At last Taran moved, so carefully that my heart swelled in my chest at his painstaking gentleness. It was instinct to press my fingers into his shoulders, deep knowledge to squeeze his hips with my thighs and urge him on. This had been locked within me, waiting to be expressed, and it was nothing but relief to finally express it.
His breathing was more ragged than the slow rhythm he set, most of his attention locked on my face, vigilant for any sign of distress.
“My love, you’re not going to break me,” I said, trying to pull him in deeper with my heel against the back of his calf. I wanted to chase that thread of tension I’d found earlier, but more than that, I wanted to see that thread in him unravel. I wanted to see him undone.
“You are shockingly, terrifyingly breakable,” Taran said before kissing me again and doing something clever with his hips to roll against a spot that made me gasp into his mouth. I tried to object to that statement, but he did it again, and I couldn’t say much with his tongue in my mouth and my heart fluttering in my chest. Still, I could dig my fingernails into his arms, hard enough that a mortal man would have worn crescent moon marks in his skin to gloat over the next day.
I thought I wouldn’t mind a few marks. A little burn when I walked. A violet constellation in the shape of his fingertips over my hips. I turned my face into Taran’s neck and let him feel the edge of my teeth against his skin.
He laughed in a shaky rush. “You are such a little demon. Fine, you know what you get?”
I was excited for whatever it was that I got, but I was still surprised when he wrapped his arms under my back and carefully rolled us over so that I straddled his hips, our bodies still joined together. I blinked with disorientation as Taran sprawled out on his back, smirking up at me.
“Go ahead, do your worst,” he said.
My laugh sent flutters of pleasure through the spread of my thighs, and while I wasn’t certain what, exactly, he thought I was going to do, every tiny movement was infinitely rewarding. When I hesitated, Taran put his hands on my hips and pulled me toward him, a sweet, aching roll that made our breaths catch in unison. I did it again, his hands still guiding me, and it was deeper, better. I had it. This was the rhythm, this was the song. I knew this one.
I closed my eyes to focus on the building pressure that coiled tighter with every movement, but the tips of Taran’s fingers brushed my chin, startling me.
“No, look at me,” he said, voice strained. It took me a moment to get it—there was nothing better in the world to look at than beautiful, inhumanly perfect Taran with his cheeks flushed red and his neck corded with tension, but I didn’t immediately realize why he sounded so insistent.
Did he think I could imagine anyone else? It never could have been anyone else but him, and it would always have been like this. Even if it had been some stolen evening away from the campfire or on our wedding night, it still would have been just like this. I wouldn’t have loved him any more or less. And he loved me, I knew that for certain. He loved me then and he loved me at this moment, with his eyes bright and fixed on my face while his fingers pressed bruises into my thighs.
I held myself up with one palm over his hammering heart as the knots of sensation in my body twisted and spun, drawing tighter and tighter until I felt that the sensation was all there was to me. Iwas only dimly aware of the rasping noises I was making, little sounds drifting from my lips without effort. I was losing track of the rhythm, suspended mostly by Taran’s hands and the primal momentum of my body. Keeping my eyes open was the only conscious effort I could manage, and I found that I was begging Taran for help again, certain that I was going to fall or fail or perhaps die under the pressure building inside me as he moved.
He pressed his thumb between us, his other hand gripping the loose hair falling down my back. Between these two points of tension, he drew me like a bow. With one final snap of his hips, that tension broke, and I was undone. Taken apart. Remade. I was too small to contain the wave of feeling and emotion that vibrated through me, washing from the points of my breasts to the tips of my toes with a force that felt sufficient to pull the walls down.
This part, I could never have imagined. I had asked my body to sing and to fight and to survive great disasters before, but I hadn’t known how it could ring with feeling. It would have felt like too much to ask for, but Taran’s rapt eyes on my shaking lips said eloquently that this was what he’d wanted.
I would have fallen—to the floor, or perhaps the ceiling—but Taran’s hands kept me barely upright as his rhythm picked up for a handful of heartbeats before the line of his mouth tightened. A long, low noise was stifled in his throat as he reached to cup one breast, my hair tangled around his fingers. His hard green stare lost focus and was replaced by a softer expression, one that suffused his face with something like wonder as the muscles of his body went taut and still. There was an echo of his pleasure in my body, one last throb of sensation that lingered before my breathing slowed and my heartbeat began to match the heaviness in my limbs.
I savored every second of it, my eyes determinedly open to catch the way Taran’s head fell back and his eyelids drooped in satisfaction. He let out a whistling sigh and brushed my hair off myshoulders before thinking better of it, gathering the longest strands to fall around his face like a curtain when I slumped forward onto his chest.
“I first imagined this about ten minutes after I met you,” Taran murmured into my ear when I finally closed my eyes. “And it must have been the millionth time.”
32
We lay nestledin each other’s arms for a long time, but eventually Taran pulled against my hands. I had my face pressed into his bare chest so that he couldn’t see my expression, and I made a wordless protest as he attempted to disentangle himself from me.
Tomorrow. I’d tell him tomorrow. Ask him to go a little further tomorrow. Just one more ocean, just one more disaster. I’d bargained with myself for this one night, and it wasn’t over. I wanted this entire night in his arms. But he rubbed his nose and lips into my jaw hard enough to make me giggle, then rolled to the other side of the bed.
I reluctantly sat up too, only to discover a wet smear on my thighs that unexpectedly shimmered like molten gold. Startled, I stifled a small laugh.
I supposed that I now had another plausible explanation for why he’d been so content to wait years for our wedding night. Even a sheltered priestess of Wesha would have grown a little suspicious about his ancestry when confronted with the apparent consequence of lying down with one of the Stoneborn.
Nose wrinkled endearingly, Taran tugged a loose lock of my hair to pull my attention away.
“I’ll be right back.” He pulled a sheet over my naked legs without bothering to cover himself before padding nonchalantly from the room. Moments later, he returned bearing wine and a folded linen cloth. He offered me my choice of these two new and appropriate gifts, and I reluctantly acquiesced to time continuing, despite my best efforts to freeze it while Taran held me and loved me and was happy.
Collapsing back in bed, Taran caught my left hand and held it out to examine my bare fingers, satisfaction in his every line. “What kind of a ring do you want? Emeralds? I have a few with emeralds. I suppose I could have a new one made, but I don’t really want to wait that long, do you?”
I shifted my wrist to twine my fingers with his instead, pulling our joined hands to my chest. I didn’t want the next hour, the next day, or the next year. Just this moment. But he was waiting for my answer, so I spoke reluctantly.
“Any ring is fine. I just want to get married in front of our friends.”
Taran propped himself up on some pillows and took a deep draught of the wine, and when he answered, his voice was still relaxed and unassuming.
“What friends? Do you mean Marit, or that girl Genna’s holding on to? They can come.”
