Finally, she moved with surety, sliding the ring home and meeting his gaze.“My loyalty is yours, as long as I am living.”
Darker bands of light unfurled like ribbons from his ring.They wrapped them up tight, and he felt it like a velvet chain around his ribs.No leaving this woman now.No letting her leave.She felt it too.She was barely breathing, her lips slightly parted, swollen still from his kisses.
“I need you,” he rasped.He hit his knees before her and clasped her hips.“I need you.”
“Yes.”Her hands tangled in his hair.
The shift she wore to bed was short, falling just past her knees, and it didn’t take much to rake up the rough linen and find the dark triangle of curls at the apex of her legs.He dragged his thumb across her sex first and slid across the floor knee after knee, pushing her backward, setting kisses beneath her belly button until her thighs hit the narrow bed.
She fell backward onto the mattress with a bounce.
Then he feasted, tasting her.Learning her.Teasing that little bud beneath her curls until she wiggled and moaned, until she grew wet with desire.
For him.
“Stay?Work out the magic with me?”
Magic.Hell.Probably would be magic with her.He could sense it in the almost visible tension strung between them.Once at a ball he’d seen instruments glamoured to cast their music into images.Each note had produced a color and shape that lifted into the air and drifted out over the ballroom.Those colors and shapes seemed to be growing between them, beautiful things promising more beauty to come.
He wrapped an arm around her waist and tugged her close, resting his forehead against hers.“I want to.But I won’t.I’m going to need to walk all night to rid myself of what it took to make those rings.I need to be exhausted to sleep without thinking of you.”
“Exhaust yourself here.”
“Wicked woman.”Wonderful woman.
She chuckled, and he kissed her once more.“Tomorrow, Diana.”Then he slipped back out into the night, sliding down the bent and twisted shop sign and dropping to his feet.
The walk home was torture, his cock hard and aching.Exercise did no good this time, nor did any attempt to think of something—anything—other than her.His brain possessed no room for any thought but Diana.His future wife.Tomorrow.
Couldn’t come soon enough, though dawn was but a few hours off.
He ground to a stop beneath a glowing fairy lamp, his cock close to coming.Hell’s teeth, it felt as if she had her sweet, hot hand around him, as if she stroked him.He couldfeelit, could feel the sweat of her palm, the warm slide of her iron and opal ring.
He was going to come in his pants.On the sidewalk.
Gritting his teeth, he thought of Ajax spitting out a half-eaten biscuit, soggy and falling apart and putting it in his hand.
That took the edge off enough to run for it.
Didn’t mean the running didn’t hurt like hell.
By the time he returned to his terrace, he almost couldn’t walk.His jaw ached from clenching it, and his back teeth were likely ground to powder.All he had to do, though, was make it up the stairs, to his chamber, then?—
Fuck.Fuck.Now it felt like her sweet little hand was cupping his balls and even sweeter lips… they were closing round his cock.
He froze mid-stride in the middle of the staircase, slammed a palm against the wall and leaned into it as he roughly stuffed his hand into trousers.He was throbbing, and he stroked himself, imagining it was her.His ring ran hot lines of pleasure up and down his shaft.He imagined slipping one, then two fingers into Diana, circling her lovely little clit until?—
He shattered like glass blown too thin after too hot a heating.He groaned curses and moaned her name as he came like a green boy.On the fucking staircase.
When his breath settled, he dragged heavy legs to his bedchamber and collapsed atop the mattress.
He’d heard bonding was intense, but his parents, other married alchemists, had only discussed the spiritual connection, the almost preternatural ability to communicate without words.He’d based the summoning stones on the concept.
He’d never imagined something so intimate, something so carnal.
Exhaustion claimed him, but the waves that pulled him under were not clear and sun-streaked as they should have been.
Because with as much as his body felt bound to Diana now, he heard, felt, nothing of her soul.
