I guide her down onto the moss.
It cushions her, soft and cool and alive. The canopy shelters us. Moonlight glows on the curve of her shoulder, the notch at the base of her throat.
She’s watching me, her golden-brown eyes appraising. She wants this, but she’s deciding whether she can risk it.
“Let me.” I hold her gaze. “Just this once, let me lead.”
Her chin tips up half an inch. Not agreement, exactly. More like permission.
I’ll take it.
I lower my head to her throat and press my mouth to the flutter at her throat. Her skin is hot, her heartbeat insistent against my lips, and the intimacy of it sings somewhere behind my ribs. Her life, beating that close to the surface, trusting me to be that close.
I kiss along her neck, down to the hollow between her collarbones. She exhales, and her breath is controlled but not steady. Her fingers curl at her sides.
I go lower and pause at her chest, just to look.
Her breasts rise and fall with each breath, her nipples peaking in the cool air. Freckles I didn’t get to count last time are scattered across the upper curve of her left breast. There’s four on the right one.
I’m already hard and pressing against her thigh, but I ignore it. It’s not time yet.
I lower my mouth to her left breast and work my way downward. Slowly. I circle one nipple with my tongue until it hardens, then pull it between my lips and suck, gently at first, then harder, while my thumb rolls along the other. Rhiannon arches. Her fingers dig into the moss and pull up a fistful by the roots.
She makes a sound, low and caught somewhere between an exhale and a moan, that drives every drop of my blood south. I graze her nipple with my teeth. Her fingers twist into my hair and grip.
I lift my head just enough to see her face. Her eyes are half-closed, her lips parted.
“Do you like that?”
She nods, her fingers knotted in my hair.
I suck harder, my teeth grazing the sensitive peak, then give it a nibble with careful pressure.
“Yes,” she whispers.
“I can’t hear you.”
“Yes,” she says again, louder this time.
Every sound. I want to hear every sound from her.
I move to the other side, giving her the same sustained attention. Her hips start moving against the air, seeking contact I haven’t provided yet. The slow roll of them is unconscious. Her body is asking for something her mouth hasn’t decided to say.
Then, I go down to her ribs, her stomach, the ridge of her hip, where I press my lips onto her skin in a long, open-mouthed kiss and drag my teeth over the bone. She sucks in a breath so sharp it sounds almost pained.
This is torture for me, too. I’m hard enough that concentration requires effort, every sound she makes ratcheting me up by another degree. But I stay controlled. Last time was fast and desperate, fueled by grief and the wreckage of her control. This time, I want to take my time with her. I want to absorb every response, every tell, every movement that shows the Commander dissolving into the woman she doesn’t let anyone see.
If this is the last time, I’m making sure I remember everything.
I press my lips to the inside of her knee.
Her legs fall open, without hesitation or negotiation. She’s opening for me, and a fierce, awed recognition burns in my chest at the trust in it. The Commander of the Guard, lettingmein.
I kiss higher up on the soft skin of her inner thigh. She’s warm there, warmer than anywhere else, and she smells like pine and what lies underneath that — a scent rich and biological and so specific to her that my brain is already flagging it as important.
“Do you want me to taste you?”
Her answer is a soft whimper.
