Page 155 of Legacy Elite

"What?"

"You've had a year of people deciding things about you." His thumb moves once along my cheekbone. "Say it, so neither of us ever wonders."

So I put both hands flat on his chest and look up at him.

"I want you, Soren." My hands aren't steady and I don't care. "Not the bond. You."

He kisses me thoroughly, and slowly, walking me backward until my shoulders find the wall — and then keeps me there, one hand braced beside my head, and takes his time about it.

"Bedroom," I manage.

"In a minute."

"Soren—"

"In a minute," he says against my jaw, and drags his mouth down my throat, and I lose the thread entirely.

He gets my shirt off standing there in my sitting room. Every button, slowly, and he watches my face the whole time — not my body, my face, checking each one — and it should be clinical and instead it takes the legs out from under me.

"You're staring."

"Yes."

"Is that—"

"I've had a very long time of not looking at you," Soren says. "I'm going to look at you."

Then his eyes go down, and stay down, and take their time, and I stand against my own wall in the lamplight and let him.

"God," he says, quietly. Almost annoyed about it.

I get my hands under the hem of his shirt and shove it up, and he lets go of the wall long enough to pull it off over his head, and when my palms go flat against his stomach he makes a noise I intend to think about for the rest of my life.

"Bedroom," I say again.

He picks me up.

One arm under me, my legs round his waist, and he carries me through and puts me down on the bed and follows me down.

And then he slows right down.

His mouth at my shoulder. My collarbone. Down. The inside of my wrist, below three dark marks, for a long moment that makes my chest ache and which he does not explain. The rest of my clothes come off one thing at a time, and by the time I'm bare underneath him I am shaking and he has not gone anywhere near where I want him.

"Soren."

"Mm."

"You're doing it on purpose."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because you flinch when I do this," he says, and puts his mouth just under my ribs on the left, and I arch straight up off the mattress. "And I want to know how many of those there are."

He learns me the way he taught me to shift. He finds where something starts, and goes back to it, and does it again, and watches, and does it once more — and by the fourth time I have my fist in the sheet and I've stopped forming sentences.

Then he stops.