His hands grip the stone floor. I hear grit shift under his nails. His throat works. No sound comes out.
I take his wrists. Lift his hands. Place them on my waist.
His fingers span my midsection. The heat of his palms against my bare skin soaks through to muscle and bone. Like pressing against the stones around a fire pit. Warmth that doesn't stop at the surface.
“Eseld.” My name again. Rougher now.
“Touch me.”
I guide his hands up. Over my ribs. When his palms cover my breasts I gasp — the heat flooding through my chest, down my stomach. His hands freeze.
“Don't stop.”
His thumbs move. Slow. Testing. The heat of them against my nipples makes my hips jerk forward. I lean into his hands and his breath comes out shaking.
I push him back against the chair and straddle his lap. His hands catch my hips. Grip. I can feel every finger printing heat into my skin.
“Tell me if?—”
“I will. Stop talking.”
He makes a sound that’s almost a laugh. Then his mouth finds my throat and thinking stops.
His lips are hot. His tongue is hotter. He drags his mouth down my neck and the heat leaves a trail that cools to warmth and craves more. My hands fist in his hair and I pull and the sound he makes is low, and raw, and I want to hear it again.
“Again,” I say, and pull harder, and he makes it again, and his hips shift under me.
I climb off his lap. Reach for his trousers. He lifts his hips and helps me drag them down.
I look at him.
The massive scale of him is everywhere else, so I shouldn't be surprised. But I am. Thick. Heavy. The skin darker gray than the rest of him, flushed with heat. He’s hard and the heat radiating off him is different here. Hotter. I can feel it against my thighs without touching.
I wrap my hand around him and the heat pulses against my palm, almost too much, and he groans and his head falls back against the chair and the tendons in his neck pull tight.
I stroke. Slow. Learning the shape of him. The ridges I can feel under the skin, subtle, textured in a way that’s not human.He’s slick at the tip. Hot. My thumb finds it and he hisses through his teeth and his hips buck.
“Look at me,” I say.
He opens his eyes. They're bright. Almost desperate.
I hold his gaze and stroke again and his breathing goes ragged and he reaches for me, hands tightening on my hips hard enough that I'll bruise and I don't care as he pulls me closer. Across the hall, the fire flares. Neither of us looks at it.
“I need—” His voice breaks. His hips push up into my hand. I've been wet since I took his shirt off, since his hands found my hips, and every shift of my body against him is a reminder. The ache between my legs has gone from want to need to something that has its own pulse.
“Eseld.Väkhi.I need?—”
“I know.”
I cross to the storage alcove. The jar from the back shelf. The herb-infused one. The one I put back weeks ago with a hot face and no excuse for why I was thinking about it. When I come back to the fire he’s watching me with an expression that makes my stomach drop. Not heat. Not want. Something past both. Something that has been locked in a chair for seven years and is not in the chair anymore.
I kneel between his legs. Pour the oil into my palms. It warms instantly against my skin — his heat is in the air around him now, everything close to his body running hot.
I wrap both hands around him. Slick. Slow. The oil catches the firelight and his cock is hot in my hands, almost too hot, and I feel every ridge and every texture as I slide my grip from base to tip. He’s big enough that the logistics part of my brain does a brief sharp calculation and the rest of my brain tells it to shut up.
He groans. Deep. His hips jerk and his hand comes up and wraps around the back of my neck and he says something in Jötunn — “Rauði, kälthu” — low and guttural and I don'tunderstand the words but I understand the sound a man makes when he’s losing a fight with himself.
“Come here,” he says. Not a request.
