Chapter 225: Under 2 (M)

BONNIE

"I’m doing it with my whole self," I told him. "The hand is just the part that shows. Sort of a crutch for concentration."

His gaze dropped briefly to the hand still raised beside me, then travelled back to my face. I could practically see the thought forming behind his eyes, and I knew, with the dreadful certainty of a woman who had made the mistake of giving a clever man something interesting to think about, that I wasn’t going to like where it led.

"Can you hold it, though?"

I narrowed my eyes. "Hold what?"

"The lake." He straightened fully and stepped closer, the mud sucking at his heel. "When you’re distracted."

"I’m not distracted."

"Not yet." His mouth curved, slow and wicked, and he stopped close enough that the strange green light between us seemed to deepen. "I was wondering whether you could keep an entire lake suspended in the air when you’re having an orgasm."

I stared at him.

Of all the things he could have said while standing beneath a lake I had just lifted out of its bed, that was what he had chosen.

Lysander’s smile widened.

"Well, Bonnie?" he asked, with the air of a man posing a perfectly reasonable question. "Can you?"

The question landed low and warm in my belly.

"Try me."

He did not need asking twice.

His fingers closed around mine, the hand still wet from the water, and he pulled me into him by it. His other arm swept across my back and took my weight before his mouth reached mine. The kiss was hard and hungry from the first second, and I answered it with my chin tipped up and my free palm flat against his chest, where his heart hit like a fist on a door.

He walked me backward. My heels slid on mud, caught a root, and found nothing at all. Then the back of my knee struck a smooth stone shelf, and he lowered me onto it and came down over me. The cold of the silt soaked into my spine and thighs while the heat of him covered everything else.

"Adventurous," he muttered against my throat. "You call this adventurous. You have rearranged the entire lake."

"Shut up."

"Make me."

I fisted a hand in his hair and dragged his mouth back to mine. He laughed into the kiss, and halfway through it the laugh broke off.

His weight settled, and his hips fit into the cradle of mine as if the shape had been cut for him. He kissed along my jaw and found the place beneath my ear that pulled my whole side tight. The sound that left me was swallowed by the water. His teeth grazed the spot, his tongue followed, and he worked down the column of my throat into the hollow of my collarbone, slow, thorough, like a man reading a page with his mouth. I arched up into him because lying still had stopped being possible.

"You are cold," he said against my breastbone.

"Whose fault is that?"

"Mine. Obviously mine."

He took my nipple into his mouth, and whatever I meant to say about it never formed. His tongue was hot and rough, and when he pulled, the tug ran straight down between my legs and settled there, heavy and aching. My nails bit into the back of his neck. He hummed, low and pleased, and moved to the other breast while his hand covered the first, thumb circling. The two sensations ran together until I could not have told him which was which.

"Lysander."

He lifted his head. "Mm."

"Do not stop to talk."

"I was not going to." He did it anyway, the wretch. His thumb swept the underside of my breast. "You have freckles here. I have thought about them since our first time."

"You pervert."

"We were both perverts that night." His mouth curved. "Your heat and my rut arrived together. Fate has a sense of humor. My wolf was howling in my skull, and I still tried to be a gentleman. It was the hardest thing I have ever done."

"And now?"

"Now I am not being a gentleman."

He dropped lower. His mouth crossed my ribs, my stomach, the dip beside my hip, leaving heat on skin that the night air kept trying to steal back. He nudged my knee wider with his shoulder, and the mud slid cool and slick beneath my heel as it gave way. His breath ghosted over my inner thigh, and every muscle in my body pulled taut, waiting.

He did not rush it. He kissed the inside of one thigh, then the other, then higher, and the flat of his tongue dragged up through me once. My spine left the stone.

"Goddess," I gasped.

He did it again, slower. He found the small hard point of me with his mouth and worked it in a rhythm that was almost lazy, and two of his fingers slid into me with no ceremony at all. The stretch rolled my eyes back.

Around us, the wall of the lake shivered.

He noticed. Of course he noticed. He lifted his head half an inch, fingers still moving, and said, "Hold it."

"I am holding it."

"You are not."

"I am holding it, Lysander. Do not stop."

He put his mouth back where it had been.

What followed was slow, ruthless work. He crooked his fingers and found a place inside me that curled my toes into the silt, and he kept at it with a patience that had to be deliberate, because nobody was that steady by accident. My hips rolled. The power holding the water shook, and the whole curved shell of the lake trembled in time with it, and I did not care. I did not care at all.

"Come here," I managed, and dragged at his shoulder until he brought his mouth up to mine. I kissed him while his hand kept working. I bit his lip and breathed against it, and he groaned into me.

The pressure gathered, drawn up tight and small and unbearable.

"Now," he said against my mouth.

I came apart.