#qotn

"Come here," he said, and when I went to him, he reached up to tangle his fingers in my hair and finally, finally kissed me.

It was electric.  He was very straight-forward about it; I'd barely started to kiss back before he was nibbling at my lower lip.  The instant I responded to that, his fingers tightened in my hair and he pressed his tongue to mine.  His mouth tasted like salt and basil; I recognized that from the tooth powder that I used now, too.

God, his lips were soft, and as I sank into the sensation, he pulled me even closer to him.  He managed to disentangle his hands and used one to cup the back of my head while the other wandered down my back — pressing first at the center of my spine, then finding the hollow in my lower back and pushing me there, using it as leverage to pull me as close as he could.

I grabbed his collar and stretched onto my toes, curious and delighted.

It turned out that I had the breath control to outlast him.  He eventually had to pull his head back and inhale harshly through his mouth, like he'd forgotten to use his nose.  His chest actually heaved with the effort.

I let him stay there, but I took the opportunity to run one palm over his arm.  Fucking muscle on top of muscle, I swear.  I'd always known he was big and I'd seen his strength in a number of different ways.  It was a totally different thing to actually put my hands on the source of it.

A better thing.

Lycus grasped me by the shoulders and pulled me back into him, as gentle as he seemed to know how to be.  He leaned his head down again, but this time, he just rested his forehead against mine.

"I could have lost you," he said, so softly that at first I wasn't sure I'd really heard him.

"You didn't."

"I could have.  Fifteen different times — and that was only in the active assassination attempt.  There were other opportunities."

"Wre handled it.  We'll keep handling it."

He pressed another kiss — feverish: heated and aimless and short — against my mouth, and whispered back, "I don't know if I can."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything.  I just chased his mouth with mine, catching him for another kiss.  This time, I bit his lip when he started to return it, and judging by the way one hand immediately dropped to the curve of my ass, the way he opened his mouth a little wider for me, he was very into it when I took charge.  When I pressed into his mouth, he squeezed.

And then we were both breathing heavily.  Lycus moved to untie his cuffs and pull his shirt off.

What we were heading for picked that moment to hit me.  So did my scruples.  Threaten a pregnant woman's execution?  I could do that, apparently, but I couldn't abuse the power I had over the captain of my guard and my oldest friend.

"Are you sure about this?  If you're not, I understand.  You said you can't be —"

He snorted a bitter laugh.  "I've been compromised from the start.  I'm not going to be less distracted, leaving now.  Just sloppily armored."

That was true.  It made my heart hurt anyway.  I looked away, not sure how to respond.

Lycus reacted by touching his thumb and a finger to my chin, gently making me look back at him.

"What happens next… what would change, if I left now, but lost you tomorrow?  What would my regrets really be?"

"About the same as mine, I think," I said, and stepped forward, into him.  I wrapped my arms around his neck and snuggled in close.  His skin smelled of sweat and, weirdly, lavender.

As he always seemed to, Lycus took the opportunity to pick me up and carry me.  I think he got the same kick out of it that I did, if from the other side of things.  I loved that swooping sensation in my stomach when he lifted me, loved twining my arms around him, loved that feeling of being totally supported.

He was big and he was terrifyingly strong and every single time he carried me, it was like a silent, subtle promise that he would always put all that raw, physical power at my disposal, rather than use it on me.  It was a heady feeling.

He dropped me carefully on what had seemed until now like a uselessly big bed.  He took that moment to pull his shirt off, tossing it away as carelessly as he had the surcoat, before he climbed in with me.  For my part, I took the chance to touch all that exposed olive skin, dancing my fingers from his collar bone to one of his pecs and then sliding lower. I followed the line of thicker, darker hair that started just under his belly button to the waistline of his trousers.

He sucked in a breath — and his stomach — and I laughed.

"Ticklish," I said, but I didn't keep teasing.  Instead, I pulled him down to kiss me, tangling my fingers in his hair, gripping the back of his head.

