Page 161 of Nikolay

I took my time.

The room seemed to narrow to the sounds she made for me. Those quiet gasps she tried to swallow and could not. The little hum low in her throat when I learned some place particularly sensitive and returned to it with deliberate care. The catch in her breathing when my beard grazed the soft skin under her breast and my mouth followed after to soothe.

“Still dreaming?” I murmured against her ribs.

She let out a shaking laugh. “If I am, don’t you dare wake me.”

“As you command.”

I moved lower, kissing my way over the gentle plane of her stomach, pausing at her hip long enough to feel the jump of muscle there under my mouth. She watched me now with a kind of stunned concentration that made me feel, absurdly, as if I were being granted something rather than taking it. Maddie had a way of making generosity look like courage.

When my hands slid to her thighs and eased them apart, she drew a quick breath.

I looked up once, asking without words.

Her answer came in the soft opening of her body and the way her fingers tightened in my hair. “Please.”

That one word went through me like lit spirits.

I kissed the inside of one thigh, then the other, and felt her shudder with each deliberate pass of my mouth. Her scent had deepened with arousal—warmer now, sweeter, touched by that wild note that belonged to wolf and woman both. It intoxicated me more surely than any wine I had tasted in three hundred years.

When I finally traced my tongue up to her clit, Maddie went taut under me.

The first sound she made was almost disbelief.

I learned her slowly. That mattered. Not because I lacked urgency, but because I had spent too long misunderstanding what she needed from me in every other realm. I would not make that mistake here. My tongue traced and tested, and when it entered her, it made her hips stir. I pulled back and circled her clit, then used my finger inside her as I tormented that bundle of nerves with the flat of my tongue. I heard her breath catch—saw her fingers grip the duvet as she writhed against my face. The sounds she made, I might have read an ancient text—carefully, reverently, with the awareness that precision mattered.

She was exquisitely responsive. A little pressure there, slower there, then firmer when the bond flashed her need through me before her body could fully voice it. I listened with mouth and hands both. When she began to tremble in earnest, I eased another finger into her with care, watching her face from beneath lowered lashes as her lips parted around a broken little cry.

“That’s it,” I murmured.

Her thighs tightened.

I curled my fingers and found the exact place that made her gasp my name as if it hurt to hold it in. I nipped at her clit and kept her there between pleasure and collapse until restraint ceased to be either possible or desirable.

“Nikolay—”

The sound of my name on her lips while she came apart beneath my hands would have ruined me all by itself.

Her back bowed off the mattress. Her fingers fisted hard in my hair. The whole beautiful line of her body went taut and then shuddered through release in waves that I felt against my mouth, against my hand, through the bond now singing between us with bright molten certainty. I did not stop until her trembling softened into aftermath and her hand, still tangled in my hair, shifted from desperate hold to dazed caress.

I kissed the inside of her thigh once more before rising.

Slowly. Deliberately. I licked my way back up the length of her body as though I meant to memorize her with my mouth. The curve of her hip. The soft hollow beneath her ribs. The underside of one breast, which drew a fresh shiver from her when my lips brushed there. Her skin tasted of salt and woman and something tenderly hers that made hunger feel too crude a word for what I carried.

By the time I reached her ear, Maddie was flushed from throat to chest, her breathing still unsteady, her eyes half-lidded and luminous.

I pressed a kiss below her ear. “I love you, Madelyn. With a depth that has no bottom and no end. If I lived three more centuries, I would spend them all discovering fresh ways to be grateful for you.”

The cry that escaped her was soft, wrecked, and so full of feeling that my own control thinned to transparency.

Her hands came to my face. “Say that again.”

“I shall say it until death grows envious.”

She laughed through what looked perilously like tears. “Lord, you really are old.”

“Insufferably.”