Every nerve is lit as his lips trail lower, the heat of his bare mouth on my skin, then the wet drag of his tongue.
“Takada is quiet,” he recites, like it’s a love poem, each word punctuated by a kiss. “It’s the kind of beautiful that doesn’t announce itself. You have to show up at the right time of year… in the right light… and just sit with it.”
A shiver ripples up my body as he nips at the sensitive spot where my neck meets my shoulder, then soothes it with his tongue.
“The cherry blossoms don’t last.” Another open-mouthed kiss, hotter this time. “That’s the whole point.”
His hand slides down my side, teasingly slow, and I open my mouth, but all that comes out is a shaky breath, like I can’t inhale enough of him.
“You’re eating breakfast under something that will be gone in two weeks…” His teeth graze my earlobe. “…and the brevity is what makes it matter.”
I moan softly, knees weakening. But one arm bands around my waist, holding me upright while his mouth continues its devastating path. “It’s beauty that asks nothing of you except to be present while it’s still there.”
His hand travels down…down, dipping beneath the waistband of my pants, then under my panties. “The Eiffel Tower is the opposite of that.” A finger slips into my slick heat, and I let out something between a gasp and a moan. “It’s been there for overa hundred years, and it’ll be there for a hundred more.” Chest pressed flush against me, his hand slides deeper. I instinctively widen my stance, opening my thighs just enough for him, breath catching when the new angle lets his fingers glide even more easily through my soaked slit.
“It’s loud and bold and completely unapologetic about existing. Half the world has seen it. The other half wants to.” When he reaches my clit, I see stars. He circles it once, feather-light, teasing the swollen bud until my hips twitch, then drags the pad of his finger back down to my entrance, spreading my wetness everywhere.
I’m trembling, thighs parted, completely at his mercy while he continues reciting in that low, velvet voice right against my ear. “There’s nothing quiet or temporary about it. It just stands there saying ‘look at me,’ and the whole city agrees.” He pushes one thick finger inside me, just the tip at first, stretching me open, and it’s fire and flames and something wildly indecent.
“I want both.” He sinks in deeper, curling gently, stroking that sensitive spot inside, and it’s something I could live off, but also might destroy me.
“I want the breakfast that knows it’s ending and the dinner that knows it isn’t.”
My head falls back against his shoulder, and I’m shaking, panting, so obscenely needy. Every slow thrust of his fingers, every lazy circle of his thumb, every word he breathes against my ear pushes me closer to the edge.
“The whisper…and the shout.” His finger draws out of me, and I moan through the ache, only to cry out when it slides back in.
“The thing that’s beautiful because it won’t last and the thing that’s beautiful because it will.”
Everything moves in a dreamlike slide, reality slipping at the edges, my world narrowed to him. His voice. My words. Words he knows by heart, and now he’s touching me like he wants me to understand how much it means. My body tightens around him, pleasure building into something that makes my scalp tingle and my toes curl.
“That’s not too much to ask, right?” On ‘right’he nips my earlobe, and I turn into a quivering disaster against him. I’m so close I can taste it. My thighs are trembling, my pussy clenching around his fingers, slick dripping down his hand as my body builds and builds, the pressure ready to snap at any second.
“Well, if it is…” he murmurs, speeding up just a fraction, thumb flicking over my clit faster. “I’ll just make it impossible by wanting them both…”
I’m panting, hips rolling, searching, needing. “Oh, God, Reth.”
“…on the. Same. Day.”
I come hard, crying out, my whole body convulsing against him. Violent waves start deep in my core and radiate outward until even my fingertips tingle. My inner walls clench and release around his fingers in desperate pulses, each contraction more intense than the last. Behind my closed eyes, Paris and Japan blur together into something indescribable and bright and permanent and fleeting and so fucking good I collapse against him.
Slick floods my pussy, drenching his fingers, soaking his hand. And my hips jerk uncontrollably while he keeps stroking methrough it, drawing every last tremor out until I’m boneless, gasping, barely able to stand.
“You are…the most beautiful thing in the world, Sophia Sinclair,” he rasps against the side of my neck. “But when you come…you’re fucking exquisite.”
I’m still quivering—a soft, rolling aftershock radiating from between my legs all the way up to my scalp—when Reth withdraws his fingers with a slow curl that makes my knees nearly give out all over again.
My bones are liquid as I turn to face him, his one arm banded loosely around my waist. There’s no getting over how beautiful he is. He’s beautiful like a blade is beautiful. Like violence carved into perfect lines. The sharp cut of his jaw, the brutal elegance of his shoulders, the way every inch of him looks like it was built for both ruin and worship. Even with the scar pulling at his cheek and the bruise blooming around his eye, he’s devastating.
I reach up, fingertips gently tracing the jagged line of his scar. “Pretty violence,” I murmur, and I see what it does to him. WhatIdo to him.
A flush races up his jaw and into his cheekbones. His pupils blow wide, swallowing the blue until only a thin ring remains. His lips part on a sharp inhale, and for the first time, there’s nothing guarded left in his expression—just raw, undisguised hunger carved into every harsh line of his face. Dark. Greedy. Almost feral.
He looks like he wants to devour me whole.
And God help me… I want him to.
Without thinking, I push up on my toes and kiss him—slow at first, then deeper, hungrier, my hands cradling his scarred face.
