He doesn’t stop. His fingers work me with a patience that makes me want to scream, building the tension in slow, relentless circles until my thighs are shaking and my hand is fisted in his hair.
“I want you inside me,” I say. “Now.”
His hand leaves me. I almost protest, but he’s already moving, settling between my thighs, his weight braced on one arm. I reach down and guide him, wrapping my fingers around his shaft, sliding the head of his cock along my slick folds. We both shudder.
“Slow,” I breathe. It’s been years, and he’s big, and I need the adjustment. “Go slow.”
He pushes in. Inch by inch. My body opens around him…the stretch, the burn, the fullness that borders on too much. I grip his shoulders and breathe through it. He stops halfway, every muscle locked with the effort of holding back.
“More,” I tell him.
He pushes deeper. All the way. My breath leaves me. His forehead drops to my shoulder, and for a moment we’re both still, him buried inside me, his arms trembling, the cave dark beyond the fire and the two of us at its center.
I feel his heartbeat where we’re joined. Or I imagine I do. The pulse of him everywhere, his chest against mine, his cock inside me, the hum vibrating through his ribs into mine.
I move first. A slow roll of my hips that makes us both exhale.
He answers. His hips meet mine, and the rhythm starts, slow, deep, his hands gripping my hips, finding the angle that makes me gasp. He holds the angle. Stays with it. Each thrust deliberate, measured, reading my body’s response.
My legs wrap around him. My nails drag down his back. The rhythm builds; not frantic, but inexorable. His mouth on my throat, my collarbone. His teeth scrape my shoulder, and I feel the wolf surge behind his ribs—the pressure, the need to let loose—and his jaw clenches as he holds the man in place.
“Stay with me,” I whisper.
He groans. His pace picks up. I match him, hips meeting every thrust, the friction building to a tightness that coils through my core. His hand slides between us, his thumb finding my clit again, pressing in time with his thrusts.
The orgasm builds like a wave, the kind that pulls back before it crashes. My thighs tighten around him. My fingers dig into his back.
“Close,” I gasp. “God! Right there, just like that—”
His thumb presses harder. His cock drives deeper. And it breaks—pleasure ripping through me in waves that make my eyes roll back, my body clenching around him, a sound tearing out of my throat that I’d be embarrassed about if I could think. I can’t think. All I can do is feel.
“Fuck,” he chokes out as he follows me over.
His rhythm shatters. His hips drive deep, his arms lock around my waist, and I feel him come inside me: the pulse of his cock, the heat of it, the rough sound torn from his chest as his face presses into my throat.
The power comes with him.
It doesn’t break outward this time. It doesn’t crack stone or shiver the air or make the fire gutter in the pit. It moves through the places where we’re joined, through his body into mine, a low chord of sensation that turns my bones liquid and makes every nerve answer at once.
My fingers go numb against his back. My spine arches. For a second, I can’t tell where his heartbeat ends, and mine begins.
Then I understand.
The sound. The force. The thing they tried to carve out of him and turn into a weapon. It was never only violence.
It’s his magic.
We stay tangled on the tarp. His arms around me. His face in my neck. The sweat cools. His breathing slows.
His hand traces up my spine. Stops between my shoulder blades and rests there, palm flat.
“Sable,” he says against my skin. My name, said with a wonder that makes my throat tighten.
I curl closer. The hum fades to something barely there, a warmth under my skin that pulses in time with his heartbeat.
The fire has burned to embers. The cave glows with the last of the coals. Outside, the snow has silenced everything.
His hand tightens on my back. “I remember something. About the music.”
