“Come here,” I commanded, breathless.
He shook his head, gaze aimed hungrily at my lips. “I don’t want to hurt your leg.”
My hands found his belt, driven by an urgency that set my skin on fire wherever he touched. “I don’t care about my leg.”
“Are you sure?”
I almost growled. “Yes, Kye. My leg will heal fine. I want you.”Mihaunathe words were sugar across my palate. “Now, come here and take this off.”
“You should know.” Kye draped a leg over my lap, rocking forward hard enough for me to feel the swell between his thighs. “That I.” He ran his fingers under my scalp, tugging my face back with a gentle wrench on my hair, and punctuated each word with a kiss across my throat. “Planned. A. Fucking. Thorough. Lashing. For. You.”
“I know,” I gasped as he sucked my earlobe into his mouth. “I’ve been waiting for it since you carried me up the stairs.”
His hand found the slit in my dress, trailing the intersection of my legs all the way to the top. “Well, here it is.” I wore nothing under the black silk, no barrier from his thumb as it rolled lazily across my center. “If you ever try something like that again, I’ll strap you to my back for the rest of our days, and you’ll never leave my fucking sight.” He swiped the opposite way, sending a string of dizzying aches through my flesh, flushing sparklingneed into my sinew while stealing oxygen from my lungs. My back arched against his hand, and he watched me from under thick lashes. “From now on, your fights are my fights. Your demons are my demons. I’ll learn their names so well, I might as well carve them in my hide.”
“That’s dramatic, even for you,” I said, my voice dissolved into husk and heat.
“My point is,” Kye tucked forward again, taking my mouth as his thumb lit into my core, draining me of the moan that suddenly caught in my throat. “If something happened to you,” his hand suddenly stopped, and he pulled away enough to look me in the eyes. “I don’t think I’d recover. I’m in this with you, and you’ll never be alone again. Fuckingnever. I need to know that you understand that. Do you understand?”
My fingers coiled in his hair, weaving into his curls. Wild heat still radiated between my knees, sharp and wicked and as decadent as the sound of his voice. But his words bit into my heart like little fangs, stirring the remorse I’d been ignoring since the moment I planned to tie him to a chair and leave him.
“I’m sorry.”
Kye shook his head. “Don’t be sorry. I’m not asking you to be sorry. I’m asking if you understand you’re not alone.” He sank back over the top of my thighs, careful to balance his own weight on his heels as he straddled my legs, his muscular arms stretching as he kept his hands on me, and it occurred to me how torturous it must have been for him, watching hiscordaeleaving in the middle of the night to fight a battle he didn’t understand and locking him in his rooms so he couldn’t follow.
But I’d lived my life alone. I’d woken to brew my fatherkavatea and watched him leave to work the fishing boats. Paddled to Neris Island to hunt for clams and listened to Nori and Olinne rant about men. Come back to my little house to bake tuna and weave baskets and tend to my garden while the neighborhoodsent whispers to each other over my head. And it had been that way for as long as I could remember. Surrounded by others, but as isolated as the island itself, nursing my spite with my own poison.
Thaan stealing me from Neris had been the worst thing that had ever happened to me. But I wondered suddenly, as Kye waited for my answer, if it’s sometimes possible that the worst things are also the brightest. If beauty might wait to be found in the darkness. If something good can root within something wrong, and if life is simply a tangle of vines that are just that. Good and wrong, hanging from the same tree.
And I’d always told myself I wanted to be alone. But maybe, just maybe, I didn’t.
I swallowed the thought, eyes and throat suddenly thick as I twisted my fingers deeper into the roots of Kye’s hair. “I understand.”
He reached behind his neck to grasp his shirt, pulling it off over his head. “That’s all I need.”
His scent followed the current of air that waved across me, lush mint leaves crushed in the rain. And I couldn’t help that my hands immediately slid over his shoulders and across his warm, hard chest, down the hard ridges of his abdomen and the V above his hips. A feral beast flickered in his eyes, and I knew we were done talking.
