Page 66 of Into Ember

The water moves with us, warm up my back every time I sink down, cool air on wet skin every time I rise, and between the heat of him inside me and the spark every time he grazes my tattoo, I lose track of everything in the world that isn’t contact.

He’s coming apart under me and trying to hide it, and he’s failing, and I have never felt anything like watching him fail. His jaw is tight. The cords of his neck stand out when I grind down and stay there. One of his hands leaves my hip to grip the rim of the tub, and the copper gives a small groan of protest under his fingers. An actual sound of metal reconsidering its life choices, and he doesn’t even notice, because his eyes are on me like I’m the only thing that has ever existed.

Powerful doesn’t cover it. There’s no shelf at the bookstore for this.

“You have no idea,” he says, rough, half to himself, hips rising into me, “how many nights — Ella — you have no idea.”

“Tell me later,” I manage, and ride him harder, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I get loud.

Really loud.

And then I hear myself. In a castle, in a room, one door away from four men with dragon hearing.

My hand slaps over my mouth.

“Oh my God.” Muffled, horrified, frozen mid-motion. “They can hear. Erik. They can hear — all of them — the whole—”

He takes my wrist, gently, pulls my hand away from my mouth, and presses a kiss into the palm of it, and his eyes never leave mine.

“Don’t hide.”

“Erik—”

“They know what you are to me. They know what you are to them.” His hips rise, slow and deliberate, and my breath breaks in half. “Nothing about this is a secret, Ella. Let them hear you.”

I’m mortified. Mortified and so turned on and he wants this. Wants to hear me and —

You know what?

Fuck it.

I let go — the volume, the balance, every quiet year I spent across a hallway from this man — and I lean back and grip the rim behind me and let the new angle take him deeper, and the sound that comes out of me is one I have never made in my life and intend to make constantly from now on. It changes everything. Every stroke drags him right across the place that makes my thighs shake, and I chase it without one ounce of shame, water surging over the sides in sheets, and Erik watches me.

I never want him to look away.

“Elara.” It comes out of him like it’s pulled up by the root. “Fuck. Elara.”

He sits up. Wraps an arm around my back and brings us chest to chest, the tattoo pressed against his arm and sparking without pause now, a live current running between our skin, and his hand splays over my sternum where the purr has built into something closer to a roar.

“I can feel you,” he says into my mouth, wondering, wrecked. “Ella. I can feel you everywhere.”

My next sound comes out and hits the stone and comes back to me, my own voice filling the room, and I don’t reach for it. His name comes out on the next stroke, louder, and the echo hands it back, and I say it again.

Something in Erik breaks underneath me.

“That’s it.” His hands flex hard on my hips. “Just like that. So good, Ella. Take everything.”

He’s meeting me harder now, exactly as hard as I’m asking, and I’m asking with my nails in his shoulders and my heels hooked behind him and half the bathwater already on the floor.

“Look at you.” It’s barely breath. “You feel so fucking good.” My rhythm starts to stutter. My thighs tremble where they grip him, every stroke landing hotter and closer than the last, and when it crests too fast I slow down and drag it out, greedy still.

He knows. Of course he knows. His hand slides down between us, right where I need it, sure and slick and perfect, and he angles up into me and puts his mouth to my ear.

“Now, Ella. Loud.”

I couldn’t hold back even if I wanted to.

I come apart with his name in my mouth and every ounce of air in my lungs behind it, clenching around him in waves that go on and on, the water going everywhere, my whole body one long pull of light — and the feel of me finishing takes him with me. He drives up once, twice, buries himself deep and holds there, spilling into me with my name and a sound underneath it, low and enormous. His arms locking around me like the world might try to take me back, both of us shaking while the tub sloshes the last of its water onto the stone.