Page 30 of Remmen

He pushed in slow, watching every second of it cross my face, and the stretch punched the air clean out of my lungs. He was so big it went straight past full into too-much and stayed there, splitting me open by degrees, and I swore, loud and helpless. He stopped at once, barely inside me, both palms planted hard on the mattress. “Breathe,” he said, low and wrecked and impossibly gentle. “That’s it. Take what you can. We’ve got all night.” So I breathed, and made myself go loose around the thick intrusion of him, and my body opened and took another inch, and another, that heavy burning drag lighting up every nerve I had, right at the knife-edge of too-much, until he was seated in me to the root and we both went dead still. Full. I could feel my own heartbeat pounding around him. So stretched, so utterly stuffed full of him that the burn of it tipped clean over into a pleasure so sharp it was almost pain, and the smallest shift of him inside me sparked all the way up my spine. I had never been so full, so completely taken up by another person, and it should have frightened me and it didn’t.

“That’s it,” he breathed, ragged. “You took all of me. Every inch. Look how well you take me.”

He started to move, and I lost hold of everything but the feel of him. Slow at first, dragging almost all the way out until just the head of him stretched me and then pushing back in an inch at a time, so I felt every thick inch of his size over and over until I was mindless with it. He slid a hand under my hips and tilted me and drove into some place deep that tore a cry out of me, and he stayed there, hitting it again and again, the old bed frame knocking under all his weight. I hooked my legs as high around him as they’d go and dragged him deeper. “Harder,” I heard myself beg, “please, I can take it—” and for once he quit being careful and gave me his whole weight and the whole brutal size of him, and I stopped being anyone I knew. I’d have done anything he asked. I’d have stayed there forever. Under the wanting I understood I was in real trouble, that this was the opposite of putting it away and living off it, and I didn’t care one bit. His ruined voice stayed in my ear, my name and that’s it, take it and you were made for this, made to take me.

It wound up in me again, deeper than his mouth or his fingers had reached, bigger and darker than the two before, building past where I thought I could go, until I was clinging to him and shaking and saying things I’d never say in daylight. When it broke, it broke through all of me, wave slamming into wave, and I clamped down around him so hard he groaned and lost the rhythm. That finished him. He drove in to the hilt and held there, his whole huge body seizing, his face buried in my throat, and I felt him come, felt his cock pulse thick and hot inside me, once, and again, spilling into me, filling me up, my name the only word left in his mouth. And through all of it, wrung out and full of him and shaking, I let myself believe it, just for a minute. That it was real. That I was his. That I got to keep this. I knew better.

He stayed over me, keeping his weight on his forearms, breathing into my hair, still inside me, his heart slamming against my chest. When he rolled us at last so I was sprawled across the furnace of him, one enormous hand traveling slow up and down my spine, I found enough breath to talk.

“So,” I said, to the dark ceiling. “That’s going to be a problem.”

A low rumble under my ear that might have been a laugh. “Yes.”

He pulled the blanket up over both of us without my asking, tucked it around my shoulder with a care that had no business coming out of hands that size, and I lay there listening to his heart come down under my ear. It would have been so easy to fall asleep right there, warm and wrecked and wanted.

And it was. Because I couldn’t walk away from this now, lying there wrung out and warm and wanted, wanted like I was worth the wanting. I’d promised myself just the once. I’d already lied.

I slipped out at first light. Shoes in my hand, down his back step, out into a settlement gone blue and silent in the hour before anyone stirred. I crossed it quick and small and went up my own stair a board at a time, and every creak was a gunshot, because Chelsea’s dark window was right there and Giles’s just past it, and either one of them could have looked out and seen the Agency counselor coming home barefoot at dawn from the wrong end of town. I should have been scared the whole way, and part of me was, but under the fear I was lit up, sore in places I hadn’t been sore in years, wearing his smell on my skin and in no hurry at all to wash it off.

I got my door open. I got it shut. I stood with my back against it in the thin gray light, breathing like I’d run the whole way.

I didn’t feel ashamed. I kept waiting for the shame to come, and it didn’t. I felt turned inside out and put back together some better way, handled like I was precious by a male who had every reason to be careless with me and wasn’t. I was terrified. I was in more trouble than I’d ever been in my life. I was also happier than I’d been in years, and all I wanted, standing there in the cold with my shoes still in my hand, was some way on this whole hard planet that I got to keep him.

CHAPTER 13

REMMEN

Anne was mine, and no one could know.

An awareness like electricity sizzled under my skin, arcing between the two of us anytime we were near. This thing between us was certain to end in disaster, but Anne’s skin was soft against my own tough hide and I couldn’t pull away. Not right now, not when her hair was stuck to my lips and her scent surrounded me like it belonged here.

It did.

I’d stopped trying to name what she was to me. The name was too big, and I was a coward. Want. I could live with want. Except losing her had stopped feeling like losing a woman I’d known a month and started feeling like losing something I’d been born with.

Later that week I walked into her office in the middle of the day and asked her to come to lunch. “As friends,” I said, because the door was open and Chelsea’s was across the hall. “Colleagues eat. It’s allowed.”

She looked at me like she knew exactly how thin it was, and she was right, it was thin as paper. “I have notes to write up.”

“You have no clients to write up.”

“That was low, Mayor.” But she was already reaching for her coat. Neither of us could make ourselves say no.

We ate at the counter of the town’s one eating-house in full view of half the settlement, elbow to elbow because the stools were built for men my size and she perched on hers with her boots hooked on the rail. She stole the pickled root off my plate without asking.

“If you keep looking at me like that, someone’s going to notice,” she said, not looking up from my plate.

“I’m making sure you eat. You sit in that office all day forgetting to.”

“About my office.” She set the fork down. “Somebody’s been leaning on men to come see me. Walking them to my door with a hand on the back of their necks, more or less.”

“Is that so?”

“You know I can’t tell you who comes to talk, or whether anyone does at all.” She let it sit. “But hypothetically, if some mayor were doing that, a man hauled in front of a counselor by his boss isn’t a client. He’s a hostage. It doesn’t take. He sits in my chair and waits out the hour and gives me nothing.”

“Hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically.” She stole the last of my root off my plate. “You didn’t hear that from me.”