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I will not set down all of it. Some of what passed between us in that cabin belongs to the two of us and to nobody else.

But I will say this much, because it matters.

It did not begin desperately. That is what I had braced for, and what I had been warned about in barracks my whole adult life, and it is not what happened. It began the way it had begun the first time, slow and particular, with her hands in my hair and her laugh going into my mouth when I caught my own stitches and swore. She was burning. She shook with it. Slick ran down the insides of her thighs in continuous, gleaming sheets. The scent of her heat filled every breath I took until I could taste it. And she was still entirely herself, sharp and funny and bossy, telling me what she wanted in complete sentences and swatting my hand away from the places she was not finished with.

"You know," she whispered at one point, "for a man who spent three years threatening to put me in chains, you are remarkably nervous."

I brushed my thumb across her cheek. "I am about to bind my life to the most dangerous woman in Nottingham."

"England."

"What?"

“I’m the most dangerous woman in England. Get it right."

"My apologies."

She pulled me closer. "Accepted."

"Robin."

"Yes?"

"I love you."

Her whole face changed. Everything clever went out of it, and what came in behind was so open that I nearly could not look at it.

"I love you too, Sheriff."

After that there was no language left worth using.

I learned her all over again, and this time there was nothing held in reserve on either side. I found the compass rose inked under her heart again, and put my mouth to it until she said my name in a voice I ‘d never heard.

She found the old border scar across my shoulder once more, and did the same. Her hands were everywhere. Mine were careful and then they were not careful, because she took my wrist and moved it herself and told me, in no uncertain terms, that she had not come this far to be handled like something breakable.

She pushed me onto my back in the nest and crawled down between my thighs. Slick dripped from her onto my legs as she settled there. She wrapped both hands around my dick, already hard and leaking for her, and looked up at me with heat-darkened eyes.

"I want this first," she said.

Then she opened her mouth and took me in.

She slobbered all over my dick. Thick spit ran down the shaft in shiny ropes while she sucked me deep, cheeks hollowed, tongue working the underside with filthy precision.

Wet sounds filled the cabin every time she bobbed her head. She took me further with each pass until the head nudged the back of her throat and she moaned around it, the vibration shooting straight through me. Slick poured from her pussy onto the blankets while she worked me, her hips rocking against nothing, desperate. She pulled off only long enough to breathe, strings of spit connecting her swollen lips to my dick, then dove back down and swallowed me again like she was starving for it.

"Robin," I groaned, fingers buried in her locs.

She only sucked harder, faster, the wet mess of her mouth making my dick glisten from root to tip. When she finally pulled off with a loud, filthy pop, her chin was shiny and her voice was wrecked.

"Now put it in me."

She set the pace. She always had, in everything, from the first arrow she ever put in one of my wagons.

And when it came, it came with her astride me and both my hands on her hips and her forehead against mine, because she had decided she would have it that way and I was in no condition to argue about anything at all. She sank down onto my dick in one long, slick slide. Her cunt was so wet the glide was effortless, walls clenching hot and dripping around me as she took every inch.

She rode me hard, hips rolling, slick pouring out around the base of my dick with every thrust until the nest beneath us was soaked.

I felt the knot take. It swelled deep inside of her, stretching her open, locking us together with a pressure so tight she cried out. I heard the sound she made and felt her whole body draw up around it, and for one endless moment the two of us simply stopped, held together, breathing the same air, going nowhere.