Page 83 of Faultline

"Liam." My name in her mouth again. Rougher this time. Fraying at the edges.

I push two fingers inside her. Deep. Curling upward with a precision I've learned from every time I've had her, every response I've cataloged, every sound I've filed away and used against her. She's tight around my fingers and her hips try to lift toward my hand, but my forearm across her pelvis holds her flat.

I'm gentle. I'm also in no hurry. And she doesn't get to set the pace.

My thumb keeps circling while my fingers stroke inside her, deep and measured, finding the spot that makes her legs shake and working it until the shake becomes a full-body tremor.

Her breath comes in shallow pulls. Her stomach muscles are taut beneath my forearm. She's close, and I can feel it in how she clenches around my fingers, and I don't let up. I hold the rhythm steady, refusing to give her harder or faster, making her take it exactly as I'm giving it.

The orgasm rolls through her in a long, drawn-out wave. Her back lifts against my arm. Her mouth opens on a sound that's my name broken into two syllables and repeated like a prayer she didn't plan to say out loud.

Every contraction grips my fingers while my thumb eases but doesn't stop, drawing the release out until her body goes limp against the mattress and her hands finally uncurl from the sheets.

I strip out of all my clothes.

She watches me from the bed with heavy-lidded eyes that track down my body, lingering on my cock where it's thick and hard against my stomach. Her expression is the one she gets when she's already three moves ahead—except right now, she isn't. Right now, she's waiting. For me.

I settle between her thighs. Hook one hand behind her knee and open her wider, adjusting the angle until she's positioned where I want her. I guide myself against her entrance and hold there, letting her feel the blunt pressure of the head against oversensitive flesh until her lips part and her fingers dig into my forearms.

"I love you." The second time I've said it. The first was the night before the bridge, driven by terror. This one is quieter. Certain. Spoken with my cock pressed against her and her body still trembling from what my hands did and my eyes on hers so she sees what the words cost me.

Her hand comes up and presses against the side of my face. The touch is tender enough to undo someone who's survived combat and fire and a bridge collapsing under his feet. It does exactly that.

"I love you," she says. Steady. Clear. Then her mouth lifts at one corner, the same sharp half-smile she gave me the first time I underestimated her. "And you couldn't get rid of me if you tried. So stop looking at me like I'm going to disappear."

I push inside her. Slowly. Inch by inch, letting her body stretch around me until I'm seated to the root and her breath leaves in a long, ragged exhale that warms my neck.

The heat of her is devastating. Tight and slick and gripping me with a pressure that registers through every nerve I have.

I hold there. Fully inside her. My forehead drops to hers.

In every encounter before this, I used distance as control. Took her against walls, across tables, from positions where the physical intensity replaced the vulnerability of eye contact. This is the opposite. Her eyes are inches from mine, and I'm not hiding behind anything.

I start to move. Slow. Full strokes that drag her heat along the full length of my cock on every withdrawal and push me into wet, gripping warmth on every return.

I've driven into this woman with force that rattled the walls. Today I'm taking her apart with patience, and the restraint is shredding me faster than urgency ever did.

She takes all of me on each stroke, and I feel the depth register in her body—the hitch in her breathing, the flex of her legs against my hips, the soft, involuntary sound she makes each time I bottom out. I learn those sounds at this pace. I learn that slow is a weapon I've never used on her before, and it's destroying us both.

My hand slides between us. My thumb finds her clit again, circling with firm pressure while I move inside her. Her head drops back against the pillow. I press my mouth to the pulse hammering beneath the skin of her throat and taste the salt while my hips keep their relentless rhythm.

Her body tightens around me. The incremental clenching squeezing my cock in pulses that blur my vision at the edges. Her fingers lock onto my shoulders. Her thighs press against my ribs.

Her whole body goes rigid beneath me, balanced on the edge, held there by the discipline I'm using to not give her what she wants until I decide she's ready.

"Let go," I tell her. Low. Against her throat. An order, even now.

The orgasm rips through her. The contraction grips me so hard my arms shake, and what comes out of her is raw and shattered—not my name this time but something deeper, a sound stripped of language and intention, pulled from somewhere beneath her ribs. I feel her pulse around me in waves that pull at the base of my cock and threaten to drag me over with her.

I hold. Teeth clenched. Watching her face while she comes, watching what I did to her with patience and weeks of learning every response her body has to give. The sight of her destroyed by gentleness hits harder than any force I've ever used.

Three more strokes. Then the release tears through me from the base of my spine with a force that contradicts every ounce of control that built it. I drive deep and go rigid, and the sound I make lives below language—guttural, ruined, pressed into the curve of her neck while every muscle I own locks tight and the warmth spills through both of us.

The aftermath is her breath against my collarbone and my weight pinning her to the mattress because I'm not ready to pull out and I don't give a damn about being ready or not.

Her hands are still on my shoulders. Neither of us moves to separate.

We end up tangled in sheets that smell like her and the woodstove and sex. The cabin settles around us. Timber contracting in the cold. The stove murmuring behind its iron door. Wind through the spruce outside the bedroom window.