by Holley Trent
“Your skin is so soft.” He swept soft lips across her forehead and then laid gentle kisses down the column of her nose. By the time he’d made his way to her lips, she’d pursed them for him.
He danced the tip of his tongue across the seam and she opened her mouth, letting him in, distracting herself from his hand roving below.
He stilled his fingers on her hip momentarily, and then inched them downward to her juncture. He swirled his fingertips there, too, just like he had at the small of her back, touching nothing of consequence.
Not yet, anyway.
Even him toying with the hair between her legs was oddly stimulating.
“Hook your leg over mine,” he said, and she did, because she wanted to see what he’d do next—where his hands would go, how he’d keep her on edge.
Just like before, his hand moved slowly, gently over her. He cupped her mound, covering more than massaging, and even that made her toes curl.
He tugged her bottom lip between his teeth and lashed his tongue over where he’d stung. He plunged his tongue in and out of her mouth, and she didn’t kiss him back—not because she didn’t want to, but because she wasn’t good at it, and she didn’t want him to stop.
She encouraged him in other ways—with grinding her sex against his slowly moving hand, with her quiet murmurs, with her fingers digging into his bicep.
He rolled her onto her back, and before she could object, he loomed over her—propped up on his hands scanning down the parts of her body that were uncovered.
His quiet growl made her cheeks burns, and the way he dragged his gaze down from her lips to her breasts made her pussy thrum.
She couldn’t remember anyone ever looking at her with such heat, but no one had ever taken his time with her, either.
He crawled backward, and wedged a knee between her legs to part them. He spread her legs wider than seemed necessary to her, but she wouldn’t complain. For once, she’d just watch and wait.
He settled on his knees between her legs and smoothed his palms up her belly.
She tried not to think about the wrinkled extra skin there—the elasticity that hadn’t returned after she’d had her child.
He’s a doctor. He’s seen it all before.
He pushed her breasts together and licked from one nipple to the next, moving on before one could get too stimulated—before she could beg him to take the thing wholly in his mouth. She wanted him to do that. She wanted excess. Stiff peaks so aroused they hurt. She wanted the pain when his chest crushed hers and the relief as her whole body went numb from pleasure.
“Chris…”
He lifted his head from her. “I told you I was going to take my time.”
“I appreciate your restraint, but—”
“Did you really just expect me to slam my dick into you and get it over with?”
“No, I wasn’t going to make that complaint. I just…” She shook her head. She’d lost the train of thought again, which should have been her big clue that whatever she was going to say hadn’t been important.
She closed her eyes and gave her head a small, frustrated shake. “Never mind.”
“Tell me.” He plied her wet nubs between his fingers, and her sex gave an answering jolt and her breath raced from her lungs.
“You like that?” he whispered.
His lips were near her ear, his deep voice inciting rippling vibrations down her spine. Making her wet. So wet.
She swallowed. Nodded.
“What do you want to tell me?”
Sighing, she forced her eyes open and made herself meet his gaze. Pale and bright in the dim room.
So beautiful, she thought.
“You must not see what I can see, then,” he said.
She rolled her eyes. “I need to do better keeping you out of my head.”
“You’re doing pretty good already, all things considered. You have an instinct for this because you’re one of us.”
“One of you…”
“Mm-hmm.” He dipped low again, and sucked one pointed nipple between his teeth. The edges raked over the sensitive flesh, and he set them into the skin of her breast.
“Fuck.” She hooked a foot around his ass to keep him moving—to keep him biting and sucking, but he likely didn’t need the encouragement. He was going to do whatever he wanted, and she was going to let him.
Just when she’d started to settle into a groove of anticipating the tiny servings of pain and the pleasurable kisses and licks that followed, he moved on down her body.
She let out a petulant whimper and curled her fingers into the covers.
“There’s more to taste,” he said.
He kissed around her navel, dipped his tongue into the cavity briefly, and then glided his soft lips down her belly.
His tongue lashed quickly around her clit, and she growled like he had before because, all too quickly, he’d pulled his mouth away.
“Chris.”
“Be patient, witch. I’m going slowly for my sake as well as for yours.”
“Witch?”
He slipped a finger between her folds and pressed his thumb beside her quivering bud.
She made some strangled sound that didn’t hint at pleasure, but more of need.
She needed him to undo her so badly. She hadn’t known satisfaction in too long.
“You know what you are.” He pulled his finger from her and then slipped it between his lips.
She made that strangled sound again and watched him suck his finger clean—watched him lick every side of the digit and then go back inside her for more.
Then two fingers.
“You think I have you under some sort of spell?” she asked.
“You may joke, but you do. If you didn’t, I wouldn’t want you so much. Wouldn’t want to plant my face between your thighs and lick you apart. Wouldn’t want to keep my cock buried inside you and to keep rutting until I fall apart, too. I’m desperate to be in you right now.”
“You’re hiding the need well.”
“Only because I’m going so fucking slowly, Martina.”
