Page 65 of Into Ember

“Erik.” I pull back just far enough to see him. “Please.”

“Fuck.” His forehead drops to my shoulder. “You can’t do that.”

I grin into his hair.

“You’re going to be the death of me,” he says into my skin, and I feel it more than hear it.

“That’s why I made you feel alive, Erik.”

Oh my God. I said that. Out loud. With my whole mouth. Somewhere Ashley just felt a disturbance and doesn’t know why — and the worst part, the worst part, is that he knows it too. He goes still.

Then he stops being good.

His hands move. Up my back. Into my hair. His mouth on my throat, my shoulder, down, and he’s not hurrying, he’s not hesitating either, and I had a thought, I definitely had a thought, it had words in it—

His palm slides up my ribs.

Over the tattoo.

The spark hits like a struck match, deeper than skin, deeper than anywhere I knew I had, and I gasp with my whole body, and his breath punches out of him at the same time. He feels it. His hand presses flat over the little dragon like he’s holding the heat in.

“There,” he says, rough, against my ear. “There you are.”

“What is— why does it—”

“Later.” His palm moves and the match strikes again. “Right now, just this.”

Everything runs hotter after that. His mouth is on my collarbone and the water is moving and my skin feels turned all the way up, everywhere at once. At some point my hips picked up a slow rhythm against him all on their own, and he groans like he never wants me to stop, and then something starts up in my chest.

A vibration, low and rolling, and it doesn’t stop.

Erik pulls back and looks at me with an expression I have never seen on his face before.

“You’re purring.”

“I’m not—” I am. I can feel it now, humming up through my sternum like it’s been waiting there my whole life for a reason to start. “Dragons purr?”

“You do.” He says it like it’s the best thing he’s ever heard. “Don’t stop.”

I couldn’t if I tried, and I’ve officially stopped trying. I lift up in the water and reach between us and take him in my hand, heavy and hard and somehow hot even in the hot water, and his whole body jerks, his head tipping back against the copper rim, and the sound he makes is not entirely human.

I did that. Me.

I line us up and sink down onto him, slow, because I have to be, because there is a lot of him and my body needs a minute to believe this is actually happening. My thighs are shaking by the time I’ve taken all of him, and his hands are shaking harder, holding my hips, letting me set every inch of the pace, and when I finally settle we’re both just breathing.

I have read a thousand versions of this moment, and not one of them came close.

“Ella.” It’s barely a voice at all. “Look at you.”

I look at him instead, and his eyes are gone, all the way gone, and I did that too.

I start to move.

Slow at first, learning it — the rise and the long drag of him inside me, the way the water lifts me half-weightless so that every stroke gives everything. I can be greedy about it, and I am immediately, thoroughly greedy about it. And he follows me. I wasn’t prepared for that. I set the pace and this enormous, ancient, dangerous man follows it, rising to meet me exactly as hard as I ask and not one bit harder. His hands spread over my hips like I’m giving orders and he’s taking them.

“Like that,” he says, low, watching me move on him. “Just like that. Take what you want, Ella.”

So I do. I roll my hips and find the angle that makes the edges of the room go white, and then I do it again, and again, because I found it and it’s mine now, and he makes a sound against my throat that I feel in my teeth. His hands slide up from my hips, over my waist, and his thumbs sweep the undersides of my breasts a breath before his mouth follows, hot and unhurried even now, even with me riding him, like he refuses to rush a single part of this, and every pull of his mouth lands somewhere much lower than where it starts.