Centuries of restraint burning away in a single breath. She tastes like the sweetest rain after the direst drought. She makes a small, desperate sound into my mouth and I’m gone.
Found and lost.
I map the bones of her face with my thumbs, learn the new lines time has drawn and the ones magic has preserved. “Heaven and hell and every fucking thing in between, you came back,” I breathe against her cheek, disbelief and gratitude surging through my very bones. “You came back to me.”
“Only for a moment, Lucien,” she pleads, and I feel the shiver move through her like a message sent from some distant, hostile shore.
Let her believe that if she wishes. But the world will shatter and burn before I let her go. Existence only remained because it held the faintest possibility that she might be within it. And to its eternal credit, it delivered her to me. Any attempt to reverse that…to deprive me of the only woman who has ever made the centuries bleed, who turned eternity itself into something worth enduring, who carved her name into every heartbeat I’ve stolen and every sin I’ve committed—will be answered with ruin so absolute that even the ashes will whisper her name in fear. “Then I’ll make the moment holy enough to melt saints.”
Her mouth drops open in silent wonder and yes, perhaps a little fear at the absolute resolve in my tone as I lay her back.
As silk sighs, then ripples, thenrips.
Her pulse flutters beneath my mouth on her throat, then collarbone, each beat a strike of flint intensifying my hunger. She threads her fingers into my hair and pullshard, the way she hasn’t forgotten I like, and the sound that rips out of me is not civilised.
I jerk out of my coat, toss it blindly, and…she pulls back, a wash of abject sorrow dousing her face, as the fire throws gold along the scars the coven left.
She touches one, and I flinch, not from pain but memory. From seeing myself through her eyes.
“Oh Gods, Lucien, look what they did to you,” she whispers. “They could’ve destroyed you. K-killed you.”
“They tried,” I scoff, carnage in my voice. “But they didn’t finish.” I catch her hand and kissing the centre of her palm, then draw my tongue over the delicate lifelines, revel in her unguarded shiver. “They will never fucking finish.”
She opens her mouth but I drag my fingertips over her plump, rosy lips. Lips I can’t wait to feel on my skin…wrapped tight around my cock.
At that savagely delightful thought, I slow down.
I have to. I don’t want to frighten her, don’t want to push her back into whatever cage still rattles the chains inside her.
I nose along her jaw, her ear, breathe her in like I’m learning oxygen from the beginning. “Once we start, I’m not going to stop, dear girl. Be warned.” It’s a fair warning. I mean it.
Her eyes meet mine, stormy, torn and beautifully turned on. Then she shakes her head, her lush curls bouncing. “I don’t want you to.”
Sanction granted, I let myself worship, ignoring the ‘because this might be all we have’reflected at the back of her eyes.
I worship her with teeth and tongue and blood.
My mouth follows, hot where my skin is not, tracing open kisses along the hollow of her throat, the sharp point of her collarbone, the delicate dip where her pulse flutters wildly beneath my lips.
With hands that remember and a mouth that relearns, I find the sounds I used to drag from her—the soft, shocked catches of breath, the low, helpless sighs when I get somethingexactlyright—and the room fills with them, a hymn I’ve waited too long to hear.
When her nails score my shoulders, I welcome the sting; it roots me in the present, proves this isn’t another dream designed to break me.
My fangs graze her skin, nipping but not breaking it…yet, but the promise of it makes her tremble, and the next sound she makes lodges like a blade in my chest. Her nails dig into my shoulders again, no barrier between us, the pressure almost painful.
I want it. I need it. The marks of her desperation and desire branded into me, the way I intend to imprint mine on her so she and the world itself will never forget that she belongs to Lucien Devereaux D’Armand.
“Lucien—”
My name leaves her lips in a whisper, half plea, half command, and I groan against her flesh, the vibration making her shiver.
“Say it again,” I murmur, voice roughened by centuries of denial. My tongue flicks out, tasting the salt of her skin, the memory of what was once mine. “Say my name. Let me hear how much you’ve missed me.”
She should defy me. She should make me crawl for it. But the words pour out, breathless, unguarded. “I’ve ached for you. So very much. Lucien.”
The sound tears something open inside me.
My growl is pure possession, a sound older than language. My hands find the laces of her corset, underneath the ripped silk, pulling slowly and deliberately, each tug a calculated cruelty.
