I lift his chin so he’s looking me in the eye. “You are my heart, Ronan. My heart. My husband. My home.”
“Oh, Sylvie,” he says, and then he lifts me up and carries me to bed. “You’re the love of my life.” He dips his fingers between my legs, opening my lips and gliding them over the wetness he finds there. He groans as he grazes my clit, his touch featherlight. “There’s nothing in this world I want more than to make you happy.”
He kisses me as I writhe against him, begging for more pressure. But then something changes. I didn’t think it was possible with such a light touch, but the tension is building in my body. “Oh,” I moan. “How is that…how are you doing that?”
“Just listening to your body,” he says, kissing my neck. “Giving it what it needs instead of what it wants.”
“Gods, Ronan.” It’s deliberate and languorous, the climb. He rubs gentle circles around my clit, occasionally dipping his fingers inside me with agonizing slowness, responding to feelings I can’t articulate. “Let me touch you.”
He complies, slipping from his pants and freeing his cock as he lies beside me. I moan as I see it, red and so erect it looks like it must hurt. I skim my fingertips over the slit, rubbing a drop of his excitement around with the same excruciatingly delicate touch he’s using so expertly on me.
He groans and bucks against my hand and then reaches back between my legs.
“So impatient,” I say, and he laughs into my shoulder.
I rub the head of his cock softly as he sighs against me, his fingers glancing over my clit. Then I trace a vein down his shaft from the head before running my hands over his balls. He gasps as I stroke them, and the sound makes the building heat between my legs surge.
“That’s so good, Sylvie. That feels so fucking good.”
He rewards me by filling me with his fingers, and I tighten around him. “I’m close, Ronan.”
“Good.” He sucks one of my nipples into his mouth, and I arch beneath him. “You’re so good at coming for me.”
I moan at his words. His touch remains as light as ever, but my body doesn’t mind. If anything, it seems to be even better in some ways, the denial. The anticipation of a stronger touch. He pulls his fingers out of me and rubs my clit again, his mouth moving from breast to breast, soft licks punctuated by harder sucks.
My legs tighten beneath me, my back rising off the bed and into Ronan’s hand. My hand tightens on Ronan’s cock, tugging his foreskin up and then pulling it back down, my movements becoming erratic as my body comes closer to its climax.
“Oh, gods,” he grunts. “Fuck, that’s so good.”
He presses his forehead to my shoulder, his hair grazing my chest. His hips buck into my hand as mine buck into his.
Then suddenly, it’s on me. My body clenches and releases, exploding in a dazzling wave of pleasure that travels up my spine into the back of my head, the heat and tension pulsing through me with my release.
I cry out his name, and he takes my mouth and climbs on top of me, inching into me as I convulse, using the waves of my climax to pull him in deeper and deeper until he’s all the way inside by the time my movement slows.
“Gods, it feels so good inside of you.” He pulls out slowly and reenters even slower, his body trembling from the effort not to pound into me all at once. “I don’t know how long I can last like this.”
“Take your time,” I say, rubbing my hands lightly over his back. “I want you to come for me like I just did.”
He moans softly into my neck. “I don’t care if I come at all. I’m going to make love to you now. All I want is to be as deep in you as I can be. To stay there as long as I can.”
He’s true to his word. He thrusts in and out of me slowly, kissing me softly the entire time. It’s so wonderfully intimate, the two of us unhurriedly moving together, taking our time. He leans back and looks into my eyes, brushing my freckles and murmuring about how much he loves me, and then he kisses me again, and I feel it so deeply in my heart that it brings tears to my eyes.
I’ve never felt love like this. I’ve never felt so certain something was right, so safe in someone’s arms. I’ve never felt so needed and cared for, never felt so much wonder and desire and comfort in someone’s embrace.
Our bodies respond to each other like they were made for each other. Like the gods themselves sculpted them to fit together, like the earth taught us her song, ancient and timeless, and we sing it together in perfect harmony.
It feels at once eternal and momentary, the connection between our bodies lasting only minutes but the tie between our souls stretching into eternity, the golden thread of fate that connects us contracting and going taut as we near our release.
Our feelings no longer feel separate as the tension builds between us. We move as one; we feel as one. His pleasure and my pleasure. The heat in my body echoing the heat in his. My legs tighten around him as his arms tighten around me; he pushes into me as I pull him in, our rhythm increasing until finally we reach our climax together, his body spilling into mine, my body taking his offering, his sacrifice at my altar.
He stays in me after, going soft inside of me, stroking me and kissing me and telling me how happy he is that I’m his wife, how he’ll never let me go, and I do the same.
But both of us are wrong.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The sunlight is bright and warm as it filters through the cottage window. I reach for Ronan but find the bed empty and cool beside me.
