Page 20 of Mischief

Every sensible cell in me knows a man with two cracked ribs has no business doing anything but sleeping.

I open my mouth to tell him so, but he catches my chin the way he did the night he left and tips my face to his, and whatever I was going to say dissolves.

He kisses me carefully, because he has to. The split lip won't allow anything else.

The carefulness is its own kind of undoing. Bodul never does anything careful.

Bodul kisses like he's trying to prove something.

This is slow, soft, his good hand cradling the back of my skull like I'm the fragile one, cracks me open in a way nothing rough ever has.

"Bed," I breathe against his mouth. "If we're doing this, we're doing it where you can lie down. I'm in charge of everything. You don't move unless I tell you."

Something flares in his good eye, heat and surrender at once.

"Yes, ma'am," he says.

I get him to the bedroom and down onto his back in slow stages.

I take my time getting the rest of his road clothes off him, and then I stand at the end of the bed and pull my own shirt over my head while he watches me with the one eye gone dark and greedy in the low light.

Whatever the beating took out of him, it didn't touch this.

He looks at me like a starving man looks at bread.

I come down over him with a knee on either side of his hips, holding my weight up on my own arms so I don't put an ounce on his ribs.

The position puts me in charge of all of it, every inch, every pace, and the low pull of that goes warm between my thighs before he's even touched me.

"Careful," I tell us both, and lower myself, and take him in slow.

The stretch of it steals my breath.

He fills me by degrees, and I sink down onto him an inch at a time, watching his face the whole way for the wince that means I've hurt his side, and it doesn't come.

What comes instead is a low broken sound from the back of his throat, his good hand flying to my hip and gripping, his head going back into the pillow, and the sight of him coming undone underneath me while I set every inch of the pace lights me up hotter than anything rough ever could.

"There you are," I whisper, seated fully, the two of us fused, my pulse pounding everywhere at once. "I've got you. Just feel it. Let me."

And he does. He lets me.

That's what guts me even as it winds me tighter, the way this impossible man, who rode with broken bones rather than call a soul for help, lies back under me and lets me have all of it.

Allows me to hold him and move on him, and take care of him even here.

His hand stays locked on my hip, not steering, only holding, his thumb stroking the crest of the bone in time with the roll of me, and every slow grind drags a sound out of one or both of us into the dark.

I ride him gentle and deep because gentle is all his body will allow, and it turns out to be its own devastation.

There's no hiding in slowness.

Every place we're joined I feel with my whole body, the drag, fullness, and the heat building.

I have to brace one hand flat on his chest, careful of the wrap, to keep from folding down onto him.

"Look at me," he rasps. "Tindra. Don't close your eyes. Let me see you."

So I look at him while I move, his one good eye holding mine, and it's almost too much, the intimacy of being watched while I come apart.