Page 86 of The Savage

His kiss is different tonight, not so much a storm but a building tide. Slow at first, then stronger, filling every corner until there’s nowhere in me he hasn’t touched with breath and warmth. He licks my mouth like it’s his favourite thing, offering his own taste of wine and something darker, something I think is the part of him he never lends to anyone. When I open for him, he groans, a raw sound that pulls a helpless echo from my throat.

‘Tell me,’ he murmurs against my mouth. ‘What are you feeling?’

‘Frightened,’ I whisper. ‘And… not frightened.’

‘Good. More, baby. Say more things.’

‘Hot. Unsteady. Like I’m trying to stand in a moving boat.’

His laugh is a thread of sound, pleased and pained. ‘I’ve wanted you to say it. Keep saying it.’ His hands slide to my back, mapping the line of it, memorising. He moves me until I’m straddling his lap, his thigh braced under me, his breath turning rough. ‘Is this better?’

My reply is in the way my body finds him, in the tiny involuntary sound that escapes me. Heat pools low; the world narrows to a rhythm I’ve never known and somehow recognise. He watches my face as if the answer to every question he’s ever had is written there.

‘Look at you,’ he says, reverent. ‘So fucking beautiful. You’re learning me. Let me learn you back.’

He lowers his mouth to my throat. The first brush is light, a test; the second has intent. He presses a kiss where my pulse trips, then another at the hollow above my heart. Everywhere his mouth goes, something inside me answers, bright and startling. I cling harder, the room tipping gently around us.

‘Too much?’ he asks.

I nod. ‘Not enough,’ I hear myself contradict, and he curses softly, gratitude and hunger knotted together.

His hands are everywhere, both of them now, and I see how much stronger he’s become when his left hand grips me tight, curving, cradling, caressing. It occurs to me that perhaps this was what he was aiming for all along. And the thought thrills me way more than it should.

The hand on my hip moves me over him, and I gasp into his mouth when I feel the steel stalk of him between my legs, shamelessly imprinting on my sensitive place.

He is hovering between devouring and devotion, and I feel the battle of it in the way he pauses, steadies himself and returns to the slower pace. ‘Tell me when it’s good,’ he says. ‘Tell me when it’s not. I want the map.’

‘You already have it.’

‘Maybe.’ He nips the edge of my lip, soothing it with his tongue. ‘But I want it in your words.’

I try. It’s clumsy at first, shy, a litany of fragments. ‘Warm… dizzy… right there – yes – wait, not so – oh.’ He listens with his whole body, adjusting when I ask, pushing when I beg without knowing that I am. The shyness burns away in the asking until I’m telling him everything.

His praise is a rush of thick words, low and rough and threaded through with dominance and awe. ‘Good girl. Brave girl. Look at me. There you are.’

I can’t keep my eyes open under the praise; they seem to flutter, then fix on his. Then flutter again when desire thickens in my blood.

He holds my gaze, holds me, guides me into that rhythm again – slow, then quicker, then slow, like a tide learning the shape of a shore. My body finds a heat-staggering glide against him, and the pleasure builds with a patience that feels like being carried to a high place on someone’s shoulders.

He touches me like he’s delving back into a language he speaks fluently, with arrogant confidence and a purpose that sends heat spiralling up my spine.

His fingers trace the seam of my thighs, then over the last scrap of fabric shielding me from his gaze.

Every breath I take stutters against the wicked patience and promise in his eyes.

‘I’m going to make you come now, baby. Would you like that?’

My response is an expelled breath that ripples with yes, even though I’m not entirely sure what coming entails. Stings of guilt have peppered my shameful exploration in the past, heavy enough to force me to abandon what the older sisters insisted was a sin, but which right now doesn’t feel like that.

At all.

On the contrary, it feels like a celebration waiting to happen when the warmth of his palm, the surety of his hold, and the way his breath catches when I soften under him, opening without thinking, makes me elated. Like my body recognises him faster than my mind can catch up. The room narrows to where his hand anchors me, to the slow, coaxing rhythm that steals my voice and replaces it with trembling, wanting silence.

Between one heartbeat and the next, he rips the panties from me and in a way, I’m glad it wasn’t a drawn-out thing. That he’s brought this too to the open and all I have to do is accept it.

Accept when his fingers travel up my inner thighs to my hot, wet core. Accept when he leans in, his forehead touching mine, his lips brushing the corner of my mouth as if tasting each shiver. ‘That’s it,’ he murmurs, voice low, wrecked, intimate. ‘Let me touch your beautiful pussy. Let me feel you. Fuck, you’re wet for me. For this. Aren’t you?’

His words move through me like a pulse, tugging something deep and unnamed to the surface. My hips tilt of their own accord, my fingers twisting in his shoulders – seeking, pleading, meeting the rhythm he sets.