He took her mouth.He didn’t ask permission. He simply claimed the kiss the way he claimed territory. Direct. Certain. Leaving no space for doubt.
The kiss hit with all the force he had been containing since the ballroom. Since the first glimpse of Tommaso too close to her. Since hearing her repeat the bastard’s words. Since watching her stand under the consequence of fresh betrayal and stillremain upright.
He kissed her like a man with too much anger and too much hunger and no intention of pretending otherwise.
Elia answered instantly.Her fingers tightened in his jacket and she rose onto her toes, bringing herself closer, opening for him with a desperate kind of trust that went straight through his control. The first touch of her tongue against his tasted of champagne and the last thin thread of patience burnedaway.
He deepened the kiss without mercy.
Her gasp disappeared into his mouth. The sound nearly wreckedhim.
His hand spread across her back, dragging her flush against him. Through layers of silk and tailored cloth he learned her body again in sharper detail than any man should while still standing under the open sky at a gala full of enemies. The fit of her against him felt violently right. Too right. The curve of her waist beneath his palm. The yielding heat of her body where it pressed into his. The fact that she didn’t pull away when the kiss turned rougher, deeper, edged with all the things he hadn’tsaid.
She wanted this.
Wanted him.
The knowledge struck hot.
Her hands left his jacket only to slide upward into his hair, and the sensation of her fingers threadingthrough it nearly made him lose what little discipline remained. He kissed her harder in answer, swallowing the startled sound she made.
Her warm, responsive body sent a fierce pulse of satisfaction through him. She arched against him at once. Not retreating. Seekingmore.
The movement dragged a harsh, dangerous sound from his chest.
Elia’s fingers tightened in his hair. “Magnus...”
He broke the kiss only long enough to move his mouth along the line of her jaw. Her pulse hammered beneath his lips and he wanted more. Wanted to stay there until she stopped thinking about contracts and debt and names like Bianca and Vittorio and Tommaso and remembered only this. Him. His hands. His mouth. The fact that she was wanted for herself and not for the uses men imagined they could make ofher.
“Say it again,” he murmured against herskin.
She tilted her head back slightly, giving him more of her throat without seeming to understand the magnitude of the surrender. “What?”
“My name.”
She inhaled sharply. “Magnus.”
The sound of it in that voice, low and shaken and intimate, shot through him like a match strikingoil.
He lifted his head and kissed her again, slower this time but no less dangerous. Their mouths met with the kind of hunger that had long since moved past surprise and settled into recognition.This was not sudden. This was not even reckless, not really. It was inevitable and both of them knewit.
Her hands slid down from his hair to his shoulders, then back to his chest, palms pressing over him as if mapping the breadth of him in silence. He could not get enough of the contact. He wanted her hands everywhere. He wanted the entire impossible night stripped down to this balcony and her body against his and the certainty that no one would ever take her fromhim.
She shivered when his hand moved from her back to the side of her throat, his thumb brushing the silken skin where her pulse throbbed.
“Tell me to stop,” he said, though the darkness in it made it clear he didn’t want that answer.
Her eyes lifted to his. Whatever she saw there made her breath catch again.“I don’t want you to stop.” Her fingers tightened in his tux, pulling him closer instead of pushing him away. “I choose you, Magnus.”
That sentence should have been enough to send him further over the edge than he already was. Instead it settled into him with a strange, brutal tenderness that nearly hurt.No one had ever taught her that wanting could be spoken aloud without punishment.
He kissed her once more, thorough now, as if he had all the time in the world and not a moment to spare. Her mouth softened beneath his. Her body did too, some of the tightness easing as she leaned fully into him. He caught the shift and gatheredit greedily.
For one dangerous, suspended moment the world outside the balcony ceased to exist.
No Donatis.
No contract.
