"You're going to let go," he says. Not a suggestion.
I shake my head, breath catching.
"Ronan—"
"Let it happen."
He goes back to work.
The orgasm builds like the mountain weather I'm learning, slow at first, atmospheric pressure, the sense of something enormous approaching, and then it breaks all at once.
He works me through every second of it.
When I come back to myself, he's already moving up my body, braced above me, and I feel his erection against my inner thigh, thick and insistent, and my body clenches in anticipation even through the aftershocks.
I look up at him.
His jaw is tight. The scar catches the growing light. He's holding himself very still and the control it's costing him is visible, in the tension across his shoulders, in the way his hands have gripped the sheet either side of my head, in the way he's breathing, measured and deliberate, like a man managing something enormous.
"You're doing that thing," I say.
"What thing."
"The thing where you hold everything back."
His eyes drop to my mouth. Back up.
"Harper." His voice is low and rough and fraying at the edges. "If I stop holding back—"
"Good," I say.
He closes his eyes for one second.
When he opens them, the control is gone.
He pushes my thigh up and settles between my legs and when he pushes inside me it's a slow, full, devastating slide that forces all the air out of my lungs in one sound.
He stops. Buried fully. Watching my face.
Then he moves.
Long, deep strokes, each one driving the breath out of me, building on the last, and I rake my nails up his back just to hold on. He hisses and does it harder, and I was not prepared—not for this man who controls everything to lose it here, not for the rough sound against my throat, or the way he says my name when he's not holding it back.
"Harper." Rough. Urgent.Mine,in the language of someone who would never say it that directly.
The headboard meets the wall.
I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper and he drops his forehead to mine and for a moment we are just that, breath and heat and the full force of weeks of almost becoming real and undeniable.
"Look at me," he says.
I open my eyes.
He holds my gaze. Dark eyes, the scar, his jaw tight with effort—all of him right there, fully present, not hiding behind the distance he keeps from the world. I see him beneath the road name, beneath everything he's carried, and he sees me seeing him, something in his expression cracking open just slightly.
He drives deeper.
I come again with my face against his neck and his name torn out of me and his arms holding me so tightly against him that I feelhis heartbeat through his chest, fast and hard and completely honest.
