Page 80 of Dominion's Guard
"Since your first Woodford Reserve on a Tuesday night." My eyes are stinging. "Since you sat at the far end and watched me with that patient, dismantling focus and I thought,this one will see through it, and I'm not ready.Since then, Andy. Since the beginning."
His hand leaves my hair and wraps around my hip. He draws me back against him with a force that empties my lungs, and the pace he sets is no longer measured or controlled. It is greedy and deep and desperate, the answer of a man who just heard the thing he's been waiting to hear and is responding with his body because words aren't enough.
His hand reaches around my hip and finds my clit, slick and oversensitive, and the pressure of his fingers combined with the depth of his thrusts collapses the distance between building and breaking.
"Look at me," he says.
I turn my face from the sheets. His face is close enough that I can see the sweat at his temples and the tendon standing rigid in his neck. The patience is gone. What's left is raw and possessive and wrecked. He has watched me from across a bar for months, and he is finally inside me with nothing between us.
"You're mine," he says. The words land like both a confession and a verdict. "Tell me you know that."
"I know that." The admission costs me everything the brat was built to protect. "I've known that longer than I wanted to."
His hips drive forward hard enough to erase whatever I was going to say next, and his hand stays on my clit and his cock hits the same spot on every stroke and the bed protests beneath us and I do not care.
The orgasm rolls through me in a wave that starts where he is buried inside me and radiates outward. My body clamps down around him in contractions hard enough to pull a groan from deep in his chest, and his name breaks apart in my mouth, fractured by the spasms wracking my body from the inside out. My thighs lock. My hands fist in the sheets. The orgasm pulses in deep, rhythmic waves I feel in my cervix and my stomach and my shaking legs, and it lasts long enough that the world narrows to nothing except the place where his body meets mine.
He follows me over. His rhythm fractures, his hand grips my hip, and he buries himself deep and comes with a shudder that runs through his entire body and into mine. I feel him pulse inside me, the hot spill of him filling me, skin to skin, nothing between us, and the intimacy of that is more exposed than the cross ever was.
The silence that follows fills the room.
He stays draped over my back, his face pressed into the curve of my neck, breathing rough on my skin. I can feel him softening inside me and the slow slide of him leaving my body. His hand loosens from my hip and slides up my spine, and I melt flat into the mattress.
He eases out and turns me gently onto my back. He brushes the hair from my face, and I expect the mask to be rebuilding, the composure sliding back into place. It isn't. He is looking at me with the expression of a man who broke open alongside me and hasn't figured out how to put the pieces back.
"I'm going to get you water," he says. "Ten seconds."
"Five."
"Demanding."
"You love it."
"So I keep being told."
He crosses to the bathroom and returns with a warm cloth and a glass of water. I drink half of it in one pull. He takes the cloth and cleans me, gentle between my legs where my skin is flushed and oversensitive and slick with both of us, and the care in his hands after the force of what we just did closes my eyes and catches my breath for a reason that has nothing to do with the sex.
He pulls the sheet up and settles against the headboard with me tucked into his side, his hand in my hair, running the slow repetitive rhythm that brings someone back into their body after it's been somewhere unfamiliar.
"I didn't know it could be like that," I say. My voice is small and stripped and honest in a way that terrifies me.
"Like what?"
"Real."
"It's been real since the beginning." He presses his mouth to my temple. "You just weren't ready to let it be."
"That is an obnoxiously accurate observation, and I want it on record that your emotional perceptiveness is criminal."
"Noted." His arm tightens around me. "Denied."
The tenderness is earned and unsettling because tender is not a word either of us would use for what we are. We are sharp edges and stubbornness and a brat who tests every boundary and a Dom who outlasts them all. Tender shouldn't fit.
It fits anyway, and I'm not ready for what that means.
The scar on my arm aches in the way that healing scars ache, a low pull that reminds me the tissue is knitting itself together under the surface. I press my face into his neck and let myself be held, and I am terrified, and I am staying.
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