Like a promise.
“Breathe, Shula,” his voice rumbles through the nothing-space, everywhere and nowhere at once. “Breathe for me.”
“I—am,” I manage, though I’m not sure how.
“Good.”
The next breath tastes like smoke and molten stone and—we slam back into existence.
Air rushes in.
The world snaps into focus.
We’re in his bedchamber. Back in Ashfell.
We’re just suddenly there.
Like reality remembered where to put us.
A gasp rips out of me, half shock, half awe.
My fingers are fisted against his shirt—except, when I glance down, it’s not his shirt at all.
It’s bare skin.
His clothes? Gone.
And so are mine.
“My clothes,” I whisper, looking down at myself, flushed and breathless and absolutely naked in his arms. “Did you?—?”
“Magic,” he says simply, voice dark with hunger. “I would apologize, but I am not sorry.”
My heart is pounding so hard I feel it in my throat. Every nerve ending is buzzing, alive, alert, singing with aftershocks of flame-travel and the fact that he stripped us both without laying a hand on a single clasp.
“Thorne,” I breathe, half scandalized, half turned on out of my mind.
He walks forward like I weigh nothing, carrying me toward the massive bed draped in black silk and deep ember-red throws.
His eyes never leave my face—like he’s searching for doubt, fear, regret.
He won’t find any.
“You’re shaking,” he murmurs.
“Yeah,” I say on a shaky exhale. “You just teleported me by fire. And got me naked. That’s kind of a lot for a girl to wrap her mind around.”
His mouth brushes my temple, his breath hot on my skin. “Too much?”
I swallow hard. “Not even close.”
“Good, and while your mind is busy wrapping around the past, why don’t you wrap your body around the present. Me. Here. Now,” he growls.
And it is such a good idea.
Something breaks in his expression then—some fierce, relieved, hungry thing—and his lips are on mine before I can say another word.
He kisses me like he means to erase every trace of fear, every doubt, every second we were apart.
