Page 99 of Why Broken Wings Fray

“I think that they are the most magnificent thing that Saoghal has shown me.”

His smile grew wide as his innocence and his relief removed all doubt from his face. “Would you mind if I – no, no.”

“What?”

I placed a finger between his brows, the two of them so closely pinched that the crease was becoming permanent. He watched my face as I massaged the tension there, and released a long sigh. “Would you mind if I had them out? I do not get to, often, and it is agonizing.”

It was my turn to smile wildly. “I would love that.”

It took him only a few minutes to shed his surcoat and his shirt, leaving the hardened muscles and taut skin for me to stare at as he rolled his head and stretched his spine. Unlike the previous times he had shown them to me, this time they came out slowly and peacefully. They sat behind him in a neutral position, bent yet relaxed against his back in a way that made him release a shuddering breath.

I let my hands wander across his chest, feeling the deep valleys between his muscles and the intense angles at which they rose. My fingers trailed of their own free will, leaving little of his skin untouched as I dragged and swiped. But it was his face that I watched, his face that sagged in a quiet type of joy as his eyes fluttered shut and he let his head fall back with every brush of my touch.

While he was in that quiet, relaxed state, I saddled myself across his lap. He returned his grip to my waist while I continued to touch and feel, his eyes still shut and his breathing evening out.

“Raegan?”

He hummed a response, his body slowly falling down from the heights at which his life of tension and stress hung him at.

“Will you bite me?”

Two bright green eyes snapped open and took to a wide position as he returned to looking overly stiff.

“I can’t. You do not know–”

“I do know. And I want you to do it. I know you want to do it, too. I have felt you linger there time and time again. Now that I understand it, I want you to.”

The darkness of his pupils started to expand as he shifted his focus to my neck, his breathing changing as he drew in a few scent-filled breaths.

I placed my hands against his cheeks and turned his attention to me once more. “Whether or not you are mine, I do not care. But I have been, and I will always be, yours.”

His mouth twitched, his throat constantly shifting, before he finally nodded.

His fangs found my neck with ease, the sharpened tips of them diving into my flesh as he moved at a speed that spoke to the desire that I knew was within him. My gasp was soft and bordering on a moan as my bloodstream changed temperature, as it filled with a substance new to it that slid alongside the blood and found a permanent home there. My eyes fluttered as the rush hit me, my own nostrils widening as the scent that would forever be his started to fill the room.

When he finally finished, when he pulled back and wiped a drop of blood from the corner of his lips, he wrapped both arms around my waist and tugged me against him, burying his face into my neck. He remained like that for a long while, the room filled with the sound of him drawing deeper and deeper breaths from my skin.

Then all at once he softened against me, his shoulders rolling forward and his head becoming heavy.

“I am so very tired.”

I ran my hands through the base of his hair, massaging at his scalp. “I know.”

“Rest with me, won’t you?”

It wasn’t often that I sat naked over someone’s lap and had them beg me to rest with them, but I found myself smiling even larger at the suggestion.

44

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The desire to touch Raegan never seemed satiated.

He lay beneath me, his wings wide and smothered by his weight.

I was sprawled out on top of him, not a shred of clothing between us, yet the comfort of it was innocent in that we had spent hours simply talking.

Smiling at him, my chin on my hand that laid across his chest, I reached the other forward and brushed his hair behind his ear. Yet again my skin grazed the scars along the top of them, where they once would have taken to one of the four positions that signified which kingdom he belonged to.