Page 96 of Edge of the Wild

But then Erik pulled back, and it was Oliver’s turn to plead, “Wait, wait.”

Erik chuckled, a fast, rough breath, and set him down just long enough to spin him around. One big hand splayed across Oliver’s throat, tipping his head back onto Erik’s shoulder, and the other pushed up beneath Oliver’s tunic to touch bare skin.

It was Oliver’s turn to moan, as Erik stroked his stomach, traced his ribs, pinched at his nipples. He wanted to look, to see Erik’s hand shifting beneath all the fine, embroidered velvet of his tunic – but Erik kept his head pinned back, not pressing, but the heat of his palm an anchor against his throat.

He skimmed kiss-damp lips along Oliver’s jaw, his temple. “Do you know,” he whispered, right against his ear, while his wandering hand plucked at Oliver’s flies, “what you do to me? How much I want you? All the time.”

Oliver couldn’t hold back a breathy gasp when Erik finally got his trousers open and wrapped that big, warm hand around his cock. “I – I think – I’ve got – some idea,” he panted out.

Erik chuckled. He stroked him, slow and deliberate, for a few moments, completely in control of the situation. But then he grew rougher, more desperate. He ground his own erection into the small of Oliver’s back, and pressed unsteady breaths to the side of Oliver’s head, fingers twitching against his throat. “Gods, I used to be so patient,” he lamented.

“We’ll – we’ll – have to – work on – that.”

“Not tonight.”

The room spun – or, rather, Oliver did. Erik rotated them, and pressed him down, so he stood bent forward at the waist, hands braced on the bed’s soft coverlet. He arched his back immediately, pressed back into the hands that Erik put on his hips – and then used to shove his trousers down to puddle on the carpet.

He knew what was coming, but still shivered when Erik dragged a thumb down his cleft, finding soft, sensitive skin there, a teasing press. But then his other hand gripped Oliver’s cock and started stroking again. “What do you think? Is tonight one of those nights when you can go more than once?”

Oliver groaned. “Yes.”

“Good lad.”

Oh. That was…oh.

Erik knew just how to stroke, and to squeeze; when Oliver thrust into his hand, and let his head fall forward, neck weak with the galloping onslaught of orgasm, he didn’t let up. Stroked him right through it, until Oliver was shaking apart, vision full of starbursts, belly clenching, cock kicking in Erik’s hand.

He didn’t get a chance to recover. Erik skimmed the come off his cock, gathered it where it had splashed across his belly, and then he was reaching back, and pressing at his entrance with one slick finger.

Oliver’s arms threatened to give out, so he went down to his elbows, cheek pressed to the coverlet, and lost himself to it. It was too much, and not nearly enough, and he couldn’t form words, could only breath raggedly, whole body lit up with an abundance of pleasure as Erik stretched him with one, with two, with three fingers.

“Are you ready?”

Oliver could only whimper in the affirmative, beyond speech, and then, blessedly, Erik was pressing in, filling him. Erik had prepared him carefully, but he didn’t both with slow once he was inside, drawing his hips back and snapping them forward immediately.

Cock stirring again, feverish with need, Oliver tried as best he could to push back and meet every thrust. But Erik took pity on him, gripped his hips tight, held him still.

The room filled with the harsh scrape of their breathing, and the smack of sweat-damp flesh as it met again, and again, and again. Oliver couldn’t choke down the wounded sounds that built in his throat; Erik grunted, and swore, and praised him; left bruises on his hips.

The pleasure built almost painfully, this second time. When Erik finally touched his cock, Oliver went off like a May Day firework. He bit the coverlet to keep from shouting, squeezed his eyes shut, and was only half-aware of Erik pressing deep and hard and reaching his own end with a deep, unrestrained moan.

Oliver drifted on a tide of sensation for a while after that. He was aware of Erik pulling out, and cleaning him up. Stripping off the rest of his clothes. His pulse throbbed in every inch of his skin, and speech was beyond him for at least five minutes.

Finally, when he was tucked naked and warm against Erik’s equally naked chest, a fur pulled up over the both of them, he murmured, “Gods.”

Erik’s chuckle sounded tired. But his lips were soft when he pressed them to Oliver’s temple – and left them there. Quietly, but seriously, he said, “I have meant it every moment of the day, and I have tried to show it in the ways I know how. But I know I need to say it, too. I love you. So very much.”

Oliver fell asleep with the pad of Erik’s thumb brushing a tear from his cheek.

12

“I apologize for any rough treatment,” Lord Connor – Connor – said, as Amelia massaged at the rope marks on her wrists. A Stranger was moving down the line of them, cutting their bonds. “Life here tends to be…less than gentle.”

“I can imagine.” She could hear her men grumbling. A glance proved that Malcolm was staring daggers at the former lord. “All of Aquitania thinks you’re dead.”

A wry smirk touched his mouth, and beneath the sun lines, and the heavy threading of silver in his beard, his ragged clothes, he still carried himself with that particular cockiness that all the landed gentry of the kingdom seemed to possess. “The last anyone saw of me, I was floating face-down in the river, bristling with arrows.”

“So your captain said.”

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