Celeste did move closer, hand sliding up his thigh as the other began a slow ascent over his other knee. “Is that all? Or are you not telling me the whole truth?”
“The whole truth?”
She reached his waist, nodding as she eased her fingers along the lowest edge of his stomach.
“The truth is, that I think about waking up beside you,” he said, and she halted her hands’ exploration. “I think about you all the time, about how you share blueberries with Plum and how you braid your hair. I think about how you’ll hopefully stand close the next time you’re showing me how to knead dough, and about how I can ask you to lay your head in my lap again so I can touch your hair, and about how I wish you wouldn’t be afraid to tell me everything because I would never hurt you.”
“Oh, Reeve,” she breathed, carefully laying hands on his chest. “Really?”
“With credence that the sun will rise.”
Celeste’s fingers curled into his tunic as she leaned against him. It was impossible that he was saying these things because no one—absolutelyno one—had ever meant them. But Reevedid.
“Well, actually…” The holy knight swallowed, and Celeste’s heart hitched as another burst of lightning illuminated the temple. “Everything I said is true, but Ialsosometimes think about you not wearing any clothes.”
Celeste felt the corners of her mouth curl up. “Oh, do you?”
“Just about every night,” he admitted, scarlet breaking out all over his neck and cheeks. “Sometimes twice.”
“I think about you at night too,” she said and pressed her hands into his hard chest. “And sometimes in the morning. And then when I find you in the courtyard, all tunic-less and sweaty, I have to stop myself from running back to my chamber andthinkingabout you again.”
That made Reeve giggle stupidly and shake his head. “No, girls don’t do—wait, do you?”
She clicked her tongue. “May I ask you one more question, Sir Reeve?”
Mouth hanging open, he nodded.
“Can I show you exactly what I want to do when I think about us together?”
CHAPTER 25
FROM DIVINE LIPS TO INFERNAL EARS
Reeve didn’t give Celeste the chance to show him anything. He grabbed her by the back of the neck with sweaty palms and crushed her mouth to his. It was perhaps not the way he was supposed to do things, but he’d put up a valiant fight to not touch her for as long as he could, and so much of his blood had left his brain that additional strategy was essentially impossible.
Celeste crawled onto him, and for a moment they were both all awkward, fumbling limbs as their mouths devoured one another, bodies struggling to catch up. This—thiswas the mad scramble he’d been told about and the way he’d imagined her, climbing onto his lap and attacking him not with arcana but with the witchery of her thighs atop his. He lifted his knees, and she slid forward, and the pieces fit.
Crickets,did they fit.
He dragged in a hiss against her mouth as his length was cradled between her legs, and she answered with the kind of whimper he had never heard but still triggered some base, animal instinct that told him it was good, and he should make her do it again.
Reeve leveraged his back against the stone of the altar—which was fine, he thought briefly, since it wasn’t whole yet—and his hands found her hips. He didn’t mean for his fingers to dig in so hard, but now that he’d gotten her, he couldn’t let her go.
Celeste, however, showed no signs of trying to get away. In fact, it seemed she was enjoying his dire grip and the sharp thrust that followed quite a bit. Despite there was no closer she could be, she was vigorous in her attempt. Well, there was closer, he thought in a muddy sort of way, but all of their clothes were proving a complication.
That could be remedied though.
His hand was sliding down her thigh, mostly of its own accord. It was easier to think of it as happening rather than him making it happen, at least. But when it found the bare skin of her knee, his hand remembered it didn’t have the ability to think or do. “Is this,” he huffed between kisses, “is this all right?”
“Gods, yes,” she breathed against his lips then pulled back. “Er, I mean, um…not gods?”
More confidently, his hand wrapped around the back of her knee and began to climb. “The other knights say that the gods wouldn’t give us bodies if we weren’t supposed to use them.”
She sucked in a sharp breath, rolling her hips forward against his shielded length and making him groan. “Well, if that’s what they say.” Celeste tugged at the low neckline of her dress, the soft fabric easily slipping down to reveal the pale, modest swell of her breasts inches from his face.
“By Valcord’s Radiance,” he murmured.
“Hello?”
