"I need—" I cannot think clearly enough to form sentences, not with his mouth doing that and his weight pressing me down and the ache between my thighs growing more desperate with every passing second. "I need more. I need you. Now."
He pulls back just enough to meet my eyes, and what I see there makes my breath catch—not just desire, though there is plenty of that, but something deeper and more dangerous. Something that looks like devotion.
"Your wish is my command."
His hands find the hem of my gown where it has bunched around my waist, and he slides the fabric down my legs with a reverence that makes me feel like something sacred. The matching underwear follows, delicate lace that cost more than my monthly grocery budget, and then I am completely bare beneath him.
"Perfect." The word comes out of him like a prayer. "You are absolutely perfect."
"You are wearing too many clothes."
He grins, sharp and predatory, and his hands move to his own shirt with an efficiency that suggests he has been waiting for exactly this permission. The fabric falls away to reveal green skin stretched over muscles that look like they were carved from stone, covered in a latticework of pale scars that tell stories I suddenly want to hear. I reach up to trace one that curves across his ribs, and he shudders at the touch like my fingers carry an electrical charge.
"Battle wounds?" I ask.
"War stories for another time." He catches my hand and brings it to his mouth, pressing a kiss to my palm that is somehow more intimate than everything else we have done. "Right now, the only story I want to tell is the one where I worship you until you forget your own name."
He makes good on the promise.
His mouth traces a path down my body—over my collarbone, between my breasts, across the soft plane of my stomach—leaving wetness in its wake that cools in the air and makes me shiver.
"Knox—"
"Shh." He presses a kiss to my inner thigh, and his tusks graze skin that has never felt so sensitive. "Let me show you what you deserve. Let me prove that I am worthy of your partnership."
And then his mouth is on me, and I stop thinking entirely.
He is skilled in ways that should probably be illegal, his tongue working with a precision that suggests he has studied human anatomy like a general studies a battlefield. He finds every sensitive spot like he has a map, alternating between teasing and demanding, gentle and rough, until I am trembling and gasping and clutching at his shoulders like they are the only thing keeping me tethered to reality.
"That is it. Let go. Stop thinking. Just feel."
I shatter.
The orgasm crashes through me like a wave, like a wildfire, like nothing I have ever experienced with any of the perfectly adequate human men I have dated in the past. It goes on and on while his mouth works me through it, drawing out every last tremor until I am boneless and breathless and certain I have forgotten how to form words in any language.
"Beautiful." He presses one last kiss to my inner thigh and crawls back up my body, his weight settling over me like a warm blanket. "You are so beautiful when you come undone."
"That was—I cannot—Knox?—"
"I know." He kisses me, and I can taste myself on his tongue, and somehow that is not gross but unbearably erotic. "And we are not finished yet."
I feel him reach between us, hear the rustle of fabric, and then he is pressing against my entrance with hot thickness that makes my breath catch. He pauses there, his forehead pressed against mine, his breath coming in ragged gasps that match my own.
"Tell me to stop," he says, "and I will. Tell me to continue, and I will make you see stars."
I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him closer. "Continue."
He sinks into me slowly, inch by devastating inch, giving me time to adjust to a size that pushes at the very limits of what I can take. The stretch burns in the best possible way, pleasure and pain braided so tightly together that I cannot separate them, and by the time he is fully seated inside me I am gasping and clutching at his back and feeling more complete than I have ever felt in my life.
"Cypress." My name sounds like a benediction on his lips. "My brilliant, fearless, magnificent Cypress."
He begins to move.
The rhythm starts slow—long, deep strokes that drag against every nerve ending I possess—but it does not stay that way for long. His thrusts grow harder, faster, more desperate, and I feel another orgasm building at the base of my spine like a gathering storm.
"You are mine. Tell me you are mine."
"I am yours." I do not even think before answering, do not calculate the implications, do not worry about what this means for our professional relationship or my career trajectory. "I am yours, Knox. All of me."
