Page 64 of Bonded By Stone & Blood

"I am yours," he says. "Not by blood debt. Not by bond. By choice."

As soon asI reach out and take both his hands, the cavern erupts in festivities.

We don't stay long enoughfor anyone to notice we've gone.

The moment the festivities swallow the crowd, Tovian takes my hand and we slip through a side passage, and I don't look back once.

Our private chamber is warm when we reach it. The fire has held. The furs are thick and the ceiling is high and the rest of the world is finally, mercifully, far behind us.

He crosses the room and his mouth finds mine with a groan low enough to feel through the stone floor, and every careful, political, sovereign thing I spent the last hour being dissolves completely.

We undress each other slowly and when he lays me back into the furs, I reach for him without hesitation.

There was a time—not so long ago—when the sheer size of him made me go still with instinctive, breathless apprehension. When my body needed coaxing, when I had to consciously breathe through the initial stretch of him pressing inside me, when I thought I simply could not accommodate the full, brutal length and girth of him without falling apart.

That time is over.

My thighs fall open naturally when he settles between them. My hips tilt up to meet him. I reach down and wrap my hand around his cock—thick and heavy and already slick at the tip—and guide him to my entrance without a single tremor in my hand.

"Look at you," he murmurs against my jaw, gold eyes burning low.

"Stop talking," I say, and pull him forward.

The first inch draws a slow exhale from us both. He presses in with deliberate control, letting me feel every ridge and vein of him parting me open. I stretch around him the way I have learned to—completely, greedily, my body knowing now exactly how to soften and yield and take him in.

There is no bracing or flinching. Only the deep, full, aching pressure of him advancing until his hips meet mine and he is seated inside me to the root, his cock pressing thick and long against the deepest wall of me. I feel him in my stomach the way I always do—that impossible, visceral fullness that should be too much but never enough.

I exhale slowly. He groans and the sound breaks whatever patience he had left.

He pulls back with a long, grinding drag that has me clutching the furs, and drives forward again, and I cry out at the ceiling. Every stroke is a full withdrawal and a full return, the thick length of him filling me so completely on each push that I lose my breath each time and find it again only when he pulls back, only to lose it all over again.

He sets a pace that is slow and devastating, and I feel every inch of it.

I feel the broad, flared head of him pressing up against the front wall of me on the inward stroke. I feel the drag of his girth stretching me wide on the outward pull. I feel him in my lower belly like a warm, insistent pressure that builds with each thrust until my thighs are shaking

"Tovian—faster?—"

He does not speed up. Instead, he goes deeper. Adjusts the angle of his hips and sinks into me on the next stroke with a roll that punches a high, broken noise from my throat and makes my toes curl uselessly against the furs.

"There," he says, voice rough.

"Yes," I gasp, “Don't stop"

He works that angle with ruthless, grinding precision until I am shaking apart beneath him, until my nails are raking lines across his obsidian shoulders and I am crying his name in fragments between ragged breaths.

Then his wings spread wide and catch the warm chamber air and he lifts us.

The furs vanish beneath me. We rise together into the dark, my legs locked around his hips, his talons gripping my waist as he holds us suspended and keeps moving. The new angle drives him even deeper and I choke out a yelp, my fingers clawing into the hardness of his shoulders for purchase I can’t find.

He dips his head and his mouth closes hot over my breast. His tongue drags slow across my nipple before he closes his teeth around it and bites down just enough to make me squeal. He rewards it immediately with a sharp upward roll of his hips that steals what little breath I had left.

He laps at the sting. Does it again on the other, his teeth grazing and his tongue soothing the bite in the same motion, and I am shaking all over, suspended in midair with nowhere to go and no reason to want to be anywhere else.

Then I get an idea.

"Let go of me," I breathe.

His grip tightens instinctively. "Sabine?—"