“Can’t.” The word cost him everything. “Empty.”
“Then take from me.” I rose up, swung my leg over his hips, settled my weight against him. Even through the fabric of my trousers, I could feel the size of him, the solid reality of his body beneath mine, the warmth radiating through the cloth. “The bond. You said it connects us. So let it connect us. Take what you need.”
“Hurt. You.”
“You won’t.”
“Don’t know. What I am. Anymore.”
I took his face in my hands. Made him look at me, made his gaze, serious and fierce, focus on my face.
“You’re Tavrin. You’re the monster who brought me poetry and starlight. You’re the man who broke through a wall because you heard my uncle yelling at me.” I kissed him, harder, trying to taste him past the fever. “You’re mine. Whatever you’re becoming.”
Something shifted in his eyes. The glaze receding, just a little. Focus sharpening, just enough.
His hands found my hips.
Not gentle. Not hesitant. His fingers dug into my flesh with a grip that would leave bruises, and I wanted them. Wanted the marks. Wanted proof.
“Yours,” he agreed. And pulled me down against him.
The kiss was different this time. Desperate. Consuming. He kissed me like I was oxygen and he was drowning. I kissed him back the same way, tangling my fingers in his hair, feeling the fever-heat of his scalp, the places where feathers were growing in along his hairline.
His hands moved up my bare spine. Mapping me. Learning the curve of my waist, the ladder of my ribs, the wings of my shoulder blades. When he reached my breasts, he made a sound that vibrated through my whole body.
“Off,” he managed, tugging at my trousers. “Need. All of you.”
I sat up. His hands fell away, and for a moment I was exposed, bare from the waist up, straddling a monster in a nest of silk and fur.
He looked at me.
Not the way men had looked at me before. Not assessing my usefulness or calculating my value or wondering what I could dofor them. He looked at me like I was the first sunrise after a long winter. Like I was something holy.
“Beautiful.” The word was a rasp. “So. Beautiful. Wren.”
My hands were shaking as I unlaced my trousers. I stood just long enough to push them down, to kick them away, and then I was bare and he was looking at all of me and I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
“Come here.” He reached for me, clumsy with weakness but determined. “Please. Come here.”
I went.
I straddled him again, skin to skin now except for the fabric of his pants between us. The temperature of him was staggering. Like pressing myself against a sun-warmed stone. Like being wrapped in fire that didn’t burn.
“Hearts,” I said. “You said we need to match hearts.”
He took my hand. Pressed it to his chest, over the stuttering rhythm of his heartbeat. Then he pressed his own hand between my breasts, palm flat against my sternum.
“Feel,” he said. “Find me. Pull me. Back.”
I closed my eyes.
His heartbeat under my palm. Slow. Wrong. The long pauses getting longer.
My heartbeat under his palm. Racing. Alive. Strong.
I breathed. Tried to slow my pulse. Tried to find his rhythm and match it.
Slower.