She loved the way he said her name like it was a song for him to sing or a prayer to be spoken. Her name didn’t sound like an afterthought when he spoke it.
He settled between her legs and, using his thumbs, spread her lips, exposing her tender places. He made her clench and clamp, but he put his tongue there, anyway.
He dipped the tip in first, as if to taste her, and then laved up and down the slit. Stimulating and teasing. Stirring her arousal and frustrating the hell out of her.
So slow. So careful.
But he seemed to be enjoying that excruciating pace. Each time he sat back on his heels, she watched his cock snap against his belly. The head glistened with his arousal, weeping over the stretched foreskin, and she wanted to touch. She needed to quell the tactile desire, and wanted to see if he were as silky as he looked. Wanted to see if that liquid at the top was enough to lubricate the entire length of him, wanted to find out for herself if he was as hard as he was going to get, and if not, if she could help him get there.
“Pretty,” she whispered as he leaned in.
He stiffened his tongue and worked it into her thrumming sex. “Did you just call my cock pretty?”
“It is from this view.”
“I bet it’d be prettier inside you. The part of it you’d still be able to see, anyway.”
The frissons of pleasure radiating from her sex to her core yanked a gasp through her parted lips, and she growled when his fingertips pinched her clit.
Of course a doctor would be a multi-tasker.
Her fingers curled into the covers and toes cramped behind his back. Her body was stiffening, tightening from his ministrations, and she was trying desperately to stave off the avalanche.
Already. Damn.
He stoked her sex, working his fingers in and out of her in a slow, torturous rhythm. His lack of speed was probably for the best. If he’d gone fast, she might have come apar
t. With his mouth on her, licking and sucking, and his thick fingers supplying such delicious pressure, she was on sensory overload.
She hadn’t let anyone take her there in so long, and that made her encounter with Chris that much more intense.
He sucked her clit hard into his mouth, and hummed, and she shouted loud enough to wake dead Vikings in Denmark.
She whimpered behind the hand she placed on her mouth, and her body shook.
“It’s all right,” he projected.
“What is that?”
“You’ve never been with one of us.”
At that curious statement, he crawled up between her legs and wrapped them around his waist. With his long-armed reach, grabbing for the condom strip on the nightstand was no hard chore for him. He ripped one off, and had it unrolled in what seemed like an instant, but Marty’s head was swimming. Time made no sense to her anymore. All that mattered to her at the moment was her body and Chris’s.
His strong, beautiful body…and he was pointing part of it at her core and giving her a sultry look that, on its own, could have made her come.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
She couldn’t tell if she’d heard him with her ears or with that psychic part of her. She couldn’t tell the difference between verbal speech and mental speech—not when she was so distracted by where his cock was and how her skin felt alight. She felt positively phosphorescent—glow-in-the-dark—from his touch.
“Stick with me,” he said. “This might be a little disorienting at first.”
“What might be?”
He leaned in and nipped her bottom lip between his teeth before letting it snap back in. His cock head was positioned at her entrance, the blunt end of him seeking to be inside her.
“You’ve never been with one of us,” he repeated. “But I’m not just anyone. This may turn out to be my most inelegant fuck ever.”
“Inelegant sounds good.” Anything sounded good, as long as he put that big dick inside her and took away her suffering.
“I don’t want you to think I can’t do better.” He brushed the head side to side against her slit, and she turned her bottom up to meet his angle.
She didn’t want him pulling back or thinking he’d missed his target. “What’s going to happen?” she asked.
“I can’t say for sure.”
Just the tip of him inside her stole her breath. Large and intrusive. Not far enough inside to get her motor running, but enough to make her second-guess her life choices.
“The likely consequence…” He rolled his hips, made his cock stretch her entrance before pushing more of him into her clenching channel. “Fuck. Stop doing that.”
“You assume I can stop that?” She couldn’t help her body being greedy after so long and with him feeling so good.
He growled and pushed in deeper, lowering himself onto his forearms and closing his eyes. He let out a fluent stream of swears and then sucked in a long breath.
“The likely consequence, Martina, from what I’ve heard, is that one or both of us may black out for a moment during the rewire.”
“The what?”
“I can’t explain what’ll happen in a context that makes any sense at all. People like us, we…swap a bit of what makes us unique when we have intercourse. We usually go right back to normal when all is said and done, but I hear the recovery is different when you’re with the person you’re fated to be with.”
“How? And fated?”
“My dreams. You were in them. You were a promise. There aren’t many recent cases like this to draw on, so let’s find out and collect some data ourselves.”
She was going to give him leave to do that, but she hadn’t had time to get the words out—or the thought out.
He pushed into her as far as he could go, and she made that embarrassing sound again.
He chuckled as he found his rhythm, and she bit down into the flesh of her forearm to keep from crying out.
Even without the threat of psychic distraction, just the physical nature of what he was doing had her blood ready to boil over.
