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He had…he had gotten her pregnant. The passion that had exploded between them that night had created this life. Had created this moment. That was how powerful the need between them was. He felt drunk on it. The whiskey that he had tasted only minutes ago was nothing now. It wasn’t what fired his blood. It wasn’t what urged him forward. She was. This was. This great and terrible need.

She slipped out of his hold, away from the wall, through the gate and across the field. He pursued her.

And when he caught her again, he kissed her beneath the open sky, under the moon. This was how it might’ve been back then.

If they had discovered each other when they were teenagers. Though of course, she would’ve been too young for him then.

But not now. But this was like a second chance, to have something he hadn’t wanted then.

She put her hand on his bare chest, her fingertips moving along his skin. He closed his eyes, let his head fall back and growled as she explored him.

When he opened his eyes again, she was undoing his belt.

“You want me?”

She nodded.

“Then why are you playing games with me?”

“Because we never did play enough games.”

That stark, simple truths stole every word that he might’ve spoken.

This was joy. Or perhaps the closest thing to it that he’d ever experienced. This was closeness. With another person. This was so many things that he had never had, all rolled up into one moment. Into one person. Esme, as she had ever been.

His desire was something new, though. Something great and terrible. A living, breathing entity that took him over. A new form of desire like he had never known it before. Close to what he had experienced the first time they had been together, but it had changed shape.

It had been different then. Both of them on guard, defensive, putting themselves behind masks. This was different.

He moved his hands over her softness, back up to cup her face. He kissed her with all of the unnamed emotion that lived inside of him. He kissed her with the force of this need that had taken him utterly and completely by surprise.

He was a man who could not be surprised, and yet Esme had done it. She was still doing it.

He lowered her down to the grass, and pushed the gown up past her hips, revealing a small, white pair of underwear beneath. He hooked his fingers in the sides of it and brought it down her slim legs, revealing that glorious, pale triangle at the apex of her thighs. He was starving for her. Only her.

The feeling inside of him was enormous. And the only thing he could compare it to was feelings he had had for her in the past. A desire to give her everything she wanted. To keep her safe. To keep some wonder in the world for her.

But if he could do that now with his tongue, then he would do it. It was perhaps a little bit too much ego when it came to his sexual prowess, but he was not a humble man. He had no reason to be.

He kissed the top of her thigh, her hipbone. Began to tease her as he blazed the trail to her thatch of curls.

She moaned, arched her hips up off the ground, and he moved his hands beneath to cup her ass, pulling her up to his mouth as he began to devour her like the glorious delicacy that she was.

Sweet and slick and his.

He had done this their first night together, and he had been feral with his need for her. He was no less feral now, but something about the quality of it shifted.

There had been a measure of anger in the way he had taken her the first time. Anger at himself. Because he wasn’t able to resist her. Anger at her for forcing him into that position.

It was all gone now. There was nothing but desire.

He moved the flat of his tongue over that sensitive bundle of nerves there, devoured her, delighted in her.

Every last cry that he could wring from her body before he let her reach her peak. In the way that her nails dug into his shoulders, the way that she used him to ground herself to the earth even as she shattered.

He lifted his head, moved up her body, pushed the nightgown up farther so that he could see her breasts, the beautiful, rounded bump of her pregnancy.

She was glorious.