I drank her soul into mine as if I truly might drain her dry.
I was no longer in control. I wasn’t a god. I wasn’t eternal. I was an animal, overcome with the desire to make her mine. Primal need had to be experienced to be understood. Until my fingers dug into her hips, until her breasts pressed into me until I dragged my teeth across her throat, tasting her, biting her, kissing her, the word went from a concept to my all-encompassing reality.
She tasted like the first thawed day after a long winter.
She was the flavor of hope, of a new spring when the world had been covered in snow. She was the energy of dawn’s first light.
She was the heat that baked the earth and broke the seed as it forced its way from the ground.
I tore myself from her with a wild sort of gasp, as if I’d resurfaced from somewhere deep underwater, and looked at her with panic.
A word escaped her lips. “Please.”
Her chest heaved. Her eyes were as wide as a startled doe’s. She struggled to swallow, and I crumbled into myself thinking that I’d hurt her, that there were pieces of me that stole and sucked and drained, pieces I’d never explored. I raked both hands into her hair with the intent to heal, to apologize, to undo, to fix, and learned how wrong I’d been.
Eleni possessed the sort of fearlessness and certainty I had yet to see on the faces of generals on the eve of battle. “Please, don’t let me go.”
My breath escaped. She had not been panting from injury.
“Don’t leave me.”
Animal. Human. Primal. Mortal.
She moved before I could think as she jumped into my arms. Her legs wrapped around my waist, and I caught her, cupping her ass, holding her close.
She’d never fall again. Not while I held her. And I knew then, I wouldn’t let her go.
“Never.”
We weren’t Eros and Psyche. The mortal woman, Psyche, had been punished for advancing things with Eros, but he—Cupid, by another name—had very particular ideas about being the final authority on love. He was the captain of their ship. The woman longing to be his beloved was its passenger.
But we weren’t them.
She gripped the back of my neck, mouth never leaving mine, legs tightening around my waist as I carried her to the bed.
It was hard to know who was at the helm as I tossed her onto the mattress, descending on her with a masculine body that no longer belonged to me. We were at war to prove who craved the other more. Before this moment, I hadn’t counted myself among carnal human lovers. My love for my human was different. It had been curious, protective, pure.
Then her head hit the pillow. Night-dark hair pooled around her. Her back arched. Her toes pointed, knees moving like the plates that shifted the earthly world as her robe fell open.
“I need you,” she said between breaths.
I nearly laughed that she believedshewas the one who neededme.
I’d never experienced this sort of ache, the desperation for two to become one. All thought drained from me, pulsing in a demanding rhythm to be inside her. I tasted her sweat, the scented oils of her realm, the sharp lungful of ozone, and above all, the shimmering opaline aura that belonged to her and her alone.
She tore the scrap of tunic from my corporeal form, flinging it to the ground with the sort of haste that told me she’d wanted it gone for a long, long time. My mouth moved from her navel upwards, between the bronze of her breasts, suckling her russetnipples, teeth and lips and tongue skimming across her throat, exploring every inch.
Her hands balled into fists in my hair. She moaned, “Let me worship you.”
The words were poetry despite their absurdity.
She hitched her calves against the back of my thighs and held me in place—as much as she could for a human, anyway.
Clothes in shreds on the marble, bare in the secrecy of the world we’d created, we paused on the precipice. Her hips rolled, soaked lips brushing against the tip of my cock. A low growl escaped my throat, but I held back for as long as I could. She’d known carnal pleasure. I was no stranger to the concept. But the consummation between mortal and immortal? Tales were written of such things for a reason.
She dug the heels of her feet into my ass, bringing herself closer, wordlessly begging.
“Eleni…”
