I grinned. “Are you proposing?”
His smile was softer, less teasing this time. He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he crouched beside the stream and ran his fingers over a few sprigs of green shooting up through the mud. I watched with a mesmerized little smile as those shoots blossomed into full flowers.
Every movement of his hand made more bloom around us, until an entire carpet of glowing flowers stretched before my feet. He collected a few handfuls, taking care to arrange them just so.
Rising back to me, he said, “I think of it sometimes, too. Not the pomp and ceremony, or the political maneuverings of it all—I never cared much about any of that. But the possibility of waking up beside you every morning?” He handed me the bouquet he’d collected. “I would have been the luckiest man in the world.”
“Youareproposing to me, aren’t you?” I teased. “Aren’t you supposed to be down on one knee?”
“You know I rarely miss an opportunity to kneel before you, but…no. I’d like to think I could plan a better proposal than this.”
“I think a spontaneous proposal would be lovely.”
“You would, wouldn’t you? Chaotic little beast.”
“What would you do without the chaos I bring into your life?”
“I don’t know.” He took my hand, lifting it and brushing a kiss across my knuckles. “And I don’t particularly want to find out.”
I melted at the words. At the way he was looking at me as he said them. He still wore that softer, more vulnerable smile that I so rarely got to see, and everything around us blurred as I stared at him. I could only think about kissing that smile—so that’s what I did. I pulled him closer, throwing my hands around his neck, dragging his mouth down to mine.
It was several minutes before we pulled away from the kiss and returned to our hideout, quietly slipping away to the room Finch had prepared for me, which was tucked away at the very back of the house.
I locked the door behind us.
The small room felt like its own world. A single oil lamp flickered on the bedside table, casting dancing shadows above us as we collapsed onto the bed. Through the thin walls, conversations occasionally drifted in from the main part of the house. And there was movement out there—so much restless movement—but we somehow ignored it all.
Aleks turned to face me. I closed the distance between us, reaching to cup his face in my hand. He leaned into my touch, eyes closing for a moment. When they opened again, the desire burning in them ignited my entire body.
His lips crashed into mine with dizzying force.
And just like when we’d walked in circles outside, we no longer cared about all the plans waiting to be made or the battles looming ahead.
But we weren’t directionless in this room.
Every brush of his body against mine felt intentional, weighted with meaning. We shed our clothes slowly, reverently,as if following the steps of something sacred. He trailed his fingertips across my bare, trembling skin. Swiped his tongue over the peaks of my breasts with the same torturous intent before finally taking them into his mouth and sucking until I gasped out his name.
As I tried to catch my breath, he slipped his arm around my waist, yanking me closer. Our hips pressed together, his desire hard and obvious as it throbbed against my own pulsing need.
He took one of my legs and draped it over his body, opening me more fully to take him in, then shifting his own position until we were perfectly aligned.
With a slow, powerful thrust, he buried himself inside of me.
As he pushed deeper, his gaze met mine. Held it. Even if he hadn’t been moving inside me as he did it, it still would have felt devastatingly intimate—the way he was watching me as he claimed me. As if he saw every bit of me. All the messy, unraveled parts. The fears. The uncertainties. And he still wanted to bind himself to me despite it all, to push deeper and deeper until there was no chance either of us could ever deny our connection.
I didn’t last long under that intimate stare. I didn’twantto last. Didn’t want to hold anything back from him.
I wrapped an arm around his neck for leverage and met his deep, powerful thrusts with increasingly desperate thrusts of my own. He moved his fingers with expert strokes across my center while his arm shoved against my thigh, pushing my legs farther apart, all while he continued to pound into me, and the combination of it all quickly sent me over the edge.
My cry of release likely would have been loud enough to concern the rest of the house, had Aleks not pressed his mouth over mine as it came. The sound faded into gasps of pleasure, swallowed up by his own answering groans as he spilled himself inside of me.
I was lost for several moments in a floating, peaceful euphoria. When I blinked back into awareness, I found Aleks watching me with nearly the same intensity as before. Another wave of release rolled through me, curling my toes and making the corner of his mouth quirk.
He pulled his fingers from between my legs and traced the curve of my shoulder, the dip of my collarbone, the line of my throat. His lips followed the trail of his touch. When I shivered, he paused.
“Cold?” he murmured against my neck.
“No.” My voice came out breathless. “I’m never cold with you.”
