He had braced for his body to fail him at the last second. He had not braced for the wet, eager clutch of her, the way she unfurled around him like a flower. He had not braced for the gleeful swoop in his stomach, so like plummeting from a height, only to catch an updraft and soar.
Then the bond filled with her pleasure, distracting him from his own. He felt her feel him.
It crashed back through the channel between their minds. Her fullness, which was his hardness. Her tightness, which was the clasp of her body around him. The small shocked pleasure when he sank deeper bloomed in her, then him, then her, then him, hers and his folded together until he could not find the seam between them.
He froze, buried, shaking.
“Oh,” Hanna breathed beneath him. Her eyes had gone wide and glassy. “Oh, Rikard. I feel us both. I feelyou—”
“I know.” His voice came out as gravel. The purr had taken him over completely now, rolling out of his chest into hers where they joined, and he watched it travel up her throat and break apart into a shiver. “I know. Hold on to me.”
She did. He moved.
Every stroke doubled. When he drew back he felt the drag of her around himandthe hollow ache of leaving her, both in the same breath. When he sank home, her inhale was his exhale. Sharing breath, they found a rhythm and the bond turned it into a loop, pleasure pouring out of him into her, returning to himchanged, gathering and refusing to spend, climbing higher and higher, lifted by them both.
He felt her nearing her release. The tightening, the white edge of pleasure racing through the bond, threatening to push her over the edge. And because he felt it, he tipped after her, and because he tipped, she rose higher still, the two of them caught in one cresting wave. Her cry broke against his shoulder. His own answer was wordless, a sound he had never made in his life, torn out of him as the pleasure went through him twice over and showered him with stars behind his eyes.
He wrenched himself free at the last possible breath, spilling hot against the soft skin of her belly instead of inside her. He shuddered through it, forehead dropped to hers, the bond still ringing between them like a struck bell.
For long minutes, neither of them could find words.
“Why didn’t you tell me it could be like this?” Hanna managed finally, breathless.
“I did not know.” He spoke into her hair. “I have never had a mate.”
“I have, and it wasn’t like this.”
He gathered her against him and folded his wings over them both like a roof. He had spent five years certain he was a ruin, but Hanna had walked into his ruin and rebuilt it. “I have never hadyou.”
“Well, now you do,” she murmured, already half asleep.
He stroked her back and purred her down into dreams, sharing those with her, too.
Epilogue
Hannalinde
Eighteen months later
The climbing roses had swallowed the south wall, cascading over it in an irrepressible profusion.
Hannalinde stood in the garden with a cup of tea and watched the moonlight silver the blossoms, pink and cream and a deep arterial red. Though they wilted and eventually dripped theirpretty petals all over the garden paths, they constantly renewed themselves. When one bloom faded, another took its place, and another, the vines growing higher and producing even more flowers with each successive month.
It felt much like watching her child grow ever taller, ever more beautiful.
Her sweet Rosalore sat in the grass at her feet, pulling petals from a fallen rose with her father’s seriousness. Her father by name. Her father in every way that counted.
She was walking now, careening about like a small, determined boulder. Her wings, folded against her back, were the size of a crow’s, translucent and fine-veined, and they fluttered when she was excited, which was often, though they would never carry her weight. Aalis had confirmed it: the wings were decorative, a gargoyle inheritance expressed in miniature. She would walk where others flew, also like her father.
Rikard insisted on keeping his restored flight abilities secret, claiming it was to avoid the dreaded sky balls. But on occasional thrilling nights when Rose House was asleep, he carried Hanna in his arms up above the clouds.
“Darling, don’t eat the flowers.”
Rosalore looked up, a petal stuck to her chin, and grinned with the dozen or so teeth she’d recently acquired. Then she ate the petal anyway.
From a blanket spread beneath the old pear tree, Carlijn laughed. She was propped against a bank of cushions with her own baby in her lap, a fat, rosy half-gargoyle boy named Theodor who had his mother’s ringlets and his father’s horns, tiny curved nubs that had appeared at three months and made Carlijn weep for two days before declaring them the most handsome horns in Solvantis. Theodor was currently asleep, which he did with the same commitment Rosalore brought to sleeping during theday. Between them, the two children conspired so their mothers rarely slept at the same time.
A gargoyle landed on the eastern wall where the moonflowers grew. Hannalinde glanced up, expecting Cléa, who visited most evenings. Instead, Bastien dropped down into the garden, his enormous wings compressed against his sides, his long hair tied back. He wore his palace harness, polished to a gleam.
