Heat rose through her before his hands did.
He kissed down her sternum and kept going, mouth warm and deliberate, and when his hand finally spread her open to him the slick of her was immediate and embarrassing and honest and she hated that the room was too quiet not to hear the wet sound when his fingers stroked through. She made herself say nothing.
Her body said it for her: clenching around his first thick finger, thighs falling open, the long low exhale that had no dignity in it.
"Mavrek," she said.
He did not answer with words. He used a second finger, curled inward to find the place that obliterated thought, and then his mouth on her clit, slow and unhurried, tongue working in patient rolling strokes while she fisted the fur with both hands and bit her own wrist to keep from being loud. Not because shefeared discovery tonight. Because the sound wanted to be larger than the room could hold.
Three days of running the arithmetic, three days of that patient terrible absence on the scaffold, all of it broke through whatever was left of her control and turned into wet heat against his tongue.
He did not stop.
When she came it was with his name dragged ragged out of her throat and her cunt clenching hard around his fingers and her back arching off the furs. He felt every shudder and prolonged it, tongue lighter now, drawing it out until she pushed at his shoulder because another second would have stopped her heart.
He came up over her then, big enough to block the lamp entirely. The weight of him settled against her and was exactly what she had come across Brineshell in the dark for.
"Still yes," he said. Not a question this time.
She pulled him closer by the shoulders and spread her thighs around him. "Come here."
He worked himself free of his trousers with one hand, watched her face while he did it, and pushed the thick head of his cock through her wetness once before lining up. Her whole body went tight with anticipation.
"Now," she said. "Don't be patient now."
He pushed inside.
The stretch of him undid what the orgasm had almost settled. Too much and not enough at once. She made a sound that was almost pain and entirely good, heels digging into the furs, hands clutching the broad heat of his back. He held when she caught breath, forehead dropping to her shoulder, and the tremor in his arms told her the hold cost him something.
She felt his pulse in the place they were joined — or thought she did, the whole lower half of her body reordered around him.
"Move," she whispered.
He did.
Deliberate. Each stroke deep and measured, building rather than chasing, not the urgency of the locked workshop or the daylit recklessness of the morning but something harder to name: the rhythm of a man who has decided the outcome and is giving her every inch of it. She clung to him and let her eyes close. The fur bunched under her hips. Warmed stones held heat beneath the platform.
His name kept breaking out of her without permission and she let it, let him have it, because the three days she had spent not saying it had been one of the more exhausting performances of her life.
He rolled them.
Not because the pace had eased. Because he understood — from her grip, from her breath — that what she needed was to be given weight again after days of floating inside her own skull. He took her with him so she came up over him in one smooth movement and his hands settled at her hips: steadying, allowing, not directing.
She rode him.
Openly. Without the frantic privacy of the locked workshop where she had kept one ear on the door even while coming undone. Here there was no door to monitor. Here there was only the thick slide of him inside her and his hands warm at her hips and the shameless reality of herself using him for the exact thing she had come for.
She moved until her thighs ached and her hair stuck to the back of her neck and small wet sounds came with each roll of her hips that the room could hear without her permission. His face below her had gone through controlled and past it entirely — jaw tight, mouth open, the specific wrecked look of a man holding himself still while being taken apart stroke by stroke.
When she came the second time it crested slowly — not the sudden shock of earlier, but a slow enormous gathering, everything in her body tightening in concert until she bore down on him and broke open. He followed almost immediately, dragging her down against his chest, one arm locked around her so tight it bordered on bruising. His cock jerked inside her in heavy pulses.
She felt each one — four, five, six — thick heat flooding her in slow deep releases that left her dizzy.
She lay sprawled over him and did not move.
Afterward there was no immediate collapse into speech.
They stayed where they had landed in the tangle of furs and half-open clothing, her sprawled partly over him, his hand slow at the base of her spine as both their breathing worked its way back toward reason. The warmed stones beneath the platform held a deep steady heat. Somewhere in the workshop a drop of oil clicked from the stirring stick into the bowl he had abandoned.