The flowers had arrived in a cluster of crimson and ivory, their throats heavy with perfume, their stems bound in ribbon.
Now they lay beneath her knees, beneath his shoulders, beneath the slow and fervent architecture of their bodies, crushed into wine-dark bruises upon the linen. Their fragrance had deepened, warmed by breath and skin, rendered almost intoxicating.
Ciaran did not apologise for their destruction.
She rode him, thighs bracketing his hips, palms pressing to the breadth of his chest. Beneath her, he was a citadel of muscle and scar, even as he lay supine, unresisting, his strength and gargantuan heart offered up.
Her hair – unbraided, ungoverned, utterly wild – spilled down her back in rivers of tarnished gold. When she moved, it tickled against the swell of her hips, brushed the hollow of her waist, skimmed the petals.
The assassin rolled her hips with a mastery learned not from manuals of love but from years of inhabiting her own body as weapon and instrument. The movement was slow at first – she watched him with an assassin’s study but also with an irrefutable measure of softness. She marked the tightening of his jaw, the way breath left him in long, shuddering currents. She delighted in that loss of composure, for the world had not seen him thus: eyes darkened, the column of his neck exposed beneath her hands.
Petals gave way beneath them with each measured descent, their scent mingling with the salt-warmth of sweat.
Ciaran had always loved the moment life flickered at the edge of departure – she had built an artistry from that liminal gasp between being and oblivion. This was a beast of a different breed. Here there was no extinguishing, no final silence. Instead, surrender that promised continuation, eternity.
She leaned forward, bracing her palms beside his shoulders, bringing her mouth close to his ear. Her hair fell like a curling curtain around them, enclosing them in private dusk. The world beyond that bed ceased to exist. No Abyss. No kings. No vows. Only heat.
Her hips found a deeper, more insistant rhythm, the motion drawing a low sound from him. She sat upright once more, arching with unconscious grace, allowing him the sight of her as she moved. What a spectacle she made – the sun-dusted length of her throat, the fall of hair against flushed and freckled skin, the flex and release of muscle as she urged them on. She was not modest. Modesty had no dominion here.
Still, there was tenderness threaded through her command.
Her rhythm quickened, though she remained exquisitely controlled, even in rising urgency. She felt him answering her now with the tightening of his hands at her waist, the lift of his body beneath hers. He did not seek to dominate the motion. He only matched it, supported it, allowing her the sovereignty.
Ciaran closed her eyes.
In darkness, sensation sharpened. Her breath grew uneven, a tremor entering her limbs despite her discipline. She opened her eyes and looked down at him just as her pleasure crested. She rode through it without shame, without retreat, her body tightening and blooming like a night-flower at the stroke of midnight. Then she bent forward, pressing her brow to his, breath mingling, the world dissolving into the lingering perfume of ruined roses.
When stillness returned, it did so gently.
She remained astride him, her hair falling in damp waves around her shoulders, her chest rising and falling against his. Beneath her palms, his heart continued its steadfast beat. Petals clung to her thighs. One ivory fragment adhered to his shoulder, like a fallen star.
Vaguely, Ciaran was aware of the devastation they had wrought – the bed strewn and stained with colour, the bouquet annihilated in the name of ardour – and felt no regret.
This love could never be a delicate arrangement preserved beneath glass. – from @apifacture!
It never fails to pull every ounce of breath from his lungs when she makes him come.
There's something about her body - the sway of her hips, the warmth of her, the way she tightens around him - that speaks to him of home, and stepping into a lost and loving place after time and time away. Even now, he spills as she peaks, and indeed his body loosens the taut arch of his pleasure, one last stir of his stiffened length inside loving heat.
His hands wander over her hips, past her bottom, and rest there against soft flesh, squeezing gently. He's almost always gentle - not because of fear, but because of the sweet sovereignty of her, the perfect domination she brings him each time. It's a sublimation he wouldn't trust to anyone. Gwyn himself could not command the wolf - not truly; he followed Gwyn, but he believed in this, this bright and imperious woman atop him.
"Dear heart," he murmurs, his lips brushing against hers, letting her taste each word. "My dear and darling heart."
His voice is a warm, susurrant growl - the sort of intimate, deeply felt breath edged in sated quiet that he has only ever given her. For the rest of the world, he is loud in a way that does not invite anything else in. He is sociable, he is warm, but he is above all guarded against anything that might seek more of him than good-willed heroism and staunch defense.
Not with her.
She can have anything she wants from him, and he revels in how she plunders him, uses him, at every opportunity. Her enthusiasm - still trembling around him - for him only makes him hungrier still, right until...well.
"Neither of us are going to move from the spot a while yet," he teases. "And I fear your kind warmth might tempt me further still..."