Page 165 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

His heart raced, but his movement was slow, unhurried as he lifted his arms. I’d never given him enough credit for them, the swells and hollows of his sculpted shoulders, the way his Leihaniian tattoo inked into the tight roll of his bicep, the raised veins along his forearms. I coiled the sheath around his wrists, letting the ends glide through my fingers and land softly at my sides.

“Say my name,” I commanded, unbuttoning his pants.

His lashes were so thick, draped low over his eyes as he watched me. “Maren.”

Another button. “Say you’re my husband.”

He swallowed like his mouth had suddenly gone dry, throat bobbing against the shadows of our room. “I’m your husband.”

I reached below him, curling my fingers around the waist of his leather pants and tugging them off his hips. “Say you belong to me.”

He smiled. I pulled the silk taut, just enough to steal the looseness from his bound hands. The smile fell, mouth gently parted, intoxicated with the sight of me. My hips rolled like a whip over his hard length, and a vicious shiver lanced down his bones.

“I belong to you,” he rasped, his breath constricting as I wrapped my hand around him, guiding him to my entrance. My head dropped back as I sank down over the delicious, aching stretch between my thighs, my back arched over the top of his center.

Kye made a motion, flinched almost, like he’d reached to wind his arms around me and couldn’t. I rolled again, and he moaned, the tremor of his voice like a rattle in my bones. My back arched further, and I braced a hand against his chest, widening my legs to take him deeper.

He swore, thick and half-drugged by my weight as I rode him. Sheathed to the hilt, I pulled my spine straight, reveling in the full feeling of him inside me. The roiling, tumbling throb of pressure, the gravel in his fractured breaths as he finally let his head droop to the side, his muscles tensing to a hard line before he broke. My name escaped his lungs with a ragged groan. I came undone at the sound of it, desperate and frayed and stirring me with the hunger of possession. I leaned across him, capturing it in my mouth like a sip of golden sunshine stolen from his lips.

We breathed against each other, spent and drowsy. His sunbursts flickered under my cheek, fading back into his skin.

“I suppose I should take this off you,” I murmured, my words muffled against his chest. A soft dusting of hair lingered there, and my fingertips toyed with it.

His exhale caught in the strands of my hair. “I was waiting to see how tight you’d pull.”

My mouth curved. I wriggled deeper into him, the drum of his heart soft against my ear. “I wasn’t going to choke you.”

Kye shrugged as though I may as well have. I huffed a laugh, climbing further up his torso to reach for the silk around his wrists. “We could try it, sometime.”

“Choking you?”

He smiled, rubbing the feeling back into his freed wrists before gathering me in with his arms. I waited, an eyebrow raised, until he laughed.

“Aalto is the god of the present. He rules over the now, rather than the future or the past.”

“And?”

His fingers drifted under the curtain of my hair, tracing the valley between my shoulder blades. “I laid in bed last night, after you’d fallen asleep, watching you. At some point I realized I wasn’t breathing, that I couldn’t remember when I’d last taken a breath.”

My brows twinged. I pulled away enough to prop my forearm against his chest, meeting his eyes.

“So, I waited to see how long I could hold it. After an hour I decided I should probably breathe again.”

“You can hold your breath longer than me?” I asked flatly.

He turned his head to the side, hiding a guilty laugh under his palm as he pretended to scratch his cheek. “I think as long as there’s oxygen in my blood now, I can go on living without fresh air.” I snorted, unamused. He suffocated another laugh, winding his fingers through the waves at the back of my head. “Of all the things to get competitive over—”

“Does that mean you’re safe to see my tail?” I interrupted. My chest tightened painfully, the pull of my lungs raw as I watched the soft shadows across his face. “If you’re descended from the god of the present?”

“Leihani,” he said, smiling softly. “I’ve tried to tell you since we returned from Perpetuum. Seeing a Naiad tail can’t kill me.”

“It did, though.”

“Kazimir did. With a sword.”

“Kye—”

“I’ve always had Sola blood in my veins. The Naiad’s curse only targets humans. I’m not a human.”