A sound left me that I had absolutely not approved for public release.
Rhain steadied me. One hand at the base of my spine, his other arm around my ribs, holding me up because I couldn’t.
His mouth stayed at my throat for one more heartbeat before he lifted his head, and when I saw his eyes, vertical and bright, the coil in my belly answered before I could pretend discipline was still involved.
“That,” he said, voice quiet with discovery, “is going to be a problem.”
“For whom?”
“Both of us,” he said with a smile.
The smile should have come with a warning label and a liability waiver. He had just discovered a tool, and every careful, court-trained inch of him intended to use it repeatedly and without remorse.
“Kjære,” he murmured against the mark, and the word touched me almost as intimately as his mouth.
Beloved.
He kissed the bite once more, and I caught the front of his coat. “Takethis off.”
His smile deepened. “As you wish.”
The coat came off without ceremony. His shirt followed, landing over the back of the chair while his hands were already moving lower, all that elegant control apparently having reached its limit.
“Rhain.”
He was working at his belt. “Yes?”
“You’re rushing.”
“Yes.”
The answer was immediate. Shameless, even. His mouth curved as he looked up at me, his eyes gone dragon.
“You said slow.”
His mouth found the edge of my jaw. “I said we should try.”
“And?”
“We tried. Briefly. It was lovely.”
I caught his face in my hands and made him look at me. Whatever lived beneath the diplomat was already in the room.
“That isn’t how language works.”
“No,” he said. “It is how diplomacy works.”
I stared at him for half a second. He kissed me before I could decide whether to argue or reward him, open-mouthed and warm, his smile still there, pressed into mine as if he intended to make the argument unwinnable by every available method.
My hand found him through the fabric. He made a rough sound in his throat, older than diplomacy, older than any language a treaty had ever been written in, and his hands closed around my wrists. He took one breath, then another, his eyes closing for the smallest fraction of a second as if he were setting the moment in place inside himself before it could move too quickly to keep.
“We are not wasting this,” he said.
“That sounds threatening.”
His eyes opened. “It is a promise.”
He took my pants off as if patience hadbecome a form of worship, going down to one knee to do it. When the fabric slid down my legs, his mouth followed, pressing a kiss to the inside of one thigh and then the other with enough care to send heat curling up beneath my skin.
