Page 45 of Ward

He laid her down in the warm lamplight and finished undressing her, and then himself, and she propped herself on her elbows to watch, because she was not about to miss it.

The size of him could have been a logistics problem. She looked at his cock, thick and heavy and flushed darker than the rest of him, and said, with total honesty, “Well. That’s ambitious.”

Through the loop she felt him go from aroused to anxious in half a second, an old reflex, a man braced to be too much. “We don’t have to⁠—”

“I didn’t say no. I said ambitious. I’m a big believer in ambitious.” She held out her hand. “Come here. We’ll go slow, and I’ll tell you everything, and you’ll feel it anyway, so you’ll know if I’m lying. Which I won’t be.”

He came. He knelt between her thighs, and he did not go straight for the main course. He put his mouth on her instead.

She had thought, before, that she knew roughly what this would be like.

She had not accounted for the loop.

His tongue moved over her slow and broad and then precise, finding the exact place she ached, and her pleasure went into him and came back as his: his pleasure in her pleasure, his greed for it, his fierce focused satisfaction every time she jolted.

Then that came back to her doubled, and she understood in one bright, astonished flash that he was learning her from the inside.

He knew what worked the instant it worked. He didn’t have to guess. He could feel it.

“Oh, that’s cheating,” she gasped, her fingers in his white hair. “That is a cheat code, you can’t — right there. Right there. Don’t you dare move.”

He didn’t dare. He pinned her hips with those docking-clamp hands and stayed exactly where she needed him, unhurried and relentless, and when she came it was fast and shocking and loud, her heels digging into his back and his name tearing out of her, wrong, of course. “Eric — oh my God, Eric —”

He lifted his head. His markings were blazing. For the first time since she had met him, he looked openly, magnificently smug.

“Aldric,” he said.

She laughed so hard she nearly went again. “Make me.”

Something flared through the loop, heat and delight and a challenge accepted.

He came up over her on his forearms, all that weight held off her, and she reached down between them and wrapped her hand around his cock and felt what it did to him land in her own body like a dropped pan, one full-body clang of want.

“Slow,” she said. “Like you promised.”

“I promised nothing.”

“You promised with your face.”

He pushed into her slowly.

The stretch was a lot, a real and full and burning lot, and she felt his attention go absolute.

He felt every fraction of it with her, the heat and the tightness and the edge of too much, all of it arriving in him tangled with his own overwhelmed shudder.

He stopped the instant she tensed.

She hadn’t said a word.

He didn’t need her to.

“Breathe,” he said against her temple. “I can feel you holding it.”

“Bossy.” But she breathed, and her body eased, and he felt that too and gave her more, and more, until he was all the way inside her and they were both shaking and she could not tell anymore whose fullness was whose.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. Move.”

He moved: long, slow, deep strokes held in that terrible control.