Raw heat gathered in my chest, sinking down to my belly and lower, golden and glowing, throbbing suddenly between my thighs. Kye snaked his hands under my bottom, tugging my long dress free of my weight, and I shifted my hips as much as my leg would allow until he grew impatient enough to grasp me around the waist with one arm and hoist me into the air, freeing the sea silk from under me. He whipped it off, my hair flying through the air as he did, and the sound of threads tearing within the preciousByssusmight have made me cringe a day ago, but Isomehow lost the ability to care about my new dress any further than the fact that it no longer covered my body.
“Aalto in the fucking sky,” he murmured, taking a moment to drink me in before his mouth returned to my neck, dragging and nipping with tongue and teeth down to my breasts. A shudder worked its way down my spine, my arms and hands suddenly too slow as I yanked on his belt again. He found the buckle between our bare stomachs, unlatching it with a violent tug before finding my nipple with the suction of his mouth.
Electricity shot through my veins from my chest to my feet, curling my toes into the thick fur of his blankets. Kye tore away, backing up to grip me behind the knees and drag me off the pillows and flat onto the mattress, still careful of my ankle, then leaned over me with a single hand thrust beside my neck. I shoved his pants down his hips, those stretchy briefs down, too, my nails scouring his hard thighs, as we stared at each other as he navigated a knee between my legs, then two, slowly guiding me open.
Our breath mingled in the air, both of us panting softly, and a rush of dark and glittering desperation entered my bones, forcing me to rotate my hips, calling his body to mine. His weight settled into me, a tightness between my legs that quickly evolved into something between the growing rhythm of my pulsing blood and an ache that skittered across my skin, sinking deep into my muscles and melting me where I lay.
Time danced through the windows and out to sea, and I have no idea how long he and I churned together, the cadence of Kye’s movement slow and agonizing and viciously brilliant. He swept my waves aside to expose my shoulder, then lifted my arm up over my head, kissing the inside of my bicep as he rotated his hip to press deeper. I shifted as well, each roll of his body laced with sharp and blinding pleasure, teasing me until I lifted my weight against my heel, urging him to meet me faster, harder, deeper.
Lips dragging against the sensitive skin of my arm, he turned his head at the clench of my movement and groaned into the side of my neck, the rumble of his voice lighting the raging sea in my veins. I trailed his body the way the restless tide chases the moon, unconcerned by stealth or tact, always reaching to be closer.
And I felt it coil around me, a pinch at my core, a jerk behind my navel, a cord winding tighter, pulling me to him, and realized it had always been there, every time he’d nudged my legs apart to send me spinning, floating, writhing. It had been there when he’d first kissed my knuckles the day we’d said goodbye on the beach of Neris Island, on the rocks below Cynthus Castle, in the quiet inn below the Sylus Mountains, and in every breath and moment in between.
Kye drifted away just enough to watch as I came undone, the cord between us gleaming and tight. But a different kind of rope within me frayed with every tremble that entered my limbs, unraveling thread by glorious thread. His thumb smoothed across my lower lip, swiping hard enough to flatten it to the side, and without thinking, I closed my mouth over it, swirling my tongue across his fingertip. Golden eyes widened, his torso shuddering against my hands. His chest vibrated, lower stomach hard and flat as he curled into me, fierce and dangerous and heartbreakingly soft, the noise that shook from him between a growl and a laugh until he finally evaporated into stillness, nose pressed firmly into the hollow below my ear.
I stared at the ceiling above. At the dust floating in the gilded morning sun, caught between luster and shadow, tiny comets tumbling between star beams. The sea crashed against the cliffs outside, wind scoring the walls of Kye’s tower, and somewhere in the haze, I detected the smooth and gentle tickle of his fingertips tracing my navel.
My eyelids grew heavy. The little bit of sleep I’d stolen in the glass box was quickly fading in the effort to stay awake, and I turned my head to press a small kiss into Kye’s mouth before my body claimed my mind for rest.
He kissed me back, small and firm and sweet, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. And as I left him there to explore the blurry edges of consciousness, a voice spoke inside my head, one that felt so familiar and tender I didn’t question its existence inside my mind at all, letting myself fade away instead into warmth and skin and rain and herbs.
