Page 104 of The Thirteenth Count

“I’ve never,” she whispered when the last distance between them had narrowed, her lips at his throat where his pulse ran wild.

He stilled.

Not slowed. Not nearly stopped. Stilled completely, though his breathing had gone ragged and every line of him was drawn tight with wanting. All his attention gathered around her, warm instead of cold, asking instead of commanding.

“Then we go slowly,” Cassius said. “And you’ll tell me.”

He took her face in both hands as if she were the rare text, the language worth learning, and kissed her until some of the tension left her body.

The first press of him was unfamiliar enough that she tightened without meaning to. Cassius stopped at once.

“Fern?”

She held him there, one hand gripping his shoulder, and waited for the strangeness to pass. He didn’t urge her forward. Didn’t tell her it would be all right. He simply remained, his forehead against hers, letting the choice stay where it belonged.

“Stay,” she whispered.

“I’m here.”

She breathed with him until her body softened, then lifted her mouth to his and drew him closer.

The discomfort eased by degrees, replaced first by warmth and then by something deeper, a gathering pressure that made her forget the cold stone beneath his coat. They found a rhythm together—halting at first, then surer—and when she shifted beneath him, and pleasure caught unexpectedly low in her body, her breath broke against his mouth.

Cassius searched her face.

“That was—” Her fingers tightened in his hair. “Do that again.”

He shifted carefully, and the next movement found the same place again. Fern’s hips lifted to meet him before she had decided to move them.

“Again,” she said, with less breath for it this time.

His hand slipped between their bodies. She startled at the first touch, then caught his wrist—not to stop him, but to keep him precisely where he was.

“There?”

“Please,” she breathed.

The word seemed to cost him something. His control frayed beneath it, each movement deeper and less measured than the last, while the pressure inside her gathered beyond anything she knew how to contain. When it finally broke, she buried his name against his mouth. He held her through it, trembling, and followed her moments later with his face pressed into the curve of her neck.

When it finally broke, she buried his name against his mouth. He held her through it, trembling, and followed her moments later with his face pressed into the curve of her neck.

Fern held him as tightly as he held her, with no chamber, no waiting stone, no tomorrow beyond them.

Only Cassius, saying her name like the vow had already begun.

The Count never found this, she thought, somewhere past thinking, held and holding. None of their instruments ever found this.

It was never in the blood at all.

After, they lay tangled in his coat in the sigil-light, her head on his chest, his heartbeat slowing under her ear. His fingers moved through her ruined curls, the little gold pin somehow still caught in them. The chamber held them. Carved roots climbed the walls into the dark, ten thousand of them, and for once the mountain’s silence felt less like a held breath than a blessing.

“All right?” he murmured into her hair.

“More than all right.” She pressed a kiss over his heart. “That was—I don’t have words for what that was, and I’ve been reading your dreadful treatises for months.”

His laugh moved under her cheek. “High praise.”

She tilted her head to look at him: flushed, undone, marked nowhere yet. Whole. Hers.