Page 238 of Maksym

Then he looked up at me. “Turn over.”

I did.

The bedding brushed my breasts as I rolled onto my stomach. I folded my arms beneath my head, cheek against my forearm, my hair sliding over one shoulder. Vulnerability moved through me in a brief cold line. My back exposed. My face turned away. Too many memories knew that posture.

Maksym’s hand settled at the nape of my neck.

Not restraining.

Present.

“I am here,” he said.

“I know.”

“You tell me if you want me to stop.”

“I know.”

His mouth touched the back of my neck.

The cold line dissolved.

He kissed down my spine one vertebra at a time, slow enough that anticipation gathered ahead of him. His palms pressed flat against my sides, warm from the fire and his own restrained hunger. He moved as if memorizing a sacred text beneath skin. Shoulder blades. Spine. Waist. The rise of my backside. He kissed and bit softly, hands spreading me, shaping me, praising without words the flesh that had returned to me.

When his mouth reached the curve where back became hip, I pressed my forehead into my arms.

Pleasure gathered low and heavy.

He kissed the backs of my thighs, then the sensitive place behind one knee, then the other. It should have been absurd. It was not. It was devastating. He left no part of me unattended, no corner of my body dismissed as merely functional. I had been used in pieces. Fed from. Handled. Reduced to what appetite required.

Maksym made me whole by refusing to hurry past any of me.

His hands slid up the backs of my thighs. He parted me.

My breath caught.

His tongue dragged slowly between my ass cheeks.

The sound I made was not dignified.

He paused, perhaps to give me the space to object. I did not. My fingers curled hard into the bedding, and my hips lifted by the smallest amount, betraying me beautifully.

I felt his smile against my skin. Then he did it again. Slower.

Hot tongue, firm hands, the wet, intimate glide of his mouth over places I had not known could become pleasure when touched without cruelty. Shame flickered, reflexive and old. The bond answered with his hunger, his reverence, his absolute lack of disgust, and shame had nowhere to stand.

He licked lower, teasing close to the heat between my thighs, then back up, until I was trembling for entirely different reasons than before.

“Maksym,” I said, and this time my voice broke on need.

“I know.”

He rose behind me.

His hands settled on my hips and drew me up onto my knees. The bedding shifted beneath us. I heard the brief rasp as he pushed his boxer briefs down and away, then felt him there, hard and heavy against me. My body clenched in anticipation.

He rubbed the head of his cock through my wetness once.