Page 70 of Property of Prophet

He moves. The first strokes are deep and slow, dragging sounds out of me I don’t recognize. He keeps them slow past the point where slow should be possible. One hand cradles the back of my head, protecting it from nothing, but protecting it anyway. His mouth moves over my face between strokes. My brow, the corner of my eye... he is making love to me in the oldest and most literal sense, and it is unbearable.

Hunger I was ready for. A body can brace against being wanted, but nothing braces against being cherished.

Wetness slips from the corner of my eye, and he catches it with his thumb.

“Don’t,” I warn.

“Too late. It’s mine now.”

“Prophet.”

“You held everything for five years.” His hips keep their devastating rhythm. “Hold nothing tonight. There’s no one here but me.”

The last wall in me gives way without ceremony. My arms lock around his neck, and my face presses into his throat, and if there are tears, he says nothing about them, only gathers me closer and keeps moving. Being taken apart gently turns out to be far more thorough than the other kind. He does it with unbearable patience, murmuring my name into my hair, until the tenderness becomes the friction, and the friction becomes need again.

“More,” I tell his throat.

“Say it again.”

“More. All of it. Now.”

Need takes over for both of us. His rhythm turns urgent, driving inside me, and I meet him at every stroke, my nails scoring his shoulders and his name breaking out of me in pieces. The bed frame knocks against the log wall, and neither of us cares. Sweat slicks the space between our bodies. Outside, the coldest night of the year presses against the glass and finds nothing in here it can touch.

He shifts his angle, tilting my hips with one broad hand, and white sparks scatter behind my eyes.

“There,” I gasp. “Right there. Don’t you dare—”

“Never,” he growls, a promise dragged up from somewhere subterranean, and he gives me exactly what I asked for until the coil in me pulls taut.

Before it snaps, I press a hand flat to his chest.

He stops instantly. Even now, even shaking, the obedience in it undoes me almost as much as the rest.

“My turn,” I say.

Understanding moves across his face. He rolls us without leaving my body, settling onto his back, his hands finding my hips as I rise over him. From here, the lamplight falls on us. From here, he has to watch, and I have to let him.

And his expression nearly ends me.

Awe is the clinical term.

Riding him slowly, I take back a rhythm of my own, and his head presses into the furs, throat working. His hands tighten against my hips, but he doesn’t try to take control. He lets me set the pace. Lamplight slides over the sweat on his chest, over every scar my palms have already memorized. Beneath me, he doesn’t look diminished. Whatever Heaven stripped from him, it didn’t take this.

Heat builds again, faster now, stoked by the sight of this ancient creature coming apart beneath me with my name in his mouth. My palms brace against his chest. His heart hammers under them, mortal and racing... mine.

“Lily.” Broken now. “L-Lily, I can’t...”

“Then don’t.”

He surges up to meet me. The rhythm shatters into something raw and entirely human. His arm wraps across my back, crushing me to his chest, and we drive each other over the edge together. My cry lands on his shoulder. His release pulses deep with a groan pulled from the bottom of him, and for one suspended moment, the lamplight seems to brighten.

Maybe it is only my vision.

Maybe it is the last of what Heaven left in him, rising to the surface to look at me.

Then there is only him and me, tangled. His heartbeat slams against my breastbone before he starts to shift me off him, careful of my weight, careful of everything.

My arms tighten. “Stay.”