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“Every inch of you,” he said against my sternum, punctuating the words with kisses, “is mine to take care of now. This heart.” A kiss. “These ribs.” Another, beside the bruise, so tender my eyes stung. “This soft stomach I want to fall asleep on. These hips.” His hands wrapped around them, thumbs pressing into the hollows, and my cock, already stirring again, gave an enthusiastic twitch against his throat. “Gonna spend years learning all of it. Every freckle. Every sound.”

“You’re going to run out of material,” I gasped as his mouth grazed the crease of my thigh. “There’s only so much of me.”

“Then I’ll start over.” He looked up the length of my body, eyes dark, and reached for the lube. “Roll onto your side for me, kitten. Want you comfortable.”

Rearranging myself took a moment of graceless shuffling, and he helped, guiding me onto my side with one thigh drawn up, arranging a pillow under my head like I was something breakable. The click of the bottle cap sounded loud in the quiet room. Cool slickness touched the cleft of my ass a moment later, warmed quickly by his fingers, and my breath stuttered.

“Easy.” His lips found my shoulder, my neck, the sensitive spot behind my ear, while one blunt fingertip circled my hole with maddening patience. “No rushing. We’ve got all day. Told you that.”

“You did say—” His finger pressed in, slow and slick, and the sentence dissolved into a long exhale. The stretch was gentle, careful, nothing like the fumbling efficiency I’d learned to brace for in another life. He worked me open by degrees, adding lube with an unhurried generosity, murmuring against my skin the whole time.

“That’s it. Look at you. Taking it so well.” A second finger joined the first, and I pushed back against his hand, greedy in a manner that would have mortified yesterday’s version of me. “There you go. Feel good?”

“Understatement.” My voice had gone thin and high. His fingers curled, found something inside me that lit up like a struck match, and I made a noise into the pillow that I would deny until my death. “Do that again and I’ll sign whatever you want.”

He did it again. He kept doing it, scissoring his fingers gently, stretching me with the same dedication he gave to laminated dough, until I was rocking back against his hand and sweating and swearing softly into the pillowcase. By the time a third finger eased in, my cock was fully hard again and leaking against my stomach, and I had lost the ability to construct sentences containing more than four words.

“Drift. Please. Now. Ready.”

“Yeah?” He withdrew his fingers, and I heard the slick sounds of him coating his own cock, felt the mattress shift as he settled behind me, his body curving around mine like a second skin. His thigh slid under mine, opening me, and the blunt head of his cock nudged against my entrance. His arm banded around my torso, his hand splayed over my heart. “I’ve got you. Breathe for me.”

I breathed. He pressed in.

The stretch was slow, deep, and endless, and he fed me his cock patiently, one inch at a time, pausing whenever my breath caught, his mouth never leaving my neck, my shoulder, murmuring praise into my skin like a litany. “Beautiful,” “Perfect,” “Mine.” When his hips finally rested flush against my ass, we both went still, and I felt full in a manner that had nothing whatsoever to do with anatomy. Held. Occupied. Wanted, all the way through.

“Okay?” His voice had gone ragged.

“Better than okay.” My hand found his where it rested over my heart and gripped it. “Move. Please move.”

He moved.

The rhythm he built was slow and deep, unhurried rolls of his hips that dragged his cock over that bright spot inside me on every stroke. Pleasure gathered low in my belly, coiling tighter with each thrust, and the sounds spilling out of me were shameless, wrecked things I made no attempt to contain. His breath came hot and heavy against my ear, and his hand slid down from my heart to wrap around my cock, stroking me in time with his thrusts.

“So good, kitten. So goddamn good around me.” His voice had shredded down to almost nothing. “Could stay inside you forever. Wanna wake up like this. Fall asleep like this. Feed you breakfast and bring you back to bed and do it all over again.”

“Yes.” Everything he said, yes. My hips moved between the push of his cock and the pull of his fist, caught in a current I had no intention of fighting. “All of it. Yes.”

“Gonna bite you when you come.” His teeth grazed the join of my neck and shoulder, a warm promise. “Right here. Gonna make you mine for good. That still what you want?”

The coil in my belly cinched tight at the words alone. “If you don’t, I’m going to be so unbelievably annoyed with you.”

His laugh broke apart into a groan as I clenched around him. His pace deepened, still controlled, still careful, but with an urgency underneath it now, his fist working my cock faster, his mouth open against my shoulder.

Pleasure built low and relentless, tightening with every roll of his hips. His cock dragged over that bright place inside me again and again, steady as a tide, and his fist matched the rhythm around my dick until I couldn’t tell which sensation was pushing me higher. Behind me, his body radiated heat like a furnace, sweat slicking the places where our skin met, and every breath he took shuddered against the back of my neck.

“You feel that?” His voice came out ruined, barely more than breath. “How perfect you are? How your body opens up for me like it was made for this?”

The words landed somewhere deeper than my ears. Somewhere old and starved. My whole life I had been a collection of shortcomings for other people to inventory, and here was this man narrating my body back to me like scripture.

“Keep talking,” I managed. “God, keep talking.”

“Could talk about you for hours.” His hips rolled deep, and I moaned into the pillow. “These shoulders. This neck. The way you blush all the way down when I say something filthy. You’re blushing right now, aren’t you, kitten?”

Heat had indeed flooded my face, my throat, everywhere. “That’s slander. That’s unprovable slander.”

His laugh vibrated through his torso and into my back, and even mid-thrust, even with his cock buried inside me, he laughed like I was the best thing he’d ever heard. Somewhere in the wreckage of my rational mind, a small voice observed that I was about to be permanently bonded to a man I’d known for less than a week, and the strangest part was that the voice sounded happy about it. My anxiety had finally encountered something it couldn’t argue with.

“Faster,” I gasped. “Please. I’m close. I’ve been close since the drawer opened.”