed at his chest and he went, sitting down onto the bed and stretching out on his back, and the whole frame groaned under him. He took up most of the mattress and waited for me to tell him what came next.

I climbed over him. Straddled his hips, my knees wide on either side of him, his cock thick and slick against my inner thigh. I rocked my hips and he slid through the wet of me without pushing in, the length of him dragging against my clit, and the friction was so good I did it again, grinding slow against him until we were both breathing hard and I was soaked and shaking and done teasing.

I reached between us and took him in my hand and guided him to my entrance, and I sank down slow. The stretch was enormous. It always was, and I always wanted more of it, the burn and the fullness of my body making room for him, opening up inch by thick inch. I braced my hands on his chest and panted through it and watched his face while I took him.