Page 63 of Daughter of the Dark

“Yes.” Solana sighed. “It doesn’t have to be anything—”

“More?” Again, he finished her sentence. He was close enough to Solana that she had to crane her neck to meet his gaze, but it was tracing the line of her shoulder. One of his fingers hooked underneath the thin strap of her nightgown and brushed it aside, sending a blaze of chills along her skin. “Is that all you want?”

No, Solana wanted to say, but she bit her tongue. It was too vulnerable to admit that she ached for him. For his fingers pressed against flesh, pressed against her soul, tethering her to the mortal world that felt unfamiliar and cold.

Reyes’s finger burned a path down the top of her breast, over the sensitive peak of her nipple through her gown, down her belly that quivered with anticipation and heated all the places she thought might be unreachable. Then his touch disappeared. “Is that all you want, Solana?” he repeated, voice firm, the question demanding an answer.

“Yes,” she hissed. She would have said it a thousand times more if it meant earning his touch once again, to find out exactly what it might feel like to squirm beneath him.

Finally, they slid into her hair and cradled her head, and despite their past, the fear of him she had once carried close to her heart, she relaxed into his grip with a sigh. “Look at me,” he demanded, and she readily obeyed. “I am going to give you exactly what you ask for and nothing more. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” she whispered.

And then there was no more room for words as Reyes pressed his mouth to hers, commanding every nerve in her body with the lick of his tongue against her lips and the grip of his hands in her hair. Those lips burned a path from her mouth to her cheek to her neck to her bare shoulder, where he grazed the tip of his nose along her collarbone. His other hand slipped her other strap off her shoulder, and then her nightgown was sliding down her body agonizingly slow, brushing against her hardened nipples, until it was a puddle at her feet and she stood entirely bare before him.

“Do you want this?” he asked, the weight of his gaze pressing against every part of her.

“Yes,” Solana answered eagerly.

Reyes dropped to his knees, his mouth just a hairsbreadth from her nipple. “Tell me what you want,” he breathed over her sensitive skin.

Solana arched into him like a flower toward the sun—helpless to do anything else—but he pulled back to wait for an answer. “Your mouth on me. Please,” she begged.

And he obliged. Like a man starving, Reyes knelt before her and worshipped every part of her with his tongue, and Solana finally, finally, got to slip her hands into his silvery, silky hair. She gripped it as he slid lower and breathed over the apex between her thighs.

“What about this, Solana? Do you want my mouth here?”

“Yes, gods yes.”

Eyes closed, she threw her head back as he devoured her, as he brought her to the cusp of ecstasy right before he pulled away. She was ready to scream, to get on her knees and beg for more, but he lifted her and spun around. Her back hit the bed and then Reyes’s mouth was between her thighs, and she was writhing underneath him. His large hands dug into her fleshy thighs and held her down. They anchored her to the bed, to the mortal realm, to her body even as she soared high above on the waves of pure pleasure.

His name was a plea on her lips. A chant of admiration.

When he pulled away, Solana was sinking back to earth, cold and undone. Reyes’s mouth glistened in the firelight as he smiled at her. “Is that all you wanted from me?”

Solana bared her teeth at him standing above her fully clothed, wielding all the power. She wanted to dig her fingernails into his flesh, make him desperate and frantic for her touch the way she felt about his. She shifted so that she was sitting on the edge of the bed and reached for the waistband of his pants. “No,” she said silkily. “I’m afraid that simply wasn’t good enough.”

Her fingers made quick work of the several buttons, but before she could slip her hand in, she looked up into his eyes. They glowed the strangest hue of molten metal that drew her in and made her want to know every thought on his mind. “Is this okay?” she asked, tracing her fingers along the line of his pants.

His stomach twitched underneath her hand, and he breathed out his approval like a dying man begging for one last touch. She obliged by slipping the length of him out of his pants and into her hands, all while she held his eyes, smiling with satisfaction as they rolled and he tilted his head back, exposing the length of his neck. Then he let out a deep groan as she placed her lips to the tip, her tongue flicking out to caress along the shaft.

“Is this what you want?” she echoed back to him, murmuring into his velvety soft skin.

“Yes,” he breathed, his voice nothing more than a gust of want and pleasure, and when she took him into her mouth entirely, it was her name on his lips, and his hands in her hair, tugging and guiding and pushing deeper.

It was she who held the power, even from below, and it was delicious.

Reyes stepped back abruptly, away from her touch, his length coming loose with a pop. She felt exposed for the smallest moment, afraid that he had changed his mind and was going to say that they should stop, that she should go, that this was a mistake, but he simply pulled his tunic over his head and then pressed her back against the bed.

The cut of his shoulders and chest drew her eyes, and there they lingered, slowly trailing over the marks etched into his skin. Wings and teeth and talons, words in a language she didn’t know, ridges of raised skin. Not covered by the ink, but adorned. Solana brought fingers up to graze against the sketch of a flower. His skin twitched beneath her touch, all of him on display like a god certain of his place.

The ache deep in her belly throbbed with want, with the need for pressure. This was too soft, too gentle. She pressed her hands down and around, dug fingers into his back, begging for his anger, for his hard and unyielding nature.

How quickly the tides had turned, for now it was him with the power, his desire lingering just above hers, withholding and reassuring in the same breath.

Reyes lowered himself onto her, a blaze of skin and raw desire. “Ask for it,” he murmured against her lips, and when she made the mistake of looking into his stormy eyes, she saw that he wouldn’t go any further without her encouragement, that it might kill him to pull away.

It went against everything in her to beg, but still, she wanted. Still, she yearned. So much like the gods who had never been satisfied, Solana knew that what they were doing would never be enough, that she would always want more, and that she was afraid, that her body felt fragmented and the pressure of him held her together like nothing else had before.