His mouth closes into a kiss, which he drags up to my ear. Gentle teeth nip at my lobe. Somehow, my hands have found his shoulders, kneading the rounded muscles, clutching at him until my heels lift from the floor. His hair drapes against my shoulder, a heavy fall of silk.
My eyes drift shut, all thought fracturing into sensation. And I realize, then, that my skin was never meant to contain me. It was only ever meant to receive the gift of his touch.
He releases my hip, his hand skimming up my ribcage to my neck, his grip splaying against my jaw. His fingers work their way through my braids, so similar to the way he touched me at the Claiming. Only this time, fire goes sizzling and sliding down my throat, as if the sky has just dropped its hottest, bluest star straight into my stomach.
Its burn licks through me. Reduces me to wave after wave ofwant.
Amriel kisses a path from my ear to my jaw, then veers toward my mouth. I expect him to slow as he gets closer, to give me room to breathe, because he must know I’ve never been kissed before. But he doesn’t give me time to think. Now that his iron hold on himself hasbroken, he can’t seem to stop, or even hesitate. He just reaches his destination and slants his lips across mine, fusing our mouths together.
The impact barrels into me, brutal in its perfection. Apart, we are nothing, but together, we’re a combustion of joined lips and questing tongues. I moan into Amriel’s mouth, and he moans into mine, and my fingers clutch tighter, fisting the fabric of his shirt as I pull him closer.
He responds, caging my jaw with his hand, his other arm banding around my waist and hauling me to him. Something firm prods against my belly, and my hips tilt, wanting to be closer, needing to be closer.
Goddess. Kissing is nothing like I imagined. Not gentle, or tender, but desperate. Consuming. Like he’s trying to devour me. Extinguish two hundred years of agony in the blaze of a single moment.
His tongue pushes deeper into my mouth. I welcome it, because I can no longer think, or resist, or even remember my own name. I can only drown in the feel of him, in the press of his body against mine, in the way his hand tangles in my hair as if he’s begging me not to walk away.
My legs give out, but he catches me, lifts me like I weigh nothing. The world spins, and then I’m sitting on something hard and cold. His desk.
He steps between my knees, forcing them wide. My gown rides up to expose my legs, but I don’t care. Not when I have his tongue in my mouth and his hands all over me—my waist, my hips, sliding up my ribs. Not when I’ve just been granted access to a paradise I didn’t even know existed.
“Shadows take me,” he rasps against my mouth. “You taste like—like?—”
I kiss him harder, shutting him up, because Iknow. Because this kiss comes straight from a bottomless pit of pleasure. Because he tastes like sweet wine and bitter chocolate and every wish I’ve ever made, even the ones I thought would never come true.
I arch into his touch. He maps my body like he’s memorizing it. His hands skim over my gown at first, then beneath it, sliding fire along my thighs, slipping beneath the satin to palm my belly, my hips.
The star in my stomach fizzes and boils, a searing ache thatgathers between my thighs. I want him to touch me there,needhim to, and I know he will, can feel the intent, heavy and certain in his mind.
But first, he’ll give me pleasure. Drawn-out, long-awaited, fed to me drop by drop. Until neither of us can stand it anymore.
A groan trips up my throat. “Amriel…”
He swallows his own name, drinks it straight from the source. Ifeelhim do it, taste its headiness on his tongue. And shadows below, it’s better than any liquor. It’s what he wishes wine would taste like. It’s the thing he’s searching for every time he pulls yet another cork from another bottle.
I tug him closer. I’ve acquired a second heartbeat, somehow—his, maybe, thudding inside his chest. Or maybe the one that pulses between my legs, fluttering just for him.
My hands rove, sliding up his shoulders and down his back, my fingers hugging lines of hard muscle. The silk of his shirt is smooth beneath my palms, but I want it gone. I need the heat of his skin against mine. Already, I have the joy of his thoughts spilling into my mind, the pleasure that coils in his belly spiraling through mine, too.
Now I want it all.
I slip my hands beneath his shirt, pushing apart the vee, no longer conscious of where his sensations end and mine begin. When we come together fully, it will be endless. Infinite. Like nothing I’ve ever experienced and nothing he’s ever even dreamed of, because this is better, this is written across the sky somewhere, and?—
My hand grazes something raised, just below his collarbone. I pause, because it almost feels like…
I frown. Pull back. Our lips part with reluctance as I feel my way across the textured scar. Surely this can’t be what I think it is. But…
“Why…” My voice breaks, and I try again. “Why’re my initials carved into your shoulder?”
He goes still, his hands collared around my waist.
I stroke across the raised, rough scar again. Yes, those are definitely my initials, in the very same place the Shadow wears them. The V even has the little flourish I tacked on to the end. As ifIcarved this myself.
“Amriel?” This time, my question carries a note of warning. “How’d this get here?”
He eases back, his expression shuttering, all the fire and longing draining out of his eyes. “Do you really need to ask?”
“Obviously I do, or I wouldn’t have bothered.”
