While most deities allow temple attendants to choose their timeline of service, only two require a lifetime of dedication: Dunne and Loial. For both war and love change souls irrevocably.
—Major Rorilee’s Guide to Appeasing the Gods, Second Edition
Our mouths collide and we ignite. There’s no more teasing. No more doubt. His tongue sweeps past my lips with arrogant ownership and I moan, sliding my fingers into his hair to hold him to me. He takes