Page 102 of Flames and Blood

He stays up over me, his mouth at my breast, his weight on one forearm. His other hand goes down between my legs and finds me wet, and he makes a low sound against my skin when he finds that out.

“Tell me what we did,” I say, voice hoarse. “When I came to you. When I wasn’t myself.”

“You came in the door already certain.” His fingers slide into me, easy, and stay, moving slow. “You crossed the room and pushed me into the door hard enough to bruise a man with a working spine.”

“What else?” My breath is coming faster.

“I put my mouth on you until you came. And then you pushed me on my back.” His lips are against my ear. “You settled over my hips.”

“What else?”

“You told me to talk. You said you wanted my voice under you.” His fingers keep moving the whole time, unhurried, and his thumb settles on my clit and stays there, small circles, patient in a way that should be illegal. “You said I was like snow inside you.”

“That sounds like me,” I pant.

“It didn’t sound like you at all. That’s how I knew.”

I don’t have an answer, and then I don’t need one, because he puts his mouth back on my breast and keeps his hand working in exactly the same rhythm, and I stop thinking in words.

It builds low, and it builds slow, and then it isn’t slow at all. I get one palm flat against the warm stone wall above my head and push. My other hand finds his wrist—not to move it, just to hold on to the thing that’s doing this to me—and the wave goes through me in one long pull. My thighs shudder with it, and I bite down on my own lip so the whole floor of the stores doesn’t hear about it.

He works me down slowly and stops before it turns into too much.

“Enough?”

“For about a minute. Come here.”

He comes up over me. I get my hands on his belt and get it open and shove the rest of it off him. Then he’s bare against me the whole length of my body, and the difference in us is everywhere—my heat, his cold, and nothing between them.

I take his cock in my hand. It’s cool and heavy, thick enough that my fingers don’t meet around it, and his stomach goes tight under my forearm.

“You’re not going to be able to do that slowly,” he says.

“Watch me.”

I push him over onto his back.

He goes. He watches me do it, and he lets it happen. I swing my leg across him and kneel up over his hips. This is how she had him. On his back, under my hands, my hair coming down over both of us—and this time I’m the one looking down at it.

“This is how it was,” he says. “The first night.”

“Then let me have it properly.”

I take him in by degrees. It’s a stretch, and it’s a real one, and I go carefully, my hands flat on his chest, and he holds my hips and lets me set every inch of it. Cold going into heat. My whole body closes around him and tightens. Then it gives, and I sink the rest of the way, and neither of us moves.

“Kalli.”

“I’m here.”

“I know, princess,” he says. “I’m just checking.”

Then I move, and I keep it slow the way I wanted, and I keep my eyes open for all of it. I watch his face. I watch his jaw go tight, then let go, then go tight again. His fingers are cold on the two bruises at my hips, and I push down into them harder. The sound he makes is one I’ve never heard out of him, unguarded, and I’d trade a lot to hear it again.

Somewhere in it, I lean down, and my mouth finds his throat.

The skin there is smooth. There’s nothing under it—no pulse, no movement, nothing at all—and my teeth are set against it before I’ve decided anything. Something under my sternum wants me to close them. It wants a mark on him where a mark would show over a collar, and it wants it so badly that my jaw shakes with holding it open.

It isn’t hers. That’s what stops me cold in the middle of everything. She’s quiet under my ribs, exactly where I put her, and this is coming out of me.