Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
His forearm pulsed — low, continuous — having nothing to do with broadcasting and everything to do with the woman standing beside his chair, naming the fractures in his discipline with the precision of someone who had tracked each one as it formed.
“I cannot afford to stop managing,” he said.
“You cannot afford to keep pretending that you are.”
He pushed back from the table. The chair scraped against the floor, and he stood, and the motion brought him within a foot of where she waited. Her chin tilted upward to hold his gaze. She had not retreated from him once—not in the argument they’d had before, not in the council chamber, not in the basement when the ceiling fell and his arms closed around her and the curse tried to take his consciousness while her hands held him to the earth.
Delphine LeClair stood inside his guard and did not move.
His breathing had shortened. The curse pressed against his arm from inside, and Delphine’s presence pressed from outside, and between the two pressures his control had thinned to a membrane that one word or one touch would dissolve.
Two centuries of maintaining the distance between what he wanted and what he allowed himself to take, and the exhaustion of it sat in his bones now, heavy and final.
“If I stop holding back,” he said, and the sentence carried the gravity of a last warning he hoped would not be heeded, “I cannot be careful with you.”
Her eyes did not waver.
“Good.”
He closed the distance.
His mouth found hers with none of the urgency that had driven the kiss in his kitchen. That kiss had been an eruption—months of pressure released in a single point of contact. His lips met hers now and stayed. His hand rose to her face, his palm settling against her cheek, his thumb tracing the bone beneath her eye. He held her there and kissed her with the slow attention of someone who had stopped fighting.
Her response matched his pace. Her mouth opened against his, and her hand came up to his wrist where it held her face. Her fingers wrapped around his and held on.
The kiss deepened without accelerating. His tongue found hers, and the contact sent heat down through his chest and into his abdomen. His free hand went to her hip, his palm pressing into the warmth that radiated through the linen of her clothing. She stepped into him, and the last inches between their bodies collapsed.
Her chest pressed against his. Her hips aligned with his. The hand at his wrist tightened, and her other hand slid between the buttons of his shirt and gripped the fabric over his heart.
His mouth left hers and tracked the line of her jaw. His lips pressed against the hinge of it, then against the soft skin below her ear, then against the tendon that ran the length of her neck where her pulse beat its rapid rhythm into his mouth. Her head tilted, giving him the same access she had given in the kitchen, in the minutes before they separated—and the offering extended past the skin.
Her fingers released his shirt and moved to his collar. She worked the top button loose without pulling away from him. The second button followed. Her fingertips traced his collarbone, and skin against skin sent a current through his chest that the curse could not replicate and could not override.
He returned to her mouth and kissed her with the patience he had denied himself for the entirety of their acquaintance in this lifetime—he allowed himself to taste her fully, to learn the geography of her lower lip, to discover the specific pressure that drew sound from her throat. She answered each discovery with a shift of her body against his, her hips pressing forward, her hand releasing his wrist to find his hair.
Her fingers slid through the slightly shaggy strands and gripped. The pull traveled his spine and pooled at its base. His hand at her hip tightened and he became impossibly hard. He drew her flush against him with the full strength of an arm that had spent centuries capable of more force than any mortal body could produce, controlled now to the degree that brought her close without bruising what he held.
She broke the kiss to breathe. Her forehead pressed against his chin, and her exhales landed against the opening of his shirt where her fingers had bared his skin.
“Stay.” The word arrived before he could consider its architecture — no neutrality, no measured distance. Just the fact of what he wanted, and then immediately the awareness that wanting was not the same as asking. He pulled back enough to see her face. “Are you sure.” Not a question the way questions usually worked. A door he was holding open, with every intention of letting her decide whether to walk through it.