When she glanced back up at him, his grin was back. And it was full of a hunger that would devour the world.
“Fuck me, Khay.”
Khayrivven’s eyes turned a shade darker as they roamed her naked form, and he reached for his waistband, opening the laces and stripping out of his pants. His cock was rock hard, the tip glistening, and on the side, a vein stood proud. Lory’s mouth went dry as he knelt between her legs, lowering himself between her hips.
He didn’t utter a word as he positioned his cock at her entrance. Only when Lory bucked her hips, hoping to get him to slide in faster, did he click his tongue. “If you don’t want to have any regrets, don’t rush me.”
The words barely registered as she reached for his neck, pulling his mouth onto hers, and rolling her hips, and, Guardians save her, he unfroze, burying himself inside of her with one long thrust that did make her scream.
A wordless scream that might have woken up the dead or alerted all of Ashthorn Ward to what they were up to, but Khayrivven shook his head against her kiss. “No one will know. My room is warded.”
Whether he’d read her mind or merely guessed, Lory didn’t care. Nothing existed but the friction between them, the heat engulfing her as Khayrivven drove into her with powerful strokes, his scent wrapping her in a cocoon of safety. Nothing could happen to her while she was in his arms.Nothing could happen at all because they were no longer of this world.
His lips were everywhere: her mouth, her cheeks, her forehead, her throat, her chest, her peaked breasts, and one of his hands he’d shoved under the small of her back, supporting her weight as she undulated her hips, breaking against him like a sandstorm against a rock.
Faster and faster, he thrust, his grip nearly painful as he wrapped his other arm around her shoulders, lifting her so she sat on his lap. The fit was so deep she couldn’t tell where she ended and where he began as he moved inside of her, and her muscles clenched as he murmured into her ear, “You’re all I ever dream about. All I can see when I’m awake. You’re m—” He bit off the last word, busying his lips with a mind-altering kiss instead, and Lory couldn’t help it—she shattered. Body trembling and heart racing, she held onto him as she rode out the waves of pleasure, screaming his name as he’d predicted. And as he kissed her, the world stilled, the entire universe stilled, and somewhere, in the far beyond, darkness and fire consumed each other like the gods themselves, measuring their strength against each other.
Inside her chest, a thread of fire spun from her heart, reaching out into that space that had no beginning and no end, and in the distance, a rope made of golden flames lingered like it was waiting. Something about it was calling out to her to reach for it, but Lory’s thoughts were blown out by a wave of ecstasy that nearly made her forget her own name.
“I love you.”She didn’t mean to think it. Didn’t mean to feel it at all, but she forgot what she had wanted or notbecause the golden rope struck like a viper, wrapping itself around the thin thread of fire until they became one long cord that originated in Lory’s chest and ended, she didn’t know where.
“—mine,” Khayrivven panted somewhere in the nexus that had opened up around her. “You’remine.”
Twenty-Four
Lory
Eternity and all-consumingpleasure still held her in their sensual claws when Khayrivven scrambled off her with a groan that was definitely not one of ecstasy. One of his hands reached for his forehead, wiping his hair back from his face, while the other rested upon his heart like he was worried it might slap out of his chest.
A grin crept onto Lory’s lips.
“This was different,” she murmured, crawling after him to the edge of the bed and wrapping her arms around his waist, but they slid off his naked form as he pushed up from the bed, opening the narrowarmoire beside the bed and slipping into a pair of black pants he extracted from a drawer.
Then, he started pacing, determined to wear a track into the stone floor.
“What just happened?”
For a beat, Khayrivven stopped, measuring her like she was a danger rather than the woman he’d just bedded, and the remorse she found in his storm-gray eyes made her chest constrict.
“What happened, Khayrivven?” Watching him pass back and forth before the bed, Lory tried to make sense of this sudden change in him.
She’d seen it before, lovers she’d taken for a night or two grow bored of her and withdrawing. She’d done it herself a couple of times, but this… This was different.
Khayrivven wasn’t shying away from her or taking a quick exit. He wasn’t kicking her out either. If anything, he seemed to be guarding her exit, as if he was worried she’d bolt.
Draping the covers around her, Lory shimmied back against the headboard and studied the Flame-born captain fighting a silent battle.
“What just happened?”
He merely kept moving, as if motion would solve whatever problem he was gnawing on.
Perhaps he was freaked out by the intensity of their connection. If the streak of blinding light as she climaxed had been remotely similar for him, she’d even understand why he was at a loss for words. But something was off in the wayhe’d put distance between them like he could no longer bear being close to her. Something about the entire situation was very, very wrong.
And it had all started with that soul-altering moment when they’d both found their release.
“Khayrivven?” If he wasn’t going to answer soon, she might just need to get out of that bed after all and plant herself in his path so he had no other option. “Whatwasthat?”
“I don’t know.” The look in his eyes suggested he knew more than he cared to admit, and that alone made red alarm bells go off in Lory’s mind.
