Page 9 of My Tiny Human Wife

“The watch can survive twenty minutes without you playing martyr at it.” I do not lower my hand. “Torvak. Come with me.”

He studies my open palm, then my face, and whatever he finds there settles it. He takes my hand. His swallows mine whole, careful as ever, and I lead him—all that height, all that lethal quiet—away from the party and up the ladder to the array platform, the single place in this whole crowded tower where two people can be alone with the sky.

The storm has finally broken. Overhead the cloud has torn open on a hard field of stars, and the cold is clean and enormous and, for these few minutes, ours. I turn to face him with my pulse going and no speech left in me, because I spent all my careful two years ago and there is none of it standing between us now.

“The loft, the night I stitched you,” I say. “The comm cut us off, and then Dareth came, and I have spent every day since promising myself I would not let one more thing interrupt this before I said it out loud.” I hold his gaze, gold and steady in the starlight. “I am in love with you. I know how impossible that is. I do not care even slightly.”

For a long beat he does not move, and I have time to feel the drop in my stomach, the old sure dread that wanting a thing aloud is the fastest way to lose it.

Then his hands come up and frame my face, both of them, engulfing, and he lowers his brow to mine like a man setting down a weight he has carried a very long way.

“Avery Quinn.” My name in that low voice loosens something low in my spine. “I have loved you since you knelt in the snow beside a dying enemy and refused, against all sense, to leave him there. I had no word for it then. I have the word now, and I am finished leaving it unsaid.”

And then he kisses me.

Nothing about it is careful. Everything else he does is measured, rationed, kept in reserve—but his mouth comes down on mine like a wall finally giving way, and I rise onto my toes and fist both hands in the front of his shirt and kiss him back with two years of no in it turning all at once to yes. He tastes of cold air and something warmer beneath it, and when I open to him a sound rolls up out of his chest that I feel land in my own, low and rough and stunned.

His hands slide from my face into my hair, and mine set out across the vast heat of him, the scaled ridges banding his throat, the hard planes his shirt has been hiding, and every place my fingers land he shudders as though the touch is a tongue he was never taught to expect. That, more than anything, is what unspools me: this enormous, disciplined, war-worn male coming apart under the hands of someone barely half his size, because in all his years not one soul was ever gentle with him.

“Inside,” I manage against his mouth. “I have a room. It is small and terrible and the door actually locks.”

“Small will suit me.” His voice has dropped to gravel. “I have no intention tonight of being far from any part of you.”

We do not manage it gracefully. He has to fold nearly double to clear my doorway, and the cot was built for one ordinary human, and none of it matters, because the instant the latch drops we stop being anything except two people who have waited too long.

I get his shirt over his head. The motion is urgent, almost clumsy, and the fabric catches on the ridges of his shoulders before I yank it free. The sight of him stripped to the waist in my cramped little room steals my breath all over again—the bronze scales that climb his neck and spread across his shoulders like armor grown from his skin, the hard muscle beneath, the lattice of old scars that tells the story of every battle he has survived. I want to trace every single one with my mouth. I will, I promise myself. I will learn every mark on him before the night is through.

He works my layers loose with a care wildly at odds with the hunger in his eyes, as if unwrapping something he means to be worthy of. His hands are so large that the fasteners on my jacket seem to baffle him for a moment, and I laugh—a breathless, giddy sound I did not know I still had in me—and help him. His knuckles brush my ribs through the thin undershirt, and the heat of him bleeds through the fabric, and my skin is already aching for more.

When the final cold-weather layer hits the floor and nothing remains between his skin and mine, he goes still and simply looks at me, and it is not a look I have language for. Reverent. Starving. Something perilously close to home. His gaze travels down the length of me—my breasts, the curve of my waist, the thatch of dark hair between my thighs—and I have never felt more seen in my entire life.

“You are certain.” Not a seduction. A door held open. “Say the word and we stop here, and it is enough. You will always be enough.”

“I have never been more sure of anything in my life.” I take that huge hand and press it flat to the bare skin over my heart, so he can feel exactly how fast it is running, and for whom. “I chose you out of a snowdrift, Torvak. I am choosing you now. Stop asking, and come here.”

He comes.

I guide him down onto the cot, which groans in protest beneath his weight but holds. He braces himself above me, forearms planted on either side of my head, and the sight of him looming over me—all that power, all that restrained strength—makes my breath catch. He could crush me without effort. He is holding himself so carefully, so precisely, that the tenderness of it is almost unbearable.

I reach up and drag my fingers through his hair, dark and thick and loose around his shoulders now, and I pull him down to me. His mouth finds my throat, and I arch into it, a helpless sound escaping me as his lips trace the column of my neck, the hollow at its base, the sensitive skin above my collarbone. His teeth graze me there, just enough to make me gasp, and then his tongue soothes the small sting.

“Torvak,” I breathe, and the name is a plea and a prayer all at once.

He moves lower. His mouth closes over one of my breasts, and I cry out—not loud enough to carry beyond the door, but close—as his tongue works the tight peak of me. The heat of his mouth is incredible, a shock of pleasure that radiates straight down to my core. His hand cups the other breast, his thumb stroking in slow circles, and I am already trembling, already wet, already so ready for him that I can barely think.

“Please,” I manage. “Torvak, please, I need⁠—”

“I know what you need.” His voice is thick, almost wrecked, and the restraint in it is fraying at the edges. “I am going to give you everything. But I need to taste you first.”

Before I can ask what he means, he is moving down the length of me, trailing his mouth over my stomach, my hips, the sensitive skin of my inner thighs. I know what is coming, and still the first touch of his tongue against my clit makes me buck off the cot. He holds me down with one massive hand spread across my lower belly, and he takes his time.

The first long stroke of his tongue is patient and thorough, learning the shape of me, the way I respond. I am already slick and aching, and the taste of me on his mouth—I can feel it in the way he groans against me, low and appreciative, as though I am something exquisite. He laps at my clit in slow, deliberate circles, and I am losing my mind, my hands fisted in the thin blanket beneath me, my hips rocking against his mouth without my permission.

“Torvak—” His name breaks on a gasp as he sucks gently, and the pressure sends a spike of pleasure straight through me. He hums against me, the vibration of it setting every nerve in my body alight, and then his tongue slides lower, parting me open, tasting the wet heat of my entrance before sliding back up to circle my clit again. I am so close, so close, and he knows it—I can feel him smiling against my skin, the bastard.

He slips one thick finger inside me, and the stretch of it is incredible. I am tight around him, but so wet that he slides in easily, and he curls that finger just right, pressing against a spot inside me that makes me see stars. A second finger follows, stretching me further, and I am gasping, writhing, my hips canted up to meet him.

“Let go,” he murmurs against my clit. “Let me feel you, Avery. Let me⁠—”