“England,” he rumbles, carrying me toward the bed, “is too small. I’ll ruin you for two worlds.”
He drops me onto the bed, and I giggle as I bounce. Our clothes evaporate, and then he’s crawling over me, kissing up from my toes, worshiping every inch.
By the time he reaches the inside of my knee, he’s talking.
“I made a study of you.” His mouth moves up my thigh between sentences. “Fourteen months of books, and then two weeks of you. You hold your breath when my mouth crosses the third bone of your spine. Your left side is more sensitive than your right. There is one sound you make only when you’re past thinking, and I have been rationing how often I cause it.”
“Rationing.” I’m already breathless. “Why?”
“You called it a vault. Vaults are sacred.” His thumbs spread me open. “And tonight, nothing is rationed.”
Three hundred twelve five-star references, and I’m the final exam.
“Chapter one,” he announces, and puts his mouth on my clit.
The bonding room was an opening statement. This is the direct examination. He narrates into my skin between passes of that impossible tongue.
“Your clit is swollen and impatient tonight.” A slow pass that lifts my hips right off the mattress. “I like you this way.”
“You’re dripping on my tongue.” Another slow lick. “I’m going to make it worse.”
His tongue proves the claim, and my moan reinforces it.
“I told you. I studied.”
When I come the first time, he stays exactly where he is and murmurs, “Again. The woman always gets more than one. It’s the rule,” and I laugh mid-orgasm, which I did not know a body could do. The laugh breaks straight into a second climax, which sizzles my brain and takes away the laughter.
He stays down there through the aftershocks, and when I try to squirm away from the sheer overstimulation, he lifts his head one inch. “You’ll tell me if you want me to stop.” He says it and waits. When I nod, he pins my hips with one forearm and keeps me right where he wants me.
“Month nine,” he says, making small talk with my thighs over his shoulders. “A duke did this to a governess for three pages. I disapproved of the duke. I kept the technique. I have been saving it for you ever since.”
I stare at the ceiling while the room spins from pleasure. This is how I die.
He groans against my clit, showing me no mercy at all. I’m shaking, past the last shred of composure I brought in with me.
When he finally lets me up, my orgasm count is at five to his zero. I put a palm in the middle of his chest and push. It moves him exactly nowhere, and that eyebrow rises before he goes onto his back for me.
“For the record,” I say, working my way down his body, “you’re not the only one who studied.”
I wrap my hand around his cock and stroke, the trick I learned that turns his switch off, and then I take him in my mouth as far as ambition allows. Which, okay, is not far, but it doesn’t matter, because his narration stops mid-word. Fourteen months of saved vocabulary degrades in real time, whole sentences down to four words, four words down to a sound with no language in it anywhere. I pull off him long enough to gloat.
“Three hundred and twelve audiobooks,” I tell him, “and not one narrator ever shut up this fast.”
He growls a word in Gorrath’vol I plan on earning the translation of, and then I’m airborne. My back hits the mattress, and he’s over me, forearms caging my head, the blunt ridged head of his cock notched at my pussy, every muscle in him trembling.
“Wren.” The word scrapes. There’s a wildness rising in him I haven’t seen before. “Tell me.”
“Yes. Now. All of it.”
He drives home in one long stroke, and the world narrows to the stretch and the drag of that ridge, and this time there’s no careful geometry. He knows me. What comes now is the whole answer, deep and devastating, his voice pouring over me. “Look at you.” A slow, grinding stroke that empties my head completely. “I built a bed on Gorrath Venn too long for any one human,thess’venna,and I have never once shared it. Two weeks I have known exactly who it was waiting for. And what I would do to her. This. This is what.” I dig my heels into the backs of granite thighs, and he takes it as permission to go harder. The bed creaks so loud, I’m pretty sure we’re one second from breaking it. Neither of us cares.
He pounds me into the mattress, and all I can do is moan and hold on.
“More.” I’m pulling at him, greedy, past pride. “Valdrek. I want everything. Stop being careful with me.”
His whole life, he has been the careful one, and I just fired him from the position. The sound he makes isn’t language in either world. He pulls out, flipping me with terrifying gentleness onto my hands and knees. His cock slides home again at an angle that punches the air out of me and rakes that ridge across the exact spot that whites my vision. Then his control vanishes. He’s driving deep. Wet sounds and slapping skin and the headboard hammering the wall.
One broad palm splays flat against my low belly and presses, and, “Feel that,” he grinds out against my ear, “that’s me,thess’venna,there is nowhere in you I haven’t reached.”
