Page 114 of Grim Tidings

He shakes his head, crawling over top of me, one knee planted between my spread thighs. He drops his weight over my hips, pinning me in place, and I relax beneath him.

“Don’t think about anything else,” he whispers into the curve of my neck. He kisses there, then drags his mouth to the dip of my collarbones, the hollow between my breasts. “Stay right here with me.”

It’s easy enough when his mouth is on my skin. I close my eyes and sink into the bed, letting myself be exactly here and nowhere else. I don’t worry about the future or the grains of sand slipping through our hourglass. I don’t worry about the many, many threats hanging over our heads. I give myself over to this—Gabriel’s fingers working down the line of buttons at the front of my sweater. The sweet ache between my thighs and the press of his hips between them.

He loves me.

“See?” Gabriel laughs. A low, rumbling thing. “You can be good when you want to be.”

I open my eyes with a half-hearted glare, and he laughs again, abandoning my sweater for the buttons on the front of his shirt.

“Yeah, that look doesn’t land the way you think it does. I like it when you get all stern with me.”

I can see that. He’s so hard it looks painful, his chest rising and falling with every panting breath while he balances on his knees between my spread thighs. Gabriel stares at me splayed out in front of him while he works his shirt open, my skirt rucked up around my hips and my cardigan slipping off my shoulders. I arch my back a little bit and his hands fumble over his buttons.

He rolls his shirt down his arms, and it’s all bare skin and tattoos. Those angry, jagged scars over his heart. I reach for them and drift my fingers over their raised edges, then sit up and set my mouth there, too. Gabriel cups the back of my head, his hand shaking.

Is this what love feels like for you, I wonder, my lips against the broken part of him, this terrible, yawning ache?

He makes another low sound and threads his fingers through my hair, yanking just this side of too rough. His mouth catches mine, hungry and deep, and I relish the slip in his control.

He can be whoever he needs to be with me. Rough, broken, breathless, perfect. Every shade in between.

“I’ll take it,” I whisper in his mouth. “Whatever you want to give me.”

“Yeah,” he growls, one hand on my thigh, urging it wider. “You will.”

He guides me back against the pillows and I go willingly, watching through heavy eyes as his palms coast down the curves of my body, considering. His tattoos start to glow, standing out beneath his skin like stars in a constellation.

“I thought I wanted to go slow with you. Show you everything you’d be missing if you—” He drags his hand over his mouth. “I don’t think I can go slow.”

“I don’t want you to,” I breathe.

I want to feel the loss of his precious control. I want to be the reason for it.

His eyes flare and his hands tighten around my rib cage. “Yeah?”

I nod, smiling slightly. My own magic rises to meet his, tempestuous and howling. This might be the only night I have with Gabriel, and if it is, I’d like for it to leave its mark. I’d like to be able to remember everything in startling detail, a hundred and fifty years from now. Three hundred. A thousand.

“Though if you want to get on your knees and beg me for it,” I tease. “Feel free.”

“Sweetheart.” He laughs and lets himself fall over me, his palm at my hip. He brushes his mouth over mine. “I’ve been on my knees for you this entire time.”

Then he drags my skirt off my hips with a rough yank and slips his hand beneath my underwear.

“Fuck,” he whispers. “You’re a mess.”

I nod. I’m so many things. Desperate, wanting, frenzied. Needy and overwhelmed.

I stare down the length of my body at his hand beneath my underwear, my pale thighs framed on either side of his tattooed wrist. There’s something indecent about watching the way the muscles in his arm flex with every smooth roll of his wrist. How the ink shifts with every thrust of his fingers. Feeling the evidence of my desire for him seems to have flipped the switch on his patience, because he works at me with single-minded determination, pushing me relentlessly higher. There is no slow buildup. No careful tiptoe toward the edge. Gabriel drags my pleasure from my body like it’s his to command.

“I’m—I don’t—”

“Mmhmm. I know.” He leans forward and drops a gentle kiss to the corner of my mouth. “You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

He curls his free hand around my throat, his fingers light as a feather as he holds my attention firmly on him.

“Don’t you feel it?” he whispers, dragging his thumb back and forth over the place where my pulse should be. “It was fucking inevitable, Darcy. From the first moment I saw you. And you thought I’d let you walk away without a fight?” He shakes his head, the hand between my legs rubbing roughly. “Nah,” he whispers. “Where you go, I go, Darcy. That’s how it’s going to be.”