The kiss deepened. His tongue found hers and she made a sound against his mouth — small, involuntary. A sound that bypassed every rational structure in his brain and went straight to the Drakonfire banked at the base of his spine. His scales surfaced along his jaw and throat. His eyes shifted, amber flooding the dark. His damaged wing stirred against his back, straining toward her the way it always strained toward her, the involuntary reach he could not suppress and had stopped wanting to.
She pulled back just far enough to breathe. Her forehead rested against his. Her hands held his face — both sides, the scarred and the whole, with equal pressure, equal attention, equal care. Her thumbs traced the scale-lines along his jaw. Her eyes were open. Looking at him. Seeing him. All of him — the weapon and the wound and the man underneath both.
"Rhaezon," she whispered, and his name in her mouth was the most beautiful and most terrible thing he had ever heard, because it sounded like it belonged there.
He kissed her again. Deeper. His hand cradled the back of her skull, fingers spread through her hair. His other arm locked around her waist, drawing her flush against him, and the full-body contact sent a tremor through him that started at the point where her hips met his and radiated outward until his wings shook with it.
The fire burned. The book lay forgotten. The shuttle was thirty-six hours away. The dead witnesses were dead. Lord Varek was calculating. Prince Dáinn was hunting. The world outside this room was sharp and merciless and full of teeth.
He did not care.
He had thirty-six hours. He was not going to spend a single one of them on anything that was not her.
TWENTY-TWO
The fire made him look like something forged rather than born.
November pulled back from the kiss just far enough to see him — scales tracing the hard line of his jaw, eyes molten amber in the low light, hair loose around his face where her fingers had freed it. His chest moved with controlled breaths that contradicted the tremor in his hands where they gripped her waist. She knew that tremor. She had noticed it the first night he laid out the terms of their arrangement, his fingers shaking around words likeconsentandno obligations. The same hands. The same shake. A completely different language now.
She kissed him again. Not carefully. Not negotiating. She kissed him the way the last three weeks had been building toward — with her whole mouth, her hands in his hair, her body pressing forward into the solid heat of him until there was no distance left to close. His groan vibrated against her lips, and she swallowed it, kept it, put it in the place where she stored every sound he had ever made that told her something he would not say aloud.
Her hands found the hem of her shirt. She gathered the fabric in her fists, and for a single breath the fire cracked in the hearth, and she could hear her own heartbeat in her ears.
"Are you sure?" His voice had dropped into that register she felt in her sternum — not asking her to stop, asking her to mean it.
She answered by pulling the shirt over her own head.
The room was silent. Rhaezon's eyes went wide, the amber gone soft and unguarded, his lips parted around a breath he had forgotten to finish. He looked at her with something close to reverence.
She reached behind her and unfastened the Aeltharian clasps one at a time. The bra loosened. She drew it down her arms and let it fall.
"Ancestors."
The word came out ragged. His hand lifted and stopped midair, hovering, trembling again, as though touching her without permission would undo something he did not want undone.
The air was cool against her bare skin for exactly one second before his hands replaced it. Large hands, scarred and rough, impossibly gentle, slid up her ribcage. His thumbs traced the undersides of her breasts, and her spine liquefied. She arched into the touch, and his breath came out in a sharp exhale against her throat.
"November."
A question. A warning. The same word it had been every time he said her name — multiple sentences compressed into three syllables, trusting her to hear all of them.
She heard all of them.
"Yes," she said. To the question. To the warning. To everything underneath both.
She leaned in and caught his mouth again, guiding his hand as she went. His palm was hot — startlingly so — and she lifted his fingers to her breast before she could lose her nerve.
The sound he made was not language. It came out of him low and broken, vibrated through her lips and down her throat and settled somewhere behind her ribs. He pulled her closer, and she felt him then — the full, hard length of him pressed against her thigh through his trousers, unmistakable, radiating heat through the fabric like a banked fire.
Her breath caught. Something low and liquid pulled tight between her thighs.
His thumb moved. A slow, deliberate circle over her nipple, and she forgot what she had been thinking about. She made a sound into his mouth and his other arm tightened around the small of her back, anchoring her against him.
"Oh."
He swallowed the word. His thumb circled again, slower, testing, and she felt the answering pull bloom lower, a wet ache she was not going to be able to pretend away. Her hips shifted forward against him without her permission. His growl rolled through her chest.
She kissed him harder. Opened her mouth to him. His tongue was hot, his teeth careful around her lip, his hand learning the shape of her with a patience that was going to ruin her.
