Page 50 of Add To Hoard

A shift moves through his expression that is not quite a smile and not quite anything else I have a name for. Then he brings his mouth to my throat and I stop thinking in complete sentences.

He is not reasonable about it.

He is thorough as he is thorough about everything — complete attention, no rushing, like he is learning her, intending to keep it. His hands on me like he is cataloguing. His mouth at my collar and then lower and I arch up and get my fingers into his hair and he makes a sound low in his throat that I feel more than hear. The coat is gone. The shirt follows. The night air on my skin and then his hands covering it and the contrast is almost unbearable.

*"Tell me what you want,"* he says against my ribs.

"Everything," I say. "All of it. I'm leaving in three days and I want all of it."

He lifts his head and looks at me. In the dying firelight his eyes are molten, that gold gone to something deeper, something that has been sitting under the governance and the patience and the six centuries of getting there eventually, and it is here now, and it is looking at me like I am the only thing it has found worth looking at in a very long time.

*“Then you’ll have it,”* he says.

And I do.

He starts with his mouth.

His lips at my collar and then lower, no hesitation, no asking, moving down my sternum and then across my ribs with the focused attention of a man who has decided to take his time and means it. I get my fingers into his hair and hold on. His hands move over me like he is memorising, the inside of my wrist, the curve of my hip, the backs of my thighs, every surface catalogued and filed. I am already shaking by the time he gets where he is going and when his mouth finally finds me I arch off the bedroll and bite my own knuckle to keep the sound inside.

He does not hurry. He works me with his tongue slow and relentless until I come apart the first time with my hand pressed to my own mouth, the sound swallowed into my fist, my whole body clenching and releasing while he holds my hips flat against the ground and rides it out. I am still shaking when he lifts his head and looks at me with those wide dark eyes and starts again.

“I can’t,” I say. “I⁠—”

He does not stop.

The second one hits harder than the first. I grab his hair and pull and he lets me, still working, his tongue pressing exactly where I need it, and I come on his face with my back arched and my knuckles bleeding where I bit them and no sound at all because I have run out of sound.

When I finally pull him up by the shoulders and get my hands at his belt he lets me do it, patient while I work the buckle with fingers that are not entirely reliable. I get my hand around him — thick and hot and already wet at the tip — and he exhales against my neck like something that has been held for a very long time being let go.

“Now,” I say. “I want you now.”

He lines himself up and pushes in slow, one long stroke, and I feel every inch of it, the stretch and the fullness and the weight of him settling into me, and I hear myself make a sound I do not recognise, low and broken and entirely honest.

“All right?” he says against my temple. His voice has gone somewhere wrecked.

“Don’t stop,” I say.

He doesn’t stop.

He moves in me slow and deep, the bedroll rough at my back and the night air cold on my skin and his chest burning hot against mine, and I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper and he goes. His cock filling me completely with each thrust, his hips finding mine in the dark, the slick wet sound of it between us. I get my mouth against his throat and bite down and he groans — a real sound, unguarded, nothing of the governor in it — and drives harder.

“Look at me,” I say.

He lifts his head. Those gold eyes in the last of the firelight, the pupils gone wide and dark, and whatever is behind them is not the lord of this island or the guardian of anything. It is just him. Six centuries of a person, looking at me like I am the only thing worth looking at.

I come a third time with him buried inside me, my nails in his back and my face pressed to his collarbone, the orgasm rolling through me in waves while he keeps moving, relentless, working me through every pulse of it. He follows me over moments later, his whole body going rigid, his cock pulsing hot and deep inside me as he finishes, his face pressed into my neck and a sound coming out of him that I am going to carry for the rest of my life.

We stay locked together. Both breathing. Both wrecked.

I think: this is the night I will count from.

He rolls to his side and pulls me with him, my back against his chest, and we breathe.

Whatever comes after — the crossing, Blackwake, Bren healed and whole and standing in the light. I will count from this.

Three days,* some part of me notes, still keeping the tally. *I have three more days.

Tonight,* the rest of me answers back. *Tonight is not three days from now. Tonight is now. Be here.