Page 124 of Serpent and Shadow

I didn’t stop the kiss as I worked on unfastening the front of his pants.

He smelled like smoke and blood. He tasted like smoke and blood, his tongue hot in my mouth as he rested his arms on either side of my face. He was throwing his magic at me compulsively now, groaning when I only pulled on him in response.

He stopped briefly to yank the shirt the rest of the way over his head, giving up on the buttons and the tailored fit. He stayed there, half-sitting up, his chest heaving as I finished unfastening the front of his pants.

“Fuck,” he groaned.

Pain filled his voice that time.

His fingers hooked the sides of my knickers, and he half-tore them off me.

His magic slammed into me again, and I let out a groan of my own.

I watched him kick off his pants, then he was kissing me again, hard enough that I could scarcely breathe. The longing there made me want to cry. I couldn’t get enough breath to cry, though, and I dug my fingers into his hair instead, which was longer than I remembered, and a rougher cut. I clenched my hands in it, not thinking about the fact I might be hurting him. My fingers toyed with the collar he wore, half-expecting it to shock me, but it was cold and smooth. It didn’t have any openings any way to take it off.

If any of what I did bothered him, he didn’t say anything.

We were still kissing when his hands eased my legs apart, surprisingly gentle.

He stopped us again, but he was breathing so hard now he wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t bear the thought he might be changing his mind.

“Please.” I swallowed. I went from yanking on his hair and toying with the collar to caressing his face. “Please, Bones… Caelum…” I swallowed again, angling my hips towards his. “Gods, please. Don’t leave.”

Pain changed his face.

I not only saw it, I felt it that time, so intensely I moaned.

He gripped my hips in his hands, fighting to control his breathing as he stared down at me. He lowered and adjusted his body until he’d notched the end of his cock in me, so that he was just barely inside, and then he was staring down at my face, his eyes glassed.

That pain in his expression worsened.

“I love you,” he said.

His voice was rough, the words barely coherent, but my whole body felt their meaning like an electrical charge. I clung to him, wrapping my legs around his waist, and I could only nod at first, kissing his mouth.

“Yes,” I managed. “Yes. Bones, I––”

He arched all the way into me, almost like he was trying to silence me.

If that had been his intent, it worked.

I couldn’t think for those first few seconds he was inside me, couldn’t breathe.

He barely paused, but rolled his whole body into me again, harder, and I cried out, arching my back so that he could go deeper.

Gods.

I’d forgotten what it was like.

I’d somehow completely forgotten what it was like with him.

Maybe it was one of those things you couldn’t really remember, not accurately, not until it was happening. His magic flooded into me, a dense, liquid heat that turned my limbs to jelly, blanking out my mind, causing me to cling to his back and shoulders like I was drowning. He fucked that magic into me deliberately, with a precision that seemed to wipe out everything else. I felt so much of him in it, I couldn’t control my reactions.

I think I was talking to him at one point.

I don’t know what I said, not really, nor did I really want to know. I could feel the intensity of emotion behind it. I knew it would probably embarrass me when I remembered it later, but I couldn’t care about any of that right now. I just wanted him to stay.

I already knew he could hurt me. He knew it, too.