Adeline froze, completely caught off guard. The heat simmering and pulsing throughout her body was so overwhelming, she could barely think around it but –
Beautiful.
She must have known he’d think so, in the back of her mind, but to hear the word fall from his lips in that soft, low tone was something entirely different. It made her chest hurt, a gentle, fluttering agony. It made her throat burn with words that wouldn’t come. So she kissed him, trying to press all the words she couldn’t find into his lips.
Kai let her claim the kiss, tilting his head back for her, parting his lips so she could stroke her tongue along every inch of his mouth. And all the while, his palms skated up over her thighs, under her nightgown, past her hips, rough new callouses from his weeks of training brushing her skin and trailing goosebumps up her sides. Her kisses grew harder and clumsier the more he touched her, until he finally grabbed her by the waist and drew her whole weight down on him, grinding himself none too gently between her thighs.
Her mind scattered like snowdust at the feel of him.
The hard, unyielding feel of him aligned with her aching centre, the press, the proof that he wanted this just as badly as she did.
She broke away, gasping, but he chased her mouth, drawing her lower lip between his teeth as he angled his hips against hers. She moaned into his mouth, and even as he pulled away to bring his lips to her ear, he ground deliberately against her, still stoking the frenzy that pulsed through her at his every movement.
“You give me more credit than I’m due,” he half-panted. “I amnotmade of chivalry. Not when it comes to you.”
Fuck,she thought distantly.He heard that.
Yet strangely, Adeline found she didn’t even have it in her to care.
Not as he caught her lips again. Not as he gripped her hips and guided them, rocking her slowly over the length of him until she was scraping his bottom lip between her teeth to keep from moaning. Her nightgown had ridden all the way over her hips, and her undergarments were soaked and tight with friction. If they kept going on like this, she was going to shatter and melt right here in his lap.
It was too much, and not yet enough.
“Did you really stay because you wanted to kiss me,” she managed to gasp out. “Or was it so you could tease me off the brink of sanity?”
He laughed, low and hoarse. “I’mteasingyou?”
“Tell me why you really stayed.”
She wanted him to say it.
Kai sat up, groaning slightly as her weight shifted against him. His breath in her ear was hot and unsteady.
“What is it you want to hear, Adeline?”
Then, so quickly she couldn’t think, he braced her thighs in his hands and spun them both, leaning her back into the settee. He hovered over her, a devious smile playing at the sharp corners of his lips.
“Do you want me to say that I stayed so I could finally,finallytouch you the way I want to?”
He ran his hand up the inside of her leg, firm at first and then lighter, lighter,toolight, just his fingers playing at the edge of soaked lace.
“Should I tell you that I’ve wanted to know what you taste like as long as I’ve known you?”
He slipped a finger into her undergarments and hooked them to one side, baring her almost entirely. She tensed against her own body, fighting the urge to writhe, though she couldn’t bite back the whimper that escaped her as his knuckle brushed over her centre.Fuck,she wanted his weight on her. Just wanted him to touch her, fill her.
“Or how badly I wanted to be inside you that night in the forest? And every night since?”
She was beyond patience, beyond pride. At this moment in time, she cared about nothing more than feeling her body stretch around him, feeling him move inside her.
“Please,” she breathed.
As if something inside him had snapped at her broken plea, Kai swore and reared back. “Take it off,” he rasped. She didn’t hesitate in reaching for the hem of her nightgown and yanking the whole thing over her head as he did the same with his shirt.
And for a moment, they paused. Indulged in one drawn out heartbeat of drinking each other in. Kai, his broad shoulders lifting with every heavy breath, was made up of all the hard plains and long lines she’d imagined, but she hadn’t expected the fine dusting of dark hair that ran from his navel to somewhere beneath his belt. She wanted to reach out and trace that line, to follow it all the way to its end. But she made herself look up at Kai, just a moment before he dragged his own gaze from her body, his eyes now hooded in a way that made her sway where she knelt; she grabbed the back of the settee for balance.
“We used to chew a leaf,” Kai said, and for a moment, with his voice so low and uneven, she could barely understand him. A leaf? “Have you something similar?”
Oh.
