He pushed in.
He was different from Dominic. Longer. Leaner. A different angle, a different pressure, a new fullness my body had to learn around him. The bond carried every small adjustment both ways, every breath, every tremor, every place I opened and he felt it happen. The relief of being filled was mine, but the wonder of filling me arrived through the line as his, and the two ran together until I could not have told you which one had started the heat.
Rhain went still above me. For one impossible second, neither of us moved.
Then he laughed, soft and disbelieving, almost embarrassed. “Faen.”
I lifted my hips to him, and whatever discipline still lived in him answered like it had been waiting for exactly this.
He pulled out almost all the way, then pushed in again, slower this time, deeper. Bracing himself on one arm, he took my hand beside my head and laced his fingers through mine as if even this needed a formal point of contact, one more claim made with care.
The next stroke pulled a sound out of me I would owe him nothing for later, because he had taken it.
“More.”
He gave it to me.
And then the joy broke loose in him.
This was nothing he had been rationing. Brighter than the prince’s polished hunger, looser than the diplomat’s disciplined attention, almost boyish for one impossible second, a delight so naked it made the bond flare open under both marks.
He kept his mouth near the new claim at the rightof my throat, and every few strokes, he licked the bond awake. Light pressure. Just enough to make it sing. Heat rose in me and stayed there, building in a register I had never had the vocabulary for while he talked against my skin in Norwegian. What he felt of my pleasure ran back into me a half-beat later, brighter for the trip, so that every stroke gave me his and mine at once.
Min.
Mine.
Vakker.
Beautiful.
The words came out of him in fragments, half-syllables and broken endearments, less chosen than escaped. He was past performance now. Past courtly control. Past every polished layer he had worn into rooms where wanting anything too visibly could be used against him.
He was in the joy of it. The realization hit almost as hard as his body did.
Rhain changed the angle and drove deeper, slower, each stroke dragging over the place inside me that had no defense against him. His mouth returned to the new mark at the right of my throat and stayed there, teeth closing over it with more pressure than before, and the claim answered like it had a pulse of its own.
Heat gathered deep and would not crest.
It wound tighter with every stroke, every drag of him, every deliberate bite of his teeth into the place he had made his. I was caught between his mouth and his body, between the claim on my throat and the fullness of him inside me, with nowhere for the sensation to go except deeper.
He felt it building. The bond gave me no privacy from him now, and he used every piece of what it told him. His rhythm changed again, still deliberate, still precise, but harder beneath it. Less diplomat. More man. More dragon. More of the thing in him that had waited to stop asking politely.
My control broke somewhere I could not follow. “Rhain.”
His breath caught. His teeth bore down on the mark, and white flashed behind my eyes. The release that had been climbing sincehis mouth found my throat finally broke through me, sharp and total, pulling my spine from the bed as my body clenched around him in helpless waves. My thighs locked at his hips. My hands found his back. A sound tore out of me with no language in it at all.
I felt him lose control through the bond.
One moment he was still holding the rhythm, still shaping the pleasure with that devastating, careful patience. The next, my body clenched around him and something in him broke.
“Faen.” The curse was rough against my throat, almost bitten off.
His hips drove deeper, harder, no longer measured, and the bond gave me every piece of it: the shock of his restraint snapping, the heat of his pleasure rising too fast to contain, the fierce, helpless satisfaction of feeling me pulse around him.
His hand tightened at my hip.
His mouth stayed locked to the mark.
