Page 28 of The Shield
He lowered his head.
I made a sound I didn’t know I could make.
The world narrowed to the point of contact and the way he treated it—reverent, strategic, relentless. He tested. He listened to every shiver, every catch of breath, every mindless plea that fell out of me when he hit something right. He didn’t try to show me everything. He found the thing that made my knees tremble and stayed there, adjusting pressure and angle until I was shaking with it.
“Better?” he asked again, voice ruined.
“God.” My hands found his shoulders. I didn’t push him away. I clung like he was the only fixed thing in a flood. “Don’t stop.”
“That’s the idea,” he said, laughing a little against my skin, the sound vibrating through me.
He used his hands like he’d been taught precision where force alone wasn’t enough. He steadied. He coaxed. He braced me when the rhythm pulled a sound out of me that made my face flame even as I chased it again. I didn’t have words for the way the heat built: tidal, inevitable, patient and merciless at once.
I had always done this to myself, one hand, clean and efficient, a quiet thing with a quiet end.
This wasn’t quiet.
His voice threaded through it, a low murmur I felt more than heard.
Good girl. Breathe. Let me. You’re safe.
The words unhooked something inside the cage of my ribs. I pressed my forehead to the glass and sobbed out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding since I was nineteen.
“Eyes on me,” he said, and when I looked down at him, what I saw there tipped me over a line: hunger and patience and pride. He wanted this for me.
“I—” My voice broke. The wave rose and rose and rose, carrying me with it whether I consented or not. “Ethan?—”
“Let go.”
I did.
It came like a break in a levee—violent, holy, the relief so intense it hurt. My body locked and then shuddered around the release, sounds tearing out of me I wouldn’t have believed if you’d played them back. The rush went so deep, it turned my hands numb, my bones light. I felt the edges of myself dissolve and reassemble, every nerve rinsed clean and bright.
It didn’t whisper. It roared.
He didn’t stop at the first pass of it. He held me through the aftershocks, easing the pressure when I whimpered, giving it back when my hips chased him. He tasted me like gratitude. He didn’t let me fall. He rode it out with me, attention locked, hands sure, body braced like he’d been born to keep things from breaking.
When I finally slumped, boneless and dazed, he lifted his head, the curve of his mouth swollen, eyes dark with intent that hadn’t burned off in the water. He touched my cheek with the back of his fingers like I was heat he didn’t want to drop. I realized I was crying a little, not from sadness but from the stupid, human shock of being handled with care.
“First?” he said softly.
I nodded. A laugh jumped out of me on a sob. “With a man,” I managed. “God.”
The smile that broke slowly across his face felt like sun flaring in a storm. “Good,” he said, voice rough. “We’re not done.”
I caught his wrist. “You—” I looked down, the ache of wanting to be good colliding with the new knowledge of what it meant to be given to. “I want?—”
“You will,” he said again, patient and sure. “But not by trading. Today, I want you ruined on nothing but taking.”
Heat flashed through me so fast my vision blurred for a second. I nodded, helpless and greedy.
He lifted me again, turning, the motion easy and sure. He found a better angle, a better brace, the glass at my back, his shoulder under my knee. He kissed me hard, swallowing the small broken sounds that kept kicking out of me against my will.
When he slid into me slowly—yes, he was careful, yes, he was big, yes, I gasped and then relaxed and then gasped again—he kept his eyes on mine. He watched every change in my face like it mattered more than his own shaking breath.
I wrapped around him and forgot every polite thing I’d learned about not asking for too much.
“Tell me,” he said.
