HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME

Chapter 18

The correspondence chain was still on the table when Raze came back.

He looked at it. Then at me. He had been running the final perimeter check and I had been sitting in the chair for forty minutes, not reading, not moving, not thinking about anything that would help either of us tomorrow. When he closed the door and the room settled, the air shifted in the particular way it shifted when we were alone and the operational day was finished and there was nothing left standing between us.

"Tomorrow is going to be hard," I said.

"Yes."

"I don't want to think about tomorrow."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he crossed the room and took my hand and pulled me up from the chair.

He kissed me slowly. No urgency in it, no performance of patience but actual patience, his hands at my jaw, thumbs tracing the line of it, his mouth unhurried against mine. I kissed him back the same way. The room was warm and quiet and outside the compound kept its watch and none of that had any weight in here.

He walked me to the cot. Sat me on the edge of it. Went to his knees.

He undressed me slowly, each piece taken off with the particular deliberateness of someone for whom the undressing was its own thing, not a step toward something else but part of it. When I was bare he looked at me in the low lamplight with that specific look, the one I had been cataloguing without meaning to since the yard, and then he lowered his head and put his mouth on the inside of my thigh and I stopped cataloguing anything.

He built it the way he built everything. Patiently. Thoroughly. His mouth moved up my inner thigh, taking its time, and when he finally put his lips on my c**t I made a sound I had no control over and my hands went to the edge of the cot and held on. His hands spread flat across my thighs, holding me open, keeping me still while his tongue worked in slow deliberate circles that took me apart with the focused precision of someone who had been paying attention for a very long time.

He slid two fingers inside me. Curled them upward. His mouth did not stop.

My hips moved against his face. I stopped trying to manage any of it, stopped trying to be quiet or measured or in control of anything. He read every sound I made and responded to each one, his fingers working deeper, his tongue increasing its pressure at exactly the moment I needed it to, and when the orgasm came it came completely. My thighs closed around his head, both hands fisted in his hair, his name coming out of me loud and unguarded. He worked me through every wave of it without stopping, his tongue gentling but not withdrawing, until I was shaking and oversensitive and pulling him up by the hair because I could not survive any more of it.

He rose and kissed me. I tasted myself on his mouth and felt nothing but more wanting.

I reached for his belt. Got my hand around him, thick and already hard, and stroked him once and felt him exhale slowly through his nose, that low controlled sound that meant his restraint was doing real work. I stroked him again, more deliberately, and watched his jaw tighten and his eyes darken and felt the particular satisfaction of being the specific person who did that to him.

"Nyra." Low. Warning and want in equal measure.

"I know," I said.

He came over me on the cot. One hand braced beside my head, the other guiding himself, and when he pushed inside me I felt every inch of him, the stretch and the fullness and the deep specific satisfaction of a body finally having the thing it had been circling for three years. He was thick enough and long enough that I needed a moment to take him fully and he gave me that moment without being asked, perfectly still, forehead at my temple, both of us breathing.

Then he moved.

Long and deep. Each stroke slow enough that I felt all of it, the full length of him driving in and pulling back, my walls gripping him on every thrust, his c**k filling me so completely that there was no part of me he was not touching. His mouth went to my throat. He shifted my leg higher, changed the angle, and found something deep and precise that made me gasp and rake my nails down his back.

He did it again. Watching my face while he did it.

His hand closed around my throat. Firm and deliberate and certain.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked.

He held my gaze and f****d me deeper and I felt the second orgasm building faster than the first, sharper at its edges, his c**k stroking the exact internal point that turned my vision soft at the edges. My hips rose to meet every thrust. The sound of it filled the room. I did not care.

He pulled out and turned me over in one smooth motion, hands certain and practiced. My palms hit the wall, his chest pressed to my back, and when he pushed back inside from behind I felt him even deeper than before, his c**k reaching places that emptied my mind of everything that was not this. His hand wrapped around my hip and his fingers found my c**t and worked it in firm circles while he drove into me with a rhythm that was completely without mercy and completely without hurry simultaneously, deep and relentless and focused entirely on taking me apart.

"Let me hear you," he said, his mouth at my neck.

I heard myself. Loud and stripped of every performance and completely beyond caring what it sounded like.

The second orgasm came with my hands flat on the wall and my whole body shaking and his name in my mouth with no composure left around it. He did not stop. His fingers worked my c**t without letting up and his c**k kept its pace and the second orgasm rolled directly into a third that arrived harder and deeper than either of the others, his c**k hitting the deepest point of me on every stroke while his fingers refused to give me any mercy until my legs stopped holding me up entirely.

He caught me before I went anywhere.

He turned me and laid me back and came over me and I felt him lose his rhythm at last, his thrusts deepening and shortening, his grip on my hip going past careful into something I would feel tomorrow. He came buried inside me, my name rough and broken in his throat, his whole body shuddering once with the force of it and then going heavy and still.

I did not remember closing my eyes.

His chest was beneath my cheek when I surfaced. His heartbeat slow and steady under my ear. His hand moved through my hair in long repetitive passes, like he had been doing it for a while and had no intention of stopping.

The lamp still burned. The correspondence chain was still on the table. Tomorrow was still coming and would ask everything of both of us.

I was already under before I made the decision to sleep.