Rolin says nothing for a moment. He sets the fire iron down carefully. "I know."
"You know she?—"
"I suspected." He turns. "I didn't have proof."
"She said—" I stop. Start again. "She called you my pet. In the market square, in front of everyone."
His face does something complex that resolves quickly back to still. "People say worse."
"It shouldn't be—" I stop again, and press the heel of my hand against my sternum where the anger has curdled into somethingthat hurts differently. "It shouldn't be normal for you to hear that and not flinch."
He crosses the room and crouches in front of my chair, which puts his face at a level with mine, amber eyes steady and close and doing the thing they do where they look through everything.
"Sybil." My name in his voice. He says it like it means something specific. "What happened to you today isn't about me."
"I know that."
"You've been protecting that orchard like it's the only thing standing between you and every mistake you think you made."
The accuracy of that lands like a fist. "Don't do that," I say. "Don't be perceptive right now, I'm already?—"
"What?"
"I'm already struggling to keep my hands off you," I say, because I've run out of room to hold things. "And that's incredibly inconvenient."
The silence is very complete.
Then he reaches up and takes the edge of my jaw in one scarred hand, tilts my face toward his, and kisses me with the slow, total deliberateness of a man thinking about making a decision for some time and has finally made it.
I grip the front of his shirt and pull him in, and the blanket falls off my shoulders, and whatever restraint we'd both been managing dissolves completely.
He stands me up from the chair and strips my wet coat off my shoulders without breaking the kiss. His hands find the hem of my shirt and pull it over my head, and then he stops. Looks at me in the firelight with those amber eyes moving across my bare skin — my shoulders, my throat, the swell of my breasts — with the same focused attention he gives to everything. A direct, unhurried appraisal that makes my nipples tighten under his gaze before he's even touched me.
"You're staring," I say.
"Yes." He doesn't apologize for it.
His mouth drops to my collarbone and I inhale sharply, my fingers tangling into his silver hair. He drags his lips lower, tongue tracing a slow line between my breasts before he closes his mouth over one peaked nipple and sucks, hard enough that my spine curves and my thighs press together on instinct. His teeth scrape the sensitive underside and I make a sound that would embarrass me if I had the bandwidth for embarrassment right now.
"Do that again," I manage.
He does it again. Then he does the other side, one scarred hand cupping my breast, thumb rolling over the wet peak while his mouth works the opposite, and I am gripping his hair hard enough that it has to hurt and he doesn't seem to care.
He walks me backward until my legs hit the bed and lays me down, and then his hands go to the laces of my trousers and he strips them off me — underclothes and all — with an efficiency that leaves me bare beneath him in the firelight, breathing hard, watching him look at me.
And he looks. He kneels between my spread thighs and looks, amber eyes tracing every inch of exposed skin, and his expression is not gentle — it is hungry.
"Rolin." My voice has gone rough. "If you don't touch me in the next three seconds I'm going to?—"
His hand slides between my thighs and his fingers find me slick and swollen, and the sound I make when he pushes two of them inside me is not dignified. His thumb finds my clit and circles it with a patient, methodical precision that makes my hips jerk off the bed.
"Fuck—" I gasp.
"There's the mouth I like." Low, barely a murmur, his lips brushing the inside of my knee. He works me open with thoselong, scarred fingers, curling them so that it hits something devastating, and I fist the blankets and buck against his hand and he doesn't speed up. He keeps that slow, deliberate rhythm while I fall apart around his fingers, my thighs trembling, his name spilling out of my mouth..
He watches my face through all of it. That's the thing about him — he watches everything, catalogues everything, files it away for later use. When I come it's with my back arched off the bed and his eyes locked on mine, and the expression on his face is something between satisfaction and raw, barely-contained want.
"Good girl," he says quietly.
