Chapter 566: In The Heat Of The Moment
Chapter 566: In The Heat Of The Moment
She came the last half-step herself.
The heat of her hit my mouth before her mouth did. It came off her skin in a clean, dry wave, seam-hot, and then her hand was at the front of my shirt and she was kissing me like she had been waiting eleven days for the right to do it and had no intention of being polite about the eleventh.
I made a sound into it that I will not dignify.
Her horns were up against my temple, blunt and warm. When I put my palm to the side of her face I felt the heat living under the bone, running, with nowhere to go. She made a low noise and turned her head into my hand and bit my lower lip, not hard enough to mean it as a warning.
“Cade.”
“I’m here.”
“Good.” She said it against my mouth. “Stay here.”
I put my back to the rock because my legs had an opinion about standing. She came with me. One thigh slotted between mine and the heat of her through cloth was indecent. She rolled her hips once, experimentally, and then again like she had found the answer to a question she had been carrying since she opened her eyes.
“You are shaking,” she said.
“So are you.”
“I am burning.” She took my wrist and put my hand flat on her sternum, the same place it had lived for a week. Under my palm her heart was doing something large and wrong and alive. “It has to go somewhere. I am asking it to go into you.”
“Ask louder.”
She laughed, once, wrecked, and kissed me again. This one was slower and worse.
Her tongue found mine and the taste of her was fever and old water and whatever she had been given to keep her here.
I got a handful of the back of her shirt and she made a sound I had not heard from her in eleven days, vulgar already, impatient.
She pulled the shirt up over her own head without asking me to help. The seam-light ran along her collarbones and the cracked line of her ribs and the small dark points of her and I had the filthy, grateful thought that she was standing.
Then she went to her knees.
The grit took her. She did not seem to care. Her hands found my belt with the same blunt competence she used on a blade, and I said her name in a way that was meant to be a question and came out as nothing of the sort.
“I know,” she said. “I know. Let me.”
She got me out into the heat of the cavern and looked at me for a moment like she was taking inventory, and then her mouth was on me, hot, wet, unhurried only in the sense that she refused to rush the first stroke. I hit the rock with the back of my head and saw nothing useful.
She took me deeper. Her hand wrapped what her mouth did not, slick already from her, and she made a pleased, filthy little sound around me when I twitched. One of her horns knocked my hip. I put my fingers in her hair carefully, above the hairline where the horns came through, and she hummed like that was the correct place.
“Ilse—”
She pulled off just far enough to speak, lips wet.
“If you apologize I will bite you.”
“Wasn’t going to.”
“Good.”
She went back down. I lasted less well than a man who has been carrying someone for eleven days has any right to pretend.
When I told her I was close she only took more of me and looked up, eyes half-lidded, steam still coming off her shoulders, and I came with my hand in her hair and her name in my mouth and she swallowed like it was another thing she had decided would be useful.
She sat back on her heels, breathing hard, mouth shining, and wiped her thumb across her lower lip.
“Your turn,” I said, and my voice had gone.
I got her onto her back on the warm stone before she could argue the logistics of it. She went. Her legs opened for my hands like she had been waiting for that too. I stripped what was left, spread her, and put my mouth on her.
She was soaked and burning. The first pass of my tongue made her hips kick and a noise come out of her that had no business in a cavern this deep, raw and grateful and obscene. I held her thighs and did it again, slower, and she swore in a language I do not have, then in one I do.
“Cade. Cade, please, do not— ah— do not be kind about it.”
How could I be when she was begging like that.
I licked her open and sucked at her until her heels dug into my back and her hand found a horn as if she needed something of her own to hold.
When I put two fingers into her she was tight from disuse and fever-slick and she clenched around them with a groan that bounced off the roof.
“There,” she said. “There. Fuck. Right there.”
I kept her there until she came the first time, shaking, one arm flung over her own mouth and failing to keep the sound in. I did not stop.
She swore at me and pulled my hair and came again smaller, wrecked, and then she was dragging me up by the shirt with more strength than a woman eleven days down should have had.
“In me,” she said. “Now. I am full of it and I need it out of me and I need you in me. Do you understand.”
“Yes.”
I lined up and pushed in on one long, careful stroke because of her ribs and because I am not a complete animal, and she still made a sound like she had been split open in the best way, head tipped back, horns scoring the stone.
“Move.”
I moved.
The heat of her around me was staggering. Every thrust pushed a little more of that stored fire out through her skin and onto mine.
She wrapped her legs around my waist and used them, meeting me, and the rhythm we found was not gentle and was not shy. The wet filthy noise of it. Her breath punching out of her on every stroke.
“Harder.”
“Your ribs—”
“Later’s fine,” she said, and I would have laughed if I had had any air.
I gave her harder. She took it and asked for more, vulgar now without ornament, yes and fuck and there and my name like a command.
Her nails went down my back. I got a hand under her ass and changed the angle and she broke on a cry that did not care who was at fifty paces with a dead wyvern.
She came around me clenching, shaking, steam lifting off her in earnest, and I followed her with my face in her throat and my whole body emptying into hers like the well had finally, finally found a place that would hold.
For a while there was only breathing.
The heat in her had changed. Her skin was still too warm under my mouth, but it was the warmth of a fire that had been given a flue.
She kept her horns against my temple and one heel lazy in the small of my back and said, very quietly, into my hair:
“Stay.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good.” She paused.
Her mouth found the corner of mine, softer now. “You look terrible.”
“It’s the heat.”
She smiled against my cheek, properly this time, and I felt the rise of her chest under my hand come back, and come back again, and keep coming.
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