Every time his touch grazed her, Vivian flinched. It was a ticklish, very faint sensation. The effort he poured into controlling his strength, terrified of pressing too hard or leaving even a scratch on her skin, came through clearly in the faint trembling of his fingertips. When his lips touched the side of her neck, she could even feel him forcing down the roughness creeping into his breathing.

“Tell me if it hurts.”

The whisper brushed her earlobe. The exposed skin was warm, and the firm jaw grazing her neck was close enough to trace in her mind.

Then a large, rough palm wrapped around her waist. The touch was careful, but it pulled her firmly toward him. The solid feel of a trained body pressed against her bare skin, carrying its heat.

Vivian felt it too. Renard was genuinely trying his hardest to be gentle. Clumsy, but not rough. In fact, the ticklish touch felt, just slightly, good.

Without realizing it, Vivian let out a small m*an. Renard, seemingly unhearing, brought only his lips and tongue and fingertips carefully to her skin.

The stimulation was clumsy but not painful, and each time the soft sensation grazed her neck and chest, an unfamiliar feeling began to stir, very slowly. As her skin grew warm, the lips that circled nearby finally made contact with her chest.

“Ah……!”

She exhaled a short breath without meaning to and her body gave a small shudder. Renard’s movement stopped almost simultaneously. Nothing was visible in the darkness, but it was easy to tell he was reading her.

Only after confirming no sign of refusal from her did Renard resume, a beat later, tracing careful circles with the tip of his tongue.

She couldn’t call it skilled. Vivian was also a first-timer, but she could feel well enough whether someone was practiced or not. The rhythm was uneven, and there was a sense of him searching, unsure of what to do or where. But what mattered more was persistence. The same relentless focus he brought to repeating the same sword strike hundreds of times in a barracks was at work here. The hand exploring her other br*ast slowly learned the right pressure, and his lips alternated between lightly catching and releasing and licking.

“Mmh……!”

The sensation of his tongue softly rubbing made her back lift off the sheets for a moment. A rough breath escaped Renard.

But after going still briefly, Renard steadied himself and returned his focus to making her feel good. He was aware of his own arousal, yet devoted himself entirely to attending to her body.

Without the firm heat and heavy presence pressing against her thigh, Vivian might have mistakenly thought Renard felt nothing for her at all. His own desire was thoroughly set aside in her presence.

Vivian was a little thrown. The wedding night she expected to simply endure until it was over was going in a direction she never anticipated.

At some point, her body began to stir a little with every movement of Renard’s tongue and hands. When the unfamiliar, warm, ticklish sensation felt too strange and she tried to pull away, Renard followed her, more persistent and more gentle.

It didn’t feel like he meant to torment her. He simply assumed his clumsiness was hurting her and moved slower, softer, more carefully.

That made it worse. Unlike Vivian’s head, which could neither refuse nor fully accept, her body was honest. Renard’s hand never went below her navel, yet she was already wet.

Each time the ticklish sensation made her squirm, the slight movement of air that followed swept across the damp fabric. She bit her lip, overcome with embarrassment.

“Ngh……!”

Her body was already moving in a completely different direction from her head. The moment his lips lifted away, her body twisted in what seemed like protest, wanting more. Renard muttered, sounding flustered.

“I’m sorry. I must have been too rough.”

Not rough at all. If anything, the problem was the opposite. And the breath whispering against her wet n*pple was now itself a sensation that made her ache.

But Renard misread the signal and moved his tongue even more slowly, as though making up for his mistake. His lips tracing carefully along the curve beneath her br*ast, counting each rib one by one, made Vivian want to cry. Every sense was razor-sharp.

When his fingertips grazed her stomach, her abdomen trembled. But that hand had no intention of going lower. Stubbornly circling only the boundary, seemingly declaring it would not descend a single inch without permission.

The part of him pressing against her thigh was fully aroused, its heat and size unmistakable even through his trousers, yet Renard set himself entirely aside and devoted himself only to her. In the darkness, the only sign of his restraint was the increasingly frequent sound of him steadying his breathing.

“Ah, haah, ah……”

Vivian grew more desperate by the moment. The ache below, completely wet, throbbed. His resolve to respect her unless she permitted him was admirable, but that very consideration was tormenting her.

She found herself squirming, trying somehow to press the wet ache against the heat on her thigh. But rather than read that desperate signal, Renard gently and firmly pressed down on her hips to stop her, worried she might hurt herself moving around.

“Don’t move. I might make a mistake.”

His lips tightened slightly around her n*pple. A wet sound echoed in the darkness. The flicking motion with the tip of his tongue, once only persistent, was slowly becoming more practiced. The methodical way he thoroughly attended to one side before moving to the other was conscientious to the point of absurdity.

Vivian could feel the wetness already running down the inside of her thigh, so Renard couldn’t be unaware of it either, yet his hand stubbornly refused to come down. Every response she gave was clearly being misread as a signal of pain.

“Don’t hold back if it hurts. Tell me.”

He misread the m*ans she was struggling to suppress again. His lips returned to exploring her skin, softer than before.

“Ngh……! P, please……”

Vivian finally parted her lips in something close to a sob. The words didn’t come out smoothly. She, who never felt embarrassment before any of the great figures of the social world, found herself, for the first time in her life, too embarrassed to finish a sentence.

But then Vivian realized this was not the moment to worry about embarrassment. Renard’s hand, startled by her near-sobbing, grazed the corner of her eye where tears gathered from the overwhelming sensation.

The man who paid no attention to the wetness below reacted with remarkable speed to the wetness at the corner of her eye. Vivian grabbed onto Renard urgently as he moved to pull away in alarm.

“No, no, please, down there, down there too…… t, touch me…… please……?”

Every movement stopped.

A silence fell, seemingly even the sound of breathing cut off. If Vivian froze from the shock of her own blunt words, Renard simply seemed unable to comprehend the situation itself.

It was dark, but Vivian could tell how flustered he was. The fingertips resting against her skin were stiff and trembling faintly.

“……What did you say?”

The voice asking again lacked the composure she faced all day. He thought he never lost his composure on any battlefield. But Vivian’s single utterance put a crack in that composure.

He heard it clearly. He couldn’t fail to know that the trembling in that pleading, near-tearful voice was entirely different from pain.

“You’re not…… in pain?”

The stiffened voice rang out once more. Like the question before it, it wasn’t really asked expecting an answer from Vivian.

Renard, who was quietly stroking her cheek as she teetered between desperate need and desperate embarrassment, asked with a breath he couldn’t quite steady.

“Where? How?”

The low voice came close enough that the heat burning all the way to the tips of his ears was felt even in the darkness.

Vivian wanted to bite her own tongue. The thought of saying out loud where and how she wanted to be touched made her feel like her face would burst. What made it worse, in the middle of all this, was that the genuine embarrassment bringing tears to her eyes was simultaneously making her body burn hotter.

Pushed to the very edge, nearly in tears, Vivian took Renard’s hand resting against her cheek. His thick-knuckled, long fingers were now gripped firmly in hers and brought to rest against the swollen, aching place between her legs.

“Ngh, h, here, uh…… r, rub it…… hya!”