Not gently. The detonation of weeks of denied desire, of sessions spent motionless while her eyes took him apart, of nights drowning her scent in cold water, of the hallway where her heartbeat galloped beneath his thumb while he called her a liar because the truth was too dangerous to name. All of it ignited in the space between one breath and the next, and his mouth found hers with the certainty of a starving man who'd been staring at sustenance through glass.
She made a sound against his lips — shock, then something hungrier — and her paint-stained hands seized his shoulders with a grip that would leave bruises on a smaller man. Her fingers dug into muscle and held on.
She stood on her toes, and he bent nearly double, and it wasn't enough, wasn't close enough. He wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her off the ground. She was all heatand grip and ferocity, and her legs wrapped around his waist like she'd been solving the geometry of this since the maze.
He kissed her like he was trying to consume the truth she'd put on canvas, like if he kissed her deep enough he could become the man she'd painted instead of the monster he'd built. His fangs grazed her lower lip — not breaking skin, just the barest scrape of enamel across that soft, impossible mouth — and a groan tore from deep in his chest, guttural and raw, a sound his beast made, and she didn't flinch. She shivered. Her fingers slid from his shoulders to the back of his neck and pulled him closer.
He was shaking. His arms, wrapped around her, carrying her weight like she was made of glass and thunder, trembled with the effort of holding her gently. The beast roared in his blood, demanding more, demanding everything, and he held it back with the same iron will that had sustained seven years of deception — except now the deception was pretending he could survive this. Pretending this wouldn't destroy every wall he'd built. Pretending that the sound she made when his fangs touched her lip didn't erase everything his body had known before her.
She pulled back. Just enough to breathe.
Their foreheads pressed together. Her breath came in ragged bursts against his mouth, hot and unsteady. His own breathing was worse. His arms shook. Her fingers curled against the nape of his neck, and the tenderness in the gesture — the same tenderness on the canvas — nearly dropped him to his knees.
"Don't you dare put the mask back on."
Her voice vibrated against his lips. Command. Plea. Dare. All three at once, delivered with the fierce directness that had made her walk toward a beast in a dark maze and reach for his face instead of running.
He answered by kissing her again.
Harder. Deeper. His hand slid up her spine and cradled the back of her head, his fingers threading into her locs, and she arched into him with a sound that burned through his bloodstream like accelerant. He carried her toward the back of the studio where the candlelight grew dim and the shadows thickened, past the easels and the scattered brushes and the turpentine-sharp air, to where a low chaise sat against the far wall — draped in paint-spattered linen, never meant for this, perfect for this.
His last coherent thought surfaced like a drowning man's final breath:
I am going to destroy us both, and I cannot stop.
Her hands found his face. Cupped his jaw. Held him with a gentleness that had no right to exist in the same universe as the hunger in her kiss. Her thumbs traced the sharp lines of his cheekbones — with the care she brought to canvas, with the reverence of someone who understood that what she held was irreplaceable and breakable and worth the risk of holding.
The candlelight guttered. The second portrait watched from its easel with warm, vulnerable eyes. And Skarreth stopped thinking entirely.
NINETEEN
Octavia didn’t surrender. She seized.
Her fingers twisted in his hair and dragged him down to her, and the sound he made — low, fractured, torn from somewhere below language — sent a bolt of heat through her core that obliterated every wall she’d built since the auction. Every hostile session where she’d weaponized her tongue because touching him wasn’t an option. Every night curled in her bed with sketches she hid like contraband, tracing the line of his jaw in graphite because she couldn’t trace it with her fingers. Every breath she’d held when his scent hit her, every pulse she’d bitten back, every lie she’d told herself about anger and artistic detachment.
Done. All of it. Burned to the foundation.
She pulled him closer with her legs locked around his waist and felt the sheer impossible scale of him — the width of his chest against hers, the arms that held her like she was both precious and combustible, the heat radiating off his skin like a furnace door left open.
He lowered her onto the chaise with a deliberateness that bordered on worship, one hand cradling her head, the other spread across her lower back. His body followed hers down,and the weight of him pressed the air from her lungs in a rush that turned into a gasp when his mouth left hers and found the hollow of her throat. His lips were hot. His fangs grazed the tendon of her neck — not piercing, just there — and the razor edge of danger made her vision white out at the edges.
His hands found the hem of her shirt. She lifted her arms, and it was gone. His fingers found the clasp of her bra and dispensed with it with a dexterity that made her laugh once, breathlessly, before the laugh died when he pulled back and looked at her.
The candlelight caught his eyes — luminous now, burning toward white at the edges — and the way he looked at her was not the appraising gaze of the lord or the predator’s assessment of the hunt. It was the look she’d seen for thirty seconds in a sunlit studio when he’d forgotten the mask: open, undone, a man encountering something he hadn’t let himself want and finding it looking back at him.
His hands came up. Cupped her breasts with a gentleness that defied their size, thumbs brushing across her nipples, and the sensation drew a sharp breath from her throat. He watched her face as he did it — cataloging, learning — and when his thumb circled again with more pressure her head fell back and he made a sound low in his chest. The growl built beneath it, that low sustained frequency, and she felt it vibrate through his hands where they held her and into her skin and down through her core before his mouth had even descended.
His lips closed over her nipple and his tongue circled — slow, deliberate, with the focused attention he brought to everything — and heat speared straight down through her, pooling low and urgent. She was already wet. The awareness of it hit her with the same involuntary honesty as everything else her body had decided without consulting her mind. His hands spread across her ribcage, holding her steady as his mouth moved to her otherbreast, his tongue tracing the same slow circle before his lips closed and he pulled — a long, deliberate suction — and the sound she made wasn't polite and she didn't care. Her fingers drove into his hair and held on.
He kissed down her stomach. Her breath came faster with each inch he descended. The jut of her hip. The soft skin below her navel. His hands found the waistband of her pants and pulled them down with her undergarments in one unhurried motion, and the air of the studio was cool against her skin for exactly one second before the furnace heat of him replaced it.
His lips found the crease of her inner thigh and paused. He breathed. The heat of his exhale moved across her where she was most sensitive and her hips surged upward with a want so sharp it was almost pain. A sound escaped her — his name, or the beginning of it, cut off when his hands pressed her thighs open with a firm, unhurried authority and he settled between them.
He looked up at her.
Those burning eyes finding hers in the candlelight. The question in them was also a statement —I see exactly what you need and I intend to give it to you— and her answer was her fingers tightening in his hair and pulling him down to where she was already aching for his mouth.
His tongue traced the full length of her, slow and deliberate, and the sound she made was nothing she recognized as her own voice. He learned her the way he learned everything — with patience and absolute attention. His tongue circled her clit in slow, tightening spirals, and she felt the sensation build the way pressure builds behind a dam — inexorable, structural, beyond her ability to manage. Her hips moved against his mouth, and his hands on her thighs held her exactly where he wanted her. The growl in his chest vibrated through every point of contact and she came apart when he closed his lips around her clit and sucked — a long, sustained pull that sent white light cracklingthrough her vision and her cry fragmenting into syllables that might have been his name.
