Page 55 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

Her expression changed. It wasn’t teasing now. She ran her fingertips over his wing again, impossibly gentle. The sensation traveled through him like heat through cold stone. He bent his head to her shoulder and breathed.

“Garrick?”

“Keep doing that.”

So she did.

There was trust in it. That was what he hadn’t expected. Not merely hers, although the weight of that was almost unbearable. But his trust. He had spent so long controlling every part of himself around other people that he hadn’t realized how exhausting it was. Wings folded. Claws watched. Strength measured. Body made smaller wherever possible. Even in Fairhaven, even among Others, there was always some part of him calculating how much space he occupied and how much force he could safely use.

She had looked at seven feet of stone and wings and claws and told him not to fold them away. So he didn’t.

Getting the rest of his clothes off took longer than it should have, because she would not stop touching him and he could not make himself tell her to. Then there was nothing left between them, and he slid his hand between her thighs, and she stopped laughing.

She was wet. Slick and hot against his fingers, her hips lifting to meet him, and the sound she made when he stroked her went straight to his cock.

“Perfect,” he said.

“You’re being careful.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be—” She broke off as he pressed one finger into her, slowly, and her back came up off the rug.

He was careful anyway. He had to be. He worked her open with one finger and then two, his thumb circling her clit, until she was shaking and swearing at him and trying to pull him down by the shoulders.

“Garrick. Now.”

“Not yet.”

“I swear to God⁠—”

“Not yet.” He bent his head and put his mouth on her instead, and whatever she had been going to say turned into a long broken sound he intended to remember for the rest of his life. She came like that, with his mouth on her and her fingers locked in the membrane of his wing.

Then he moved up over her, looked down, and stopped. He was not going to fit. That was not modesty and it was not fear. It was a measurement, and he had been right about measurements since he was a boy.

“Maris—”

“Don’t you dare.” Her eyes were wet and bright and absolutely certain. “Don’t you dare stop now.”

“You’re going to⁠—”

“I’ve had a baby, Garrick.” She reached down between them and took hold of him, and everything in him narrowed to that grip. “Come here. Slowly. I’ll tell you if it’s too much.”

So he did it her way. He pressed against her and pushed, watching her face, and she was so tight that for a moment he thought his measurement had been right after all. Her eyes went wide and startled, her teeth clamping down on her lower lip. Fuck.

He immediately stopped moving. “Am I hurting you?”

“No. God, no. Keep going.”

He kept going. She breathed out and shifted her hips and took another inch of him, and another, the ridges dragging as he went, and she said his name in a voice he had never heard her use. It took a long time. Neither of them hurried it. When he was finally seated in her, all of him, her body stretched around his and holding on, he had to stop. He put his forehead down against hers because his arms were shaking.

“There,” she said, wrecked and pleased with herself. “Told you.”

He had no answer. He was not certain he had words at all.

Then she moved under him, and his control snapped.

He was not careful after that. She didn’t want him careful, and she told him so, in words at first and then in nothing but sounds, her nails in his shoulders and her heels locked at the small of his back. He gave her exactly what she asked for. The firelight coming through his wings. Her voice breaking on his name. He shifted his angle and his ridges brought her up off the floor, and when she came the second time she took him with her, hard enough that the sound he made had no words in it either.