Her sex was so full of him, and each hard thrust sent an answering tug to the nipples pressed beneath his sweat-dampened chest. She tingled there, thrummed down below, and his fingers notched into one ass cheek added just the right amount of pain. Normally, she might have backed down from it, but with Chris, she courted the feeling.
She courted the heady blend of sensations, and the sound of his deep voice as he whispered encouraging things into her mind—“That’s right, baby, so fuckin’ wet. Squeeze my cock just like that.” He made her feel like a goddess. She was the only one who could give him that kind of pleasure. She wasn’t just an anonymous body or one face in a crowd.
“Mine,” he thought at her and gave her ass a punishing squeeze that would probably leave marks, and she didn’t care.
Let him mark me.
“Need more,” she projected. “The angle… I want to be on top.”
He rolled her, barely pausing to figure out the physics, and somehow managed not to unsheathe himself.
On his back, he gripped her hips and rocked upward, his gaze holding a heated dare.
She yipped and clawed her fingers into the bed as she leaned in.
He was still the one doing all the work. She’d intended to ride him, but had lost sight of the point. He was doing enough. She was so full and could hardly breathe, and each thrust took away her will to do so, anyway.
Swallowing hard and forcing herself to pull in a deep breath, she leaned forward more, crushing her breasts against his chest and digging in her knees against his thighs.
He was hitting that sensitive spot inside her again and again, and each thrust compressed her already quivering clit and made her body quiver in turn.
“Let me have you,” he whispered.
He rolled his hips and pressed her tightly against his body, and she wondered how he could possibly think he didn’t already have her.
“I don’t…I don’t know what else I can do,” she said.
Besides tugging the tempting lobe of his ear between her teeth and hissing along the edge of his jaw. She wanted to taste and devour every part of him—wanted to memorize the sensations of him, or more—for him to just merge into her so she could feel everything that was his at once.
And she must have, because in one instant she was screaming out some vulgar thing as her body convulsed atop him, and the next there was just light.
And flashes.
Memories?
Not hers.
Chris through his own eyes. A stream of his milestones. Everything that was important about him. Everything that gave him something to offer a woman. All his motives. All his wishes.
And his dreams…of Marty.
Me?
She saw that he pictured her, and also Shani, who wasn’t her father’s anymore, because she was Chris’s, and there were other kids, too.
That was what Chris wanted, and he wanted it so badly because some Viking god had given him a dream telling him he could have it all.
Marty didn’t have any such favor, but she knew one thing.
She wanted Chris, too.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Martina? Sweetheart?”
Chris hated to wake her. She was so sweet in sleep with the way she curled into him, clutching whatever she could reach of his body with her arms and legs. Touching whatever skin she could.
He didn’t want to stop touching her, either—he never wanted to stop touching her, and especially not so soon after they’d joined, but Paul was standing in Chris’s bedroom doorway asking for a quick consult, of all damn things.
“Sorry, man,” Paul said.
Chris grimaced, and tried again to wake her. No dice.
There was a chance he couldn’t just yet. He hadn’t passed out, but he’d come damned close. He’d barely had his wits about him well enough to slip out of her and get the condom off before he fell asleep with her atop him.
He had no
way of knowing what she’d seen when her eyes had taken on that faraway look and her body had stiffened on top of his, but as soon the magic had slaked, she’d been putty in his arms. He knew what he’d seen, and they needed to talk about it at some point—about her father and mother.
About the repressed magic she didn’t understand that was so different from her father’s. Dan Petersen couldn’t do what his daughters could. The best Chris could guess, though, was that Dan couldn’t sense it. Chris could, though. He might have been one of the very few people aware of it.
He pulled the covers up over her shoulders and waved Paul into the room.
“Is she just asleep, or out-out?” Paul asked.
“Out-out.”
Paul grunted and settled into the chair by the window. “So…”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Couldn’t be surer. She’s mine. She’s it for me.”
Paul nodded slowly and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Well, congrats.”
Judging from Paul’s flat tone and the stern set of his lips, Chris wasn’t completely convinced that Paul meant the congratulations, but Chris couldn’t take his lack of enthusiasm personally. He knew his friend well. Paul hadn’t wanted to believe that lowly men like them would be favored with matches. He’d been amused when Chris had told him back in college that he wanted to hold out for his. Even back then, Chris hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that there was some woman meant for him and that he’d know her when he saw her. The dreams came later. Bits and pieces at a time—glimpses of her.
“So, what’s up?” Chris asked. “Must be important for you to wake me at seven on my day off.”
Paul blew a raspberry and rolled his gaze up to the ceiling. “I don’t know if I’d call this consult important so much as urgent. One of the old docs called me looking for answers, and I didn’t want to tell him I didn’t know, so here I am. I think you’ve diagnosed more cases of endo than that guy.”
“Endometriosis?”
“Yeah. Apparently, a lady damn near crawled into the ER on her belly last night begging for pain meds. She said nothing OTC could touch the ache, and at one point she started wishing for death, or at the very least for someone to scoop out her midsection.” He snorted. “She claimed she didn’t really need it, anyway.”
