Page 88 of Wretched Thorns

“Eli.”

“Two, Serena.”

He came up over her.

***

She wrapped her legs around his hips.

He hadn’t undressed himself. The architecture accommodated. He was bare against her where it mattered, his heavy, hot cock pressed against the inside of her thigh, and her hips came up off the table to find him.

He pushed into her with all the careful precision he had lavished on her at every single part.

She was hot and tight and slick from what his mouth and his hand had already done to her, and the slide of him going in made her arch all the way off the table. Her teeth set in the muscle of his shoulder. His eyes closed because the look on her face was going to undo him before he was ready to be undone.

He paused at the hilt.

“Eli,” she said.

“Give me a second.”

“Oh fuck.”

“Just one second, beautiful, or I’m going to embarrass myself.”

She closed her eyes. She let him have it.

He looked at her in the firelight. The dark wave of her hair against the wood grain of the table. Her lips slightly parted. Her hand at the side of his neck. The bruise at her collarbone where his brother had been. The print of his own mark on the inside of her thigh.

He kissed her once, open-mouthed and slow. She tasted like everything he wanted his life to be made of.

Then he moved.

***

He moved in her slowly, controlled in a way that felt far more dangerous than rushing would have. He kept his eyes on her face. He kept his hand at the pulse of her neck. He moved his mouth to her ear, where his voice could reach her without having to be loud.

“Mine,” he said.

“Yes.” She screamed. “Yes.”

She came. It rolled through the bond in a slow rolling swell, and instantly the onyx and gold threads awakened. She came with her teeth at his collarbone and her nails opening skin on his back. He kept moving through it because it may have been the third one he’d promised her, but he wasn’t done yet.

He shifted the angle of his hips. He found the place she wanted him to find. She started building again before the first wave had finished rolling, and her hand came up to fist in his hair, and she was making noise with every stroke.

He moved faster.

His precision shattered. He let it. His hips pumped into her, hard and deep. She was tight and soaking wet around him, and the sounds of them fucking filled the library between the breaths. Her heels dug into the small of his back and pulled him deeper. The table that wasn’t a table creaked under both of them, disrupting the peace of Eli’s library that wasn’t a library.

He kept his mouth at that tender spot just below her ear. He kept his voice low and soft.

“I want to bite you here.” He said it without slowing. “I want to give you my venom so badly my teeth ache.”

She arched off the table.

“I am not going to.”

“Eli.”