24
KENDRA
This kiss is nothing like the others, and the others were enough to keep me up at night replaying them. The kisses before were careful, controlled, a man holding himself on a leash and letting out just enough slack to taste what he wanted without losing himself. This kiss has no leash, his lips hard against mine, his tongue pushing past my teeth with a heat that makes my brain short-circuit, and his arm hooks under the small of my back and lifts me off the mattress, dragging me up the bed until my head hits the pillow at the headboard.
He settles his weight between my legs. Every inch of skin where he presses against me ignites, the heat rolling off him in waves that soak through my clothes and settle into my muscles, my hips lifting into him without my say-so, my fingers digging into his shoulders.
He breaks the kiss long enough to pull back and look at me, his eyes darker than I’ve seen them, the amber gone molten, his chest rising and falling in heavy pulls with his ridge fully erect along his back and not even trying to press it down. His fingers grip the hem of my shirt and he drags it up my body, his knuckles trailing fire across my stomach and my ribs, and I liftmy arms so he can pull it over my head and drop it off the side of the bed.
His fingers move to my bra and he stops, staring at the clasp, his brow creasing, his hands hovering over the hooks. He turns me slightly, studying the mechanism, and his thick fingers fumble the first attempt and I have to press my lips together to keep from grinning.
“It’s a clasp,” I tell him softly. “You pinch and pull.”
He exhales through his nose, and manages the hooks on his second try. The fabric loosens and he slides the straps down, and when the bra is gone and I’m bare from the waist up he goes still.
His eyes travel over me and the look on his face is not hunger. It’s reverence, his lips parting, his fingers hovering above my skin.
I reach for his hand and place it on my chest, his palm covering me entirely, and I feel his fingers tremble on my skin.
“Kendra.” My name comes out of him slow and wrecked, like he’s been holding it for a very long time, and I pull his hand tighter into me.
“I’m right here.”
He lowers his mouth to my neck, and his hands move down my body to hook into the waist of my pants. He pulls them down with my underwear, working them over my hips and down my legs, and his hands are shaking the entire time.
The tremor in them tells me something that his face and his voice have been trying to hide. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the realization hits me in the middle of kicking my pants off my ankle.
Kojo has never been intimate with a woman before. I can see it in every careful movement — placing my bra on the bed instead of throwing it, pulling my pants down slowly instead of tearing them, the hesitation in his fingers every time they metnew skin. He is navigating me like a territory he has imagined a million times but never set foot in.
I look at him, kneeling between my legs, naked, and my eyes travel down. His dick is thick enough to make my mouth go dry and long enough that my brain starts doing math I did not sign up for, and I press my thighs together instinctively — my body’s first response a very honest recalculation of what I thought I was prepared for.
“I want to mate with you, Kendra.” His voice is low, steady, completely serious, and the formality of the wordmateinstead of anything else lands different than anything he could have said. He’s not trying to hook up. He’s not looking to fuck. He is asking for the thing his entire species was built around, the act that completes a bond written before either of us existed.
But he sees my face and reads the hesitation before I can mask it, and his body shifts backward immediately, his hands lifting from my legs, his weight redistributing toward the edge of the bed.
I sit up before he can pull any further away, my hand catching his arm. I push forward, using his surprise to shift the balance, swinging my leg over his lap and pressing my palms flat on his chest and pushing him backward until he’s lying beneath me with his head near the foot of the bed and his eyes wide open, looking up at me like everything he thought was about to happen just changed.
“You’re not going anywhere,” I tell him, and his hands hover at my hips, not gripping, just resting there, waiting, his chest heaving beneath my palms.
I lean down and kiss him slow this time, controlling the pace, and his mouth opens under mine with a groan that starts deep in his chest and vibrates against my lips. When I pull back and look at his face, what I see there makes me want to ruin him. A thousand years of waiting, written in every tight line of hisexpression, his fingers pressing into my hips like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he loosens his grip.
I slide down his body, his abs tightening under me as I go, his breathing catching hard enough that I hear it stick in his throat. I wrap my fingers around him and every muscle he has locks up at once, rigid from his neck to his thighs, his head pressing back into the mattress with a sound that isn’t a word but something he’s been holding for centuries escaping all at once.
“This is mine,” I tell him, and I mean every syllable. His dick is hot in my hand, the heat pulsing against my palm, and I lower my mouth onto him, just the tip, tasting the salt and the furnace warmth of his skin, and his hips jerk off the bed and a cackle rips out of his throat so loud the windows rattle. I pull back, startled, and he slaps a hand over his face with his eyes wide.
“I apologize,” he chokes out from behind his fingers. “That was my Bouda.”
I grin and take him in again, deeper this time. His Bouda can do whatever it wants while I am busy. He’s hot on my tongue, bordering on uncomfortable and quickly crossing into addictive, his furnace pulsing through every inch of him, and I take him deeper until my mouth stretches around his thickness and the groan he releases is so raw it makes the hair on my arms stand up.
One hand finds the back of my head, sliding into my hair, not pushing, just resting there, trembling, and the restraint in that gesture while he writhes beneath me is the most attractive thing I have ever experienced in my entire life. I work him until his hips are moving in a rhythm he can’t control, ragged sounds escaping behind his clenched teeth that I can feel resonating in my own chest, and when I pull back to catch my air the noise he makes is devastating, a broken sound that tells me he would have let me do that forever if I hadn’t stopped.
I climb back up and position myself over him, reaching down to guide him where I need him, and the first inch makes me gasp out loud. Not from pain but from the stretch, the fullness, the heat of him inside me so intense that I clench around him and we both groan at the same time, his hands gripping my thighs hard enough to leave marks.
I sink down slowly, shaking, taking him in increments to adjust to what I’m accepting, and his eyes are locked on my face as he watches me take him like it’s the only thing that has ever mattered.
I bottom out and we both stop breathing.
“Kendra.” His voice shatters on my name. The formality, the composure, the careful restrained guardian who speaks only when necessary, all of it has left him, and in its place is a man who is feeling something for the first time and doesn’t have the vocabulary for it. His palms slide up to my hips and his fingers press into the soft skin there and I watch tears gather in his eyes and spill down his temples into the mattress.