His teeth caught his bottom lip, a groan tearing loose from his throat as he rasped, “With pleasure.”
Before I could brace myself, his mouth, once tentative, grazing, claimed me with purpose as our lips collided in a slow, inevitable crash. The bondflared as recognition roared in response to our souls aligning themselves into each other.
He was gentle at first, fear splitting down the bond over what his greed might do. But it quickly forced through, becoming eager and consuming, tasting me like I was everything he’d been denied at once.
His lips trailed down my throat, slow and punishing, teeth grazing just enough to make me shiver while his hand drew slow, agonizing circles lower, past my hips.
“You’re trembling,” he growled, moving his mouth back against my lips. “I love that. Now,” his teeth nipped gently. “Open for me.”
Without thought, I obeyed, parting, letting his tongue find mine as it swept into my mouth.
His kiss was fire and smoke, and gods, I wanted to burn in it.
Fingers slid lower, pressing against the fabric that shielded my ache, thumb circling the bundle of nerves that pulsed beneath. The pressure was just enough to undo me. I pushed harder into his palm as his fingers slipped past the barrier, dragging aside the fabric. Then he was there, sliding through the slickness he found, coating his touch in proof of my betrayal.
He trapped my wrists above my head with one hand while the other slid with brutal patience, making me arch despite myself.
“You feel how desperate you are?”
His eyes dropped to my mouth just as mine slid closed, my nails digging into his shoulders as my legs trembled, threatening to give way.
“Tell me,” he purred, sinking inside. “Is it still the thought of turning my blood to venom that makes you wet?” His palm ground firmly against my sweet spot, his words searing as hot as his touch. “Or is this, all of this, for me?”
Our lips crashed again, tongues colliding, messy, consuming. A raw, throaty sound broke free of me, unrestrained. The bond sang with it, dragging my truth to him whether I spoke it aloud or not.
All for him. Every pulse, every shudder, every desperate drip was his to claim.
“This is where I belong.” He wrapped a hand around the hollow of my throat. Firm enough to restrain, careful enough to breathe. “Holding you, shaking and soaked, until you forget how to stand without me.”
My toes curled, the world narrowing to the press of his palm, the scrape of his thumb, the slow, worshipful rhythm of him. Pleasure tore through me in a glorious wave as the room tilted and the air left my lungs. He held me through the falling, fingers steady at the base of my skull.
When the tremors subsided, his grip softened, sliding from my throat to cup my jaw. He kissed me again, not a taking, but a vow pressed to my lips. “I don’t have to claim you to know you’re mine,” he whispered. “But know, I have always been yours in return.”
The implication in his words imprinted along my spine, dangerous and tender all at once. Everything I had both longed for and feared.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Verena
ELVA TILTED HER HEAD. “You look,” her eyes swept over me once, twice, “flushed.”
My hand flew to my cheeks where a glow was still branded, proof I hadn’t shaken off what had happened only an hour or so ago. Proof I’d only barely managed to peel myself from Ronan’s tent and stumble back here.
Elva didn’t know, and fates, I wasn’t ready to let her. Not because I wanted to hoard the secret, though I did, but because I was still figuring out what it meant. Still wearing the invisible claim he’d left.
That son of a bitch hadmarkedme. And I’d let him. Worse, I’d worn it with something dangerously close to pride.
Then he’d ruined me with only his hand. The kind of ruin that left my bones molten, my pulse wrecked, and my body broken open to something I’d never felt before.
That wasn’t skill. That was a talent born of the damn gods.
I wasn’t ready to name what it meant. To admit how much closer it bound us. He had said the words, that I was his, and I’d felt the truth of them. But he deserved better than me. Someone purer, stronger. Untainted by venom and fate.
I fluttered my hand in front of my face, hoping that fanning away the blush would disguise the blaze under my skin. “Well, it is a thousand degrees here,” I muttered. It was not.
If Elva scented anything else, anything unmistakablymale, she didn’t show it. She simply slid one of her ornate fans into my hand, her expression drawn from porcelain composure.
I groaned in relief as the stronger breeze washed over me, collapsing backward onto the cushions and furs with relief close to desperation. The strain between my thighs had been sated, thoroughly, ruinously, but even a stray thought of him sent the pulse sparking alive again.
