Page 73 of Crown of Thorns

It's the first time in his life he has said that word to anyone. It cracks something in his voice.

I sink down on him slowly. Completely. Every inch accounted for. Every moment deliberate. And his eyes fall shut but I tell him to open them. I tell him to look at me. I tell him to watch the woman he made do this.

It takes a while. He is thick and I have made myself wait as long as I have made him wait, and I go down in stages, lifting off, taking more, until I am flush against him and there is nothing left. I stay there. I put both hands flat on his chest and feel his heart going like something trapped.

"Don't come," I tell him.

"That's not," he says, and stops, and swallows. "That's not entirely in my control."

"Then get it in your control."

I set the pace. Slow. Controlled. Strategic. Every movement is a question being answered. Every touch is a negotiation. I'm in command. I'm the operative now. And he's letting me lead, and the surrender costs him something, I can feel it.

I take his hand and place it on my wrist. I guide his fingers to the veins there. I make him trace them. I make him understand that every beat of my heart, every pulse beneath my skin, is connected to the woman I've become through his hands.

Then I move his other hand. Off the headboard, down, and I put his thumb where I want it and show him the pressure and the speed and take my own hand away.

"There. Exactly there. Don't change it."

He doesn't change it. He is a man who has spent fifteen years learning to execute an instruction precisely and he executes this one precisely, and I ride him with his thumb working my clit in the rhythm I set and his eyes locked on my face, and when I come it is loud and it is long and I do not stop moving through any of it. I feel myself grip him. I hear what it does to him. His hand shakes and stays exactly where I put it.

I don't let him rest. I take his wrist and move his hand to my throat and close his fingers where I want them. Not tight. Present. So he can feel the pulse he is responsible for.

"Like that."

"Renny."

"Don't take it off."

He doesn't take it off. He holds my throat in one hand and my hip in the other and lets me use him, and his eyes never leave my face, and somewhere in the middle of it I stop keeping count of anything at all, which hasn't happened to me since I was old enough to count.

"Look what you made," I tell him.

He looks. His eyes trace my face. His hand shakes as he holds my wrist. He's completely in my control, and it breaks something in him that I can see.

I move faster. I move harder. I take what I need and I feel him trying to control it, trying to flip us, trying to reclaim power. I don't allow it. I press my hand to his chest and I keep him pinned.

"My turn," I tell him. "You taught me. Now let me show you what I learned."

I feel the moment he stops fighting. The moment he surrenders completely. It's not soft. It's not romantic. It's the ultimate vulnerability—being held down by someone smaller, someone younger, someone you trained to be as dangerous as yourself.

The second one comes off the back of the first before I have finished with it. I do not slow down for it. I lean forward and put my forearm across his throat, not pressing, just there, just so he understands that I could, and he goes absolutely still underneath me except for his hips, and I feel his whole body register the position and choose it.

It goes on longer than either of us expects. I lose the rhythm twice and find it again. My thighs burn and I don't stop. He starts saying things underneath me that he won't remember saying afterwards, and I file every one of them, because I file everything, because that is what I am and what I have always been and the only part of me this house hasn't managed to reorganise.

"Now," I tell him. "Now you can."

He comes with my name in his mouth and my forearm across his throat and my free hand pinning his wrist to the mattress, and it is not quiet and it is not controlled and it is nothing like the man who walked into a library four hours ago with his face wiped clean. I feel every part of it. I stay on him until it stops.

Then I let go of him and he gets both arms around me properly for the first time all night and pulls me down onto his chest hard enough that the air goes out of me.

We lie there a long time. His arms are locked around my back. His heart is still going too fast under my ear. I reach up without looking and put my hand flat on his sternum and hold it there, counting, the way I would with any animal coming down off something that had overloaded it, until the rate drops under a hundred.

"You can talk now," I say.

"I don't have anything."

"That's a first."