Page 28

Zandrel

By the time I settle myself between Roslyn’s thighs, I’m nearly shaking with just how fucking badly I need her.

Fates, I haven’t been like this since my first fumbling attempts at intimacy, since being hardly more than a youth who barely knew what went where and how to keep myself from letting enthusiasm get the best of me.

I give Roslyn a little more of my weight, kiss her deep, fist my cock and bring it to her soaked, swollen entrance.

She pulls her lips from mine, gasping. “Production, uh, took care of you, too? Birth control, I mean.”

My mind isn’t exactly coherent enough to follow a conversation, but after a few murky moments, I give her a quick nod. “Yes. I’m dormant.”

It was one of the many stipulations of joining the cast, adhering to a birth control policy for all contestants which ensures there won’t be any Mate Match babies conceived by couples who most likely won’t last beyond a single revol after filming wraps.

But Roslyn and I don’t have to worry about that, and I find myself endlessly, deliriously thankful to know the precaution means I can have her just like this. Bare. As she is. The heat and the softness of her. The glorious humanity of her.

“Good.” She presses her hips closer, and it takes every damn thing I have not to sink into her, to lose myself.

I’m nearly mindless with it, that need.

Mindless with want for her, mindless with the desire to be even closer.

“You’re sure?” I make myself ask, needing to hear her say it.

Please, fates, let her say it.

Roslyn curls a hand around my jaw, makes me look at her. “Yes, I’m sure.”

Prayer answered, I ease forward and feel my resolve to take this slow slip again.

I thought Roslyn was scorching the first time I touched her.

I was wrong.

She’s an inferno, a firestorm to obliterate me completely, the blazing center of the brightest star.

The damp heat of her pulls at me, her legs a vise around my waist as she bucks and strains to take me deeper.

“Easy,” I say, stilling to let her adjust, and unbearably, unreasonably pleased at her sharp cry of protest and the straining cant of her hips.

“Can’t,” she says, voice thready and hoarse. “Can’t wait. Please, Zan. Need—I need—”

“I know.”

Withdrawing from her, I lean in to kiss the keening whine that slips from her lips, and take myself in hand once more.

It’s not going to be an easy fit, and I won’t rush this, no matter how prettily she might beg.

I run the head of my cock up the length of her slit. Once, twice, again, working her into a frenzy and stoking her pleasure until she’s soft and wet for me. I notch myself at her entrance and give her an inch, then two, before pulling back and starting again, sinking a little deeper each time.

It drives her out of her fatesdamned mind. Blunt nails digging into my shoulder, teeth scraped over the armored plate on my pec when she rears up and makes her frustration known.

And, because I’ve always been powerless against her, I give her what she wants.

I hitch one of her legs over my hip, then the other, tilting her hips and finding the angle that works for us both. She meets me halfway, body opening for me, letting me in. Sweet and hot and wet and beyond my wildest fantasies.

But when I’m seated fully, pressed so deep inside of her that I can feel her heartbeat as my own, I have to stop again.

We’re both panting, both straining for control, and we’ve barely even begun.

I try one experimental thrust, then two, and my eyes nearly roll back in my skull with the unimaginable pleasure of it. Of her, of the way she meets each thrust with an eager buck of her hips, with fingers buried in my hair as she kisses and bites at every piece of me she’s near enough to taste.

And fates damn it, but I’m not going to last long.

Not like this.

Not when it feels like I’ve been waiting an age to be inside her.

Not when she looks like this—wild and glorious beneath me, cunt spread wide around my cock, a beautiful flush covering her chest, her neck, her soft round cheeks.

Not when she feels like this—so fucking tight, so warm, so perfect.

But even though I won’t last long, I also won’t find that release without her.

I adjust the tilt of my hips, lining up just right so the armored ridges on my pelvis press against her clit and—

“Fuck,” Roslyn curses, and I know I’ve found a new way to make her tremble, a new way to make sure she gets just what she needs.

“I want to feel you,” I tell her, leaning down so I can kiss up her neck, whisper the words into the soft curve of her jaw. “Let me feel you, Roslyn.”

I need it like I need my next breath. To feel the power of her release, to know I gave it to her. Hips tight to hers, I make it my singular purpose in life to last until she gets there.

The fates must be looking kindly on me tonight, because only a few short minutes later she’s tensing beneath me, arms tightening and belly clenching as her breath grows more ragged and her cries more urgent.

And when she comes—a low scream wrenched from her throat, face buried in my neck—I’m lost.

I spill into her with a shout, and through each endless spasm of my orgasm, her name is the sweetest nectar on my lips. A blessing and a benediction and a plea all in one.

Roslyn, Roslyn, Roslyn.

I say it like a vow into the hollow of her throat. Whisper it like a secret to the tender skin just beneath her ear. Trace it into the curve of her breast with my tongue and mold it to her lips with a kiss. When words fail, I keep it just to myself as I rest my forehead to her collarbone.

And it’s there, in the last throes of that pleasure, that a small, quiet voice makes itself known in my mind.

It’s a voice that questions how any of this is possible, how it can be that pleasure and tenderness and a connection like this can even exist.

How did I find her here, of all places? When my life has taken me from one corner of the sector to the other, when I’ve been alone for so very long, how many stars aligned to bring us together?

And, maybe more than anything, it’s a voice that wonders quietly, desperately, how I’ll be able to walk away from her when all of this ends.