One stroke.
I arch into it.
His free hand comes up. He unhooks my bra, and the fumbling, the way his fingers shake at the clasp. The strap slides down my arm. He slips it off me and sets it on the floor next to my shirt. Folded. I love him a little for folding it.
His palm closes over my breast.
The heat of him. The size of him. His whole hand covers me, his thumb drags across my nipple in one slow pass, and the sound that comes out of me is not one I recognise. I grip his shoulders. His skin under my palms is latticed with old scars; the white raised lines along his collarbones, the round puckered circle in the meat of his shoulder, the long seam that runs from his throat down past the neckline of his shirt.
I pull his henley up and over his head.
He lets me.
I run my fingers down his chest, over every scar I can reach. The round one at his shoulder is a bite. The long seam is a blade. The latticework across his ribs I don't want to name: cages, the pattern of bars pressed into skin over years, and I pause there and he watches my face.
"You don't have to stop," he says. My chest cracks wider.
"I'm not stopping."
I lean down and put my mouth on the bite. I kiss it. The blade, the latticework, every scar my lips can reach, and when I lift my head his eyes have gone wet again andthe purr has gone so lowI only know it's there because my lips are tingling where they touched his skin.
His touch slides down my stomach.
Slow.
I catch his wrist. I guide his fingers under the waistband of my leggings, under the cotton of my underwear. I press his hand against me. His palm covers everything; his middle finger long enough that the tip of it slides between my folds on the first pass, and I am already so wet I embarrass myself.
"Oh." The sound breaks out of him. Low and wrecked. "Nina."
"Yes." I rock against his palm. "Like that. Don't stop."
His finger finds my clit.
He's paying attention. One slow stroke at a time, reading my face for the small shifts that tell him more or softer or there. He figures me out in thirty seconds. His thumb keeps working circles while his middle finger slides down and pushes inside me, my forehead drops onto his shoulder.
"Garrett."
I work my own hand down between us. The front of his jeans. I find his cock through the denim, he is hard, and huge. My grip doesn't close around him even through his pants. His breath punches out of him the second I press along his length.
"You don't have to," he says.
"I want to."
I undo his belt, the button, the zipper. I slip my fingers inside and close them around him, skin on skin. The sound he makes is not a sound a human throat could produce: a broken-open rumble that drops into a register below his purr beforehe catches it and pulls it back. His cock is hot against my palm, heavier than I expected, thicker at the base than at the tip. I stroke him once, slow, root to head, and his whole body shudders.
"Nina." His forehead presses into my neck. His finger curls inside me and I forget how to breathe. "I won't last. It's been."
I kiss the corner of his mouth. My thumb slides over the head of him, finding him already slick. "It's okay. I'm not going anywhere tonight."
On the floor by the fire. His finger inside me, his thumb on my clit. My grip on his cock, stroking him in time with the way he strokes me, the two of us holding each other's gaze because he won't look away and I can't. His other palm stays locked on my waist like a man clutching a lifeline. The firelight finds the sweat on his chest. The shadows of his horns fall across my face and shift when I shift.
My orgasm climbs.
"Garrett."
"I've got you." His voice has gone deep and rough, stripped of everything but the low rumble. "I've got you. Let me see you, sha'li."
I break apart on him.
