His eyes drifted to her breasts, and the response was immediate— with every breath she took, the fabric that covered her nipples seemed to stroke across her and make her even tighter.
“Let me make you feel good, Payne. And we’ll see where this takes you.”
“Yes.” She lifted her hands to his face and pulled him to her mouth once more. “Please.”
Verily, as she would take nourishment from a vein, now she drew upon the warmth of his lips and the slick entrance of his tongue and the energy he called out of her.
Moaning into him, she was submersed in sensation, from the weight of her body on the bed, to the blood coursing throughout her, to the pulsing need between her legs and the delicious ache at her breasts.
“Healer.” She gasped as she felt her thigh get swept over by his palm.
He shifted back, and she was gratified that he was panting as well. “Payne, I want to do something.”
“Anything.”
He smiled. “May I unbraid your hair?”
For certain, her tresses were the last thing on her mind, but his expression was so rapt and intense, she could not deny him the request—or any part of herself. “But of course.”
His fingers trembled ever so slightly as he reached for the end of her braid. “I’ve wanted to do this since the moment I first saw you.”
Gradually, inch by inch, he freed the heavy weight of the black waves she kept long for no other reason than she was too disinterested to tend to them. Given his profound regard for what he revealed, however, she began to wonder if mayhap she’d far underestimated their significance.
When he was finished, he spread the lengths out o’er the bed and just sat back. “You are . . . indescribably beautiful.”
Having never viewed herself as even feminine, much less “beautiful,” it was an astonishment to hear the reverence in not just his words, but his voice.
“Indeed . . . you tie my tongue,” she said once again to him.
“Let me give you something else to do with it.”
As he joined her on the bed and lay beside her, she turned into the cushion of his pectorals and the hard expanse of his stomach. She was big compared to other members of her sex, her body retaining the power that had come from her sire’s side to the point where she often felt ungainly in comparison to other females: No willowy grace as the Chosen Layla had for her—in truth, she was built for fighting, not spiritual or sensual service.
Here with her healer, however, she felt rather perfectly proportioned. He had not the tremendous heft of her twin brother, but he was bigger and thicker than she was, in all the places a male should be: Lying with him in the dim room with their bodies so close together, and the temperature rising everywhere, she was not something that should not be, a malformation of girth and bulk, but an object of desire and passion.
“You’re smiling,” he whispered next to her mouth.
“Am I?”
“Yeah. And I love it.”
Over at her hip, his hands burrowed into her nightgown and she felt it all, from the light drift of his pinkie finger to the smooth skin of his palm to the hot trail his touch left behind as he slowly went upward. Closing her eyes, she arched into him, very aware that she was asking for something, yet unclear as to what exactly she was in search of—but she knew he would give it to her.
Yes, her healer knew exactly what she needed: That hand of his went up her rib cage and paused beneath her heavy, tender breasts.
“Is this okay?” she heard him ask from a great distance.
“Anything,” she gasped. “Anything to feel my legs.”
Except even as the words left her, she sensed that what drove her was less her paralysis and more a greed for him and his sex—
“Healer!”
The sensation of her breast being captured in a gentle caress was a wondrous shock, and she jerked up, her thighs spreading, her heels pressing into the mattress beneath them both. And then his thumb passed up and over her nipple, the stroke shooting a blast of fire to her core.
Her legs sawed on the bed, the tight coil in her sex driving them. “I’m moving,” she said roughly—and almost as an afterthought. What seemed important now was joining with him and having him . . . come . . . inside of her.
“I know, bambina,” he avowed. “And I’m going to make sure you keep it up.”