He kissed me back, biting at my lips, but seemed more interested in reaching around behind me to unfasten the whitewood buttons of my dress.  When he reached the third, he made an indignant noise into my mouth, and I laughed again, half-turning and pulling my hair over my shoulder.

Jesus, my crown was still on my head.  Forget Aquanet; apparently all I needed was a determined maid and a bunch of tiny, jabby hairpins.

While he focused on my dress, I unpinned my hair and underhanded the crown toward the side table like the most valuable frisbee of my life.  It clattered away.

Lycus' hands stilled on my dress for a moment, but then he pressed his lips to the part of my upper back he'd revealed.  It felt strange through my chemise, and he made another annoyed sound.

I stood and tugged the dress off, laying it aside as carefully as he had his mail, and laughed at Lycus' annoyance at my shift and slip.

"Just the chemise and stays after this," I promised.  "And the stockings, unless you want those to stay on."

Lycus gave me a look like he was seriously considering tearing the rest of my clothes off with his teeth.

I couldn't help it.  I laughed again: it was just so purely him.  I pulled my shift and slip off, then waited while he tugged at the laces of my stays.  I heard him muttering curses under his breath at the knots my maid had tied, but with one final jerk he undid them, and I felt the stays loosen.

Lycus tossed them aside like they had personally offended him, then untied the ribbon at the neckline of my chemise and drew it up over my head.

I turned, then, and reached out to cup my hand over his cheek.  I knew the reaction that was coming.  Every man and most of the women I'd ever dated had shared it.

He turned his face into my palm for a moment, surprisingly thick eyelashes shuttering down as he closed his eyes.  When he opened them, I could see the minute his focus zeroed in on my breasts.

He reached up to touch, first stroking then cupping the sides of them.  Then he lifted my breasts in his hands.

I scooted forward, closer to him, and he made a noise of vague approval.  He was one hundred percent focused, and there was no keeping the smile off my face because of how ridiculously, giddily warm he made me feel.

"Lycus," I said, and had to say it again to get his attention back.  I pressed a kiss to his brow, delicate and gentle and over all too soon, and asked, "What comes next… have you done this before?"

He struck me as the kind of man who would have reacted to not being able to have the person he wanted by just not sleeping with anybody.

Lycus stilled for a second, and then said, "Enough to know what I'm about."  He paused, considering, and asked, "Is there some expectation otherwise, in Seattle?"

"Nah, but I think it's easier to talk about, there.  It just would have changed my, like, angle of approach."  I heard the 'like' slip out and wanted to kick myself.  But if he noticed the verbal pause, he didn't seem to care.

Instead, he offered me that damnable, devastating movie star corner-of-his-mouth smile.  "Your angle?"

"You know what," I said, and then thought better of using words at all.  I reached out and pushed on his chest.

Lycus, saint that he was, humored me, falling back to the soft sheets.  I straddled him and reached down to the laces on his trousers.  I wasn't used to dealing with knots there, but it wasn't any worse than button fronts, really, and I'd had plenty of experience getting those off people.

I rolled off him and let him strip them off with a writhing motion that didn't look sexy, but the sheer intimacy and vulnerability of how dumb he looked made it hot.  I put a mental bookmark on that thought to figure out later.

Not even counting the multitude of dick pics I received in Portland and Seattle, I liked to think that I'd seen a fair number of dicks in my day.  Some of them had been meh, some of them had looked more like a technical challenge, and some of them had made my whole brain light up like I'd won a prize.

Lycus' made my mouth go dry.  It wasn't his length that impressed me — whatever the hell it was in inches, he looked proportional considering his height — but the girth.  He was uncut, which looked mildly weird to me, but dear god, he was thick.

My brain got stuck on the word 'thick,' and I lost power of speech.  I possibly lost power of thought.  It took me a full fifteen seconds to manage the words, "Oh god, I want to ride you so bad," and I only got them out because he started to look kind of worried.

