Page 69 of Property of Prophet

My shirt goes, then the rest. His hands are careful at every fastening, gentle far beyond any need. Cool air touches my skin for half a second before his warmth replaces it. He looks at me the way no one has ever looked at me, not Marcus, not anyone. His gaze moves over me with a thoroughness bordering on devotion.

Then he steps back and undresses for me.

There is no performance in it. He strips the way he does everything, deliberate and unhurried, his eyes never leaving mine while his hands work. His belt gives. The last of the fabric drops away from a body built by eternity and then aged by a single fall, broad through the shoulders, weathered everywhere. Silver dusts his chest. Old power still lives in the frame, beneath the tattoos and the scars, a ruin with the cathedral still visible.

When he turns to lay his clothes over the chair, lamplight finds his back. Two long marks run down his shoulder blades, the exact places where something enormous used to live. My breath catches on them. He hears it and goes still, letting me look, offering me the one part of himself no examination ever covered.

“They don’t hurt,” he says quietly. “Not anymore.”

“Come here anyway.”

He comes, bare and unhurried, magnificent in a way with nothing celestial left in it. Wanting rolls through me, the pull of a woman toward a man and nothing more complicated than heat. His gaze travels over me again and stays.

“You’re staring,” I say.

“Yes.” There is no apology in it. “I spent an eternity around glory. I want to be accurate about this. You are more interesting.”

A laugh breaks from me, and he catches it with his mouth. Then he walks me backward to the bed and follows me down, his weight braced on his forearms, his body a long line of heat above mine. The furs are cool on my back, but he is not cool anywhere. His mouth finds my throat, then the hollow beneath my ear, and my hips lift into him.

Reverence lives in his hands. Hunger lives there, too, trembling in his forearms where he holds himself back. Whatever he was before the fall, he never wanted anything with a body. This body wants, and it wants me, and the wanting shakes in him.

“You won’t break me,” I tell him.

“I might break me,” he says against my skin. “Worth it.”

His mouth moves ever downward. He finds the scar below my left collarbone and lingers, unhurried, until my breath goes ragged. My fingers thread into his hair, silver and warmer than hair should be. Lower. His hands frame my hips with a gentleness I want to fight and can’t. When his mouth reaches the inside of my thigh, my whole body has forgotten its training.

“Look at me,” he says.

Looking at him is the hardest part. Hunger I can take with my eyes closed. He wants witness.

He watches my face while he takes me apart with his mouth, learning every sound I make and returning to the ones I try to swallow. Heat gathers low in my belly, coiling tighter with each pass of his tongue. My heel presses into his back, and my hands twist in the furs. He hums against me, pleased, and the vibration alone nearly finishes it.

“Prophet.” His name comes out wrecked.

“I know,” he murmurs, and does not stop.

The climax rolls through me in long waves I had stopped believing my body was capable of. My spine bows off the bed. Some sound leaves me, unguarded and loud in the small room, and for once in five years, no one hears it but the man responsible. He works me through every second. When my hands finally push weakly at his shoulders, he presses one last kiss to my hip and comes back up my body, slowly, letting me feel every inch of the journey.

His eyes have gone dark, ringed thin with blue, and he’s shaking. Faintly, everywhere, a man holding a flood behind a door.

“Now,” I tell him.

“Lily.”

“Now.”

Still, he pauses, poised at my entrance, forehead dropping to mine. Whatever prayer he says, he says it into my skin, wordless. Then he pushes into me, one slow, unbroken stroke, and both of us stop breathing.

The stretch of him borders on too much. Five years of solitude live in my body, and he fills every one of them. He stills, buried deep, giving me time I didn’t ask for but need anyway. His breath pulses against my temple, and beneath my palms, the muscles of his back stand rigid with the effort of not moving.

“You feel,” he starts, but can’t finish it.

“I know.”

“There are no words for this, in any language. I checked them all.”

“Then stop looking.” My hips roll up against him, and his control breaks.