Page 94

Aster had stepped closer. He didn’t touch her but for the way he wound her braid around his finger. She recognized the look in his eyes; one he’d had before. It was that of a starving man seeking satiation, and losing the fight not to reach for her flesh.

“Say the word, Graham,” he breathed.

This time, she kissed him. And it wasn’t a fleeting ghost of contact like the first time he’d done it. It was pressure and passion and permission.

“You should have gotten the king,” she murmured against his lips. Their last barrier came crashing down.

He laughed against her mouth, joy mixed with his desire, as he hoisted her into his arms. His hands had already slipped beneath the hem of her dress, gripping her bare skin as he carried her to bed.

If sex was a kind of magic, sex with Aster was an exercise in the occult.

The incantations he breathed into her pores as he slipped her straps from her shoulders settled into her skin, consuming her flesh. She muttered charms with her lips, trailing across every unexplored inch of him as her unsteady hands undid his shirt buttons, revealing a sea of skin to quench her thirst. The spells cast by his touch, insistent in its exploration of the places that made her sway, circled her mind and body in a whirlwind of want. And the enchantments she conjured with heavy pants between parted lips were the only things keeping her grounded in some semblance of reality as Aster sank into her, echoes careening through her head.

For a moment, all was still.

Then Molly’s breath rattled on the intake. An overwhelming urgency had her shifting, desperate for more.

Aster groaned against her neck, teeth scraping along the vertical tendons of her throat before he lifted his head to meet her eyes. She rocked again, encouraging him to move, nearly split apart by the electric storm crackling between her nerves.

He pressed a kiss to her lips, surprisingly chaste as he dragged his hips away from hers. Molly gasped against his mouth, threading her fingers through his hair, dragging her nails against his scalp, down his neck, and to his shoulders.

When he broke the kiss and looked at her again, she saw a glint in his eyes, a crinkle at the corners, and she knew she was done for.

Her eyes rolled back just as his hips snapped forward, a jolt of electricity by way of magic—or was it the other way around?—zipping between them, indifferent to where one ended and the other began.

Aster pushed up, seated against his heels as his confident, practiced hands held her by the hips to meet his every movement. She was a canvas, pulled too tightly across her frame, unraveling at the edges as she let her reflexes take control, instinct orchestrating how to be with him. She had no control over her impending ruin under his touch.

Heat bloomed beneath her skin, rushes of need she barely knew what to do with. But she knew she needed more contact, more closeness. The cool bite of air against the firestorm on her skin drove her to seek more. She reached out, and without the need for words, he simply pulled her to a seated position with him, chest pressed to chest, face pressed to face, and the vacancies in her mind pressed to the memories in his, so close they might as well be one.

He slowed his pace as he held her against him, savoring the new position. She moved with him, whimpering at the grit of friction as he thrust up into her: all at once entirely familiar and deliciously unknown. She clawed at his back, gripping for support as every fiber inside her threatened to dissolve beneath sweat-slicked skin and the trail of his tongue along her breast. She remained steady only by the grace of the arm Aster had anchored around her waist, keeping her upright and perfectly positioned to meet his hips with hers.

She released a tiny, broken breath as his left hand briefly cradled her head before dipping lower. His hand cupped her breast in its descent, rolling a nipple between his fingers in a way that drew a moan from her before continuing downward.

His hand slipped past her ribs, ghosted across her stomach.

She pressed her nails harder into his back, rolling her head forward enough to meet his eyes. She had little control left, already on the precipice of a new ledge and ready, desperately so, to fall.

She only had one request as his fingers finally found their destination.

Don’t be gentle with me, she wanted to say. She hadn’t been with him, all those months ago when she’d still mistrusted everything about him. She wanted that treatment repaid with interest, sweet, delicious interest. But the words died in her throat, along with every coherent thought she might have had as her world unwound around her.

For a moment, her mind was nothing but vacancies, enormous caverns of unknowing as her reality blinked out of existence before reforming and beginning anew. She reveled in the distinct pleasure of watching every ounce of Aster Bishop’s careful control shattering around him.

He collapsed on the bed, clinging to her, and she to him, as he pressed tiny kisses against her neck, her shoulder, her wrist. Every inch his lips could travel, they did. And her hands did the same, relearning and cataloging every stretch of his pale skin.

“I’m never sleeping on a sofa again,” Aster announced, barely a whisper between kisses.

“No?” was all Molly managed as she traced the long lines of his arm.

“Not when you’re in a bed.”

“Is it always like this?” she asked quietly, hoping to communicate the feeling of possession, of being possessed, that burned like hot coals inside her chest.

“The sex?” he asked, diverting his trail of kisses so he could level his face with hers. “Yes and no,” he answered. “It’s always fantastic, but this was . . .”

“Magic,” she supplied, resisting a sense of embarrassment over her sentimentality. She’d never pictured herself as that kind of person, one so consumed in another that the edges between them ran and blurred.

He hummed in agreement as he dropped his mouth to her ear, the barest hint of teeth toying with the lobe. Her body arched against his, reacting to his touch. She smiled into the feeling, eyes closing.