She found the first clasp at his ribs by feel, her fingers fumbling where the fabric split to accommodate the wing joint. The metal was warm from his skin. She got it open. Moved to the next.
"Let me," he said against her mouth, but she shook her head.
"I've got it."
The second clasp gave. The third. His breath hitched when her knuckles brushed the scale-lines along his side, and she filed that away — that spot, that reaction, the way his stomach drew tight under her hand. She worked the last clasp loose.
He took over then. One quick, impatient movement — shirt gathered, pulled over his head, thrown somewhere behind him without care for where it landed.
November forgot how to breathe.
All of him. The full map of his body was beneath her hands. The scars. The scale-lines tracing his collarbones and sternum, darker than his golden-brown skin, obsidian shot through with gold, smooth and radiating warmth like stones left in the sun. She ran her palms flat across his chest and his stomach contracted beneath her touch. His scales rippled and spread, surfacing along his forearms and the backs of his hands where they held her.
Neither of them had planned this. Neither of them stopped.
His mouth found her throat first.
Not the careful place beneath her jaw where a polite kiss might land — the full curve where her neck met her shoulder, open-mouthed, his breath hot and uneven against her pulse. She felt his teeth scrape once and her whole body lit up from the inside, a slow burn uncoiling low in her belly. Her fingers tightened in his hair.
"Rhaezon."
His name came out of her thready. He answered by pressing his mouth more firmly against that same spot, the edge of one canine grazing skin, and she made a sound she had never made before in her life.
He drew back just enough to look at her. His pupils had gone full vertical, amber-gold swallowing the dark. He looked like he was memorizing her, like she was something he intended to know completely.
Then his mouth moved lower.
He kissed the hollow of her throat. The jut of her collarbone. The soft place above her heart where he lingered, and she realized her heart was galloping against his lips and he wasfeeling it, learning the rhythm of it, the way his hands had learned the shape of her ribs.
His palm cupped her breast and his mouth followed. Warm, wet, the rough drag of his tongue, and she arched up with a gasp that was half his name. He made a low noise against her skin — that harmonic she felt from the inside — and the vibration traveled down through her sternum and settled between her thighs with devastating accuracy.
"Oh god."
She felt him smile against her breast. Actual smile. She had seen it exactly twice in three weeks and now she was feeling it against her skin.
His free hand stroked down her back, slow, tracing each vertebra like he was counting them. The tenderness of it undid her more thoroughly than any of the heat — this enormous, dangerous male holding her as though she were something precious he had been entrusted with and did not intend to mishandle.
His tongue circled her nipple and she forgot her own name.
He took his time. That was the thing she could not stop noticing — the unhurriedness of it, the way he seemed to have decided that every inch of her deserved its own attention. His mouth closed over her, gentle suction, his tongue flicking in a slow rhythm that matched the pulse now hammering between her thighs. She made a sound she could not contain and his answering vibration rolled through her chest.
His hand found her other breast. His thumb rolled over the nipple in time with his mouth, and she felt herself coming apart in small increments, each one too subtle to name.
"Rhaezon."
He hummed against her skin. The harmonic dropped lower, deeper, settling somewhere inside her she did not know had a voice until now. Her hips rocked forward against him withouther permission and she felt the full hard length of him twitch against her thigh in response. His breath stuttered.
He switched breasts. Cool air on the wet skin he left behind and then his mouth, hot, deliberate, and she pushed her fingers through his hair and held him there. His canines grazed her, and she shivered. He made a low, approving sound against her, and she filed that away too — he liked her shivering.
Her hands slid down his back and she felt him still, the wing muscles flexing under her palms, the scale-lines running warm along his spine. She traced them down until her thumbs found the hard ridge of his hips.
She pushed gently. He lifted his head. His mouth was flushed and his pupils were slits and he looked wrecked already. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to the scar along his jaw.
He went absolutely still.
She kissed the silver thread at his temple. The ruined edge where pigment had given way to damage. The slope of his neck where the burn scars gathered. He was trembling by the time she reached his collarbone, hands gripping her hips like he was holding onto her to keep from falling.
"November."