He let out a breath.  "I was about to ask if you'd ever —"

"— Yes.  Can we stop talking now, because I really want... "  I made a helpless waving gesture; I was pretty much out of words.

He reached for me.  I put my palms in his for a second, then slid them down his arms and straddled him again.  I watched his teeth bite into his lower lip, out of interest or uncertainty, and leaned forward to kiss him.

I found one question.  "Trust me?"

"Yes," he told me, simple and honest.

I shifted on top of him, lining us up, then slowly, slowly sank down.  I didn't want to go slow.  I felt like I'd been starving for how much and how long I'd craved him and I wanted to feast.  I didn't let myself: I took him in slow inch by slower inch.  The way I had to stretch to take him was the perfect kind of pain.  Shivers rolled down my spine even as it burned so good, like my chest when I was belting a note at the bottom of my tessitura.  At one point I had to stop, and I leaned my head back to suck in a lungful of air.

Lycus actually made a strangled noise in his throat.  His fingers tightened on my skin where he was holding onto my hips.

I breathed out through my nose, a centering breath, and kept going.  I had to stop again when he was all the way inside me.  From the way he'd closed his eyes and his fingers were twitching on my pelvic bones, I could tell he needed the break, too.  We both stayed still, breathing together, in and out in the same rhythm.

I stayed that way until I heard Lycus blow out a ragged sigh, like he was only barely keeping it together.  "Please," he said, "please," and I was ready for it, too.

I rocked my hips.  I was already so soaked, and the feel as we moved back and forth — in and out like our breaths had just mingled — threw any kind of thought out of my head.  Pressure was building low in my stomach and the small of my back.  Second after second of need and pleasure stacked on top of each other, like some part of my body was building a tower.

One of Lycus' hands wandered from my hips to the curve of my ass.  He squeezed, fingers digging into my skin.  I was so close to the edge, pinned so thoroughly by the tightrope it felt like I was walking, so focused on that building tension and the pulse that beat between my thighs, that it didn't even hurt.

I don't know how long we lasted.  It felt like forever.  It felt like two seconds.  But it was so good: so slick, so perfectly fitted, and then one of his hands traveled from my hip to the place where we joined together.

I lost it.  The throbbing pulse found a new beat, the tower tumbled, the tension broke.  I threw back my head and screamed.  I could feel myself twitching around him, tensing and relaxing in a way I couldn't have hoped to control or stop and wouldn't have wanted to, anyway.

My voice bounced and echoed off the stone walls and the high ceilings.  I didn't hear anything Lycus might have said, didn't hear any noise he might have made, when he went over the edge.  I felt him shake underneath me, felt him move inside me and the throb-pulse of his climax.

When I was pretty sure he'd finished, I rolled off and collapsed onto the bed beside him.  I lay there, breathing hard, for about a minute before I rolled onto my side to watch him.  I got to witness him getting his breathing and his face back under control; he was flushed and sweaty and his eyes had gone heavy-lidded.  It was a good look on him.

"That was…"  But I let myself trail off.  There were no words that seemed to fit.  'Good' was too small; 'amazing' seemed glib.  I shook my head.

Lycus rolled onto his side, too, and I saw his dazed expression as he watched me.  He didn't have words, either.  I traced his features with my eyes, pleased just to have a chance to watch him without that professional soldier mask on.  As if he was thinking the same thing I was, he reached out and rubbed his thumb along my cheek.  In answer to his motion, I turned my head and caught the pad of his thumb with my lip.

"We were fools, to avoid this," he said.

I agreed.  "We were always going to end up here, weren't we?"

He let out an edged, bitter laugh like he had weeks ago, the day he'd told me he loved me too much to let someone else protect me.  "With you having come three inches from death, and me a fool?  Yes.  Oh, yes.  My fate is to lose you.  One way or another."

"You believe in fate?"

"You don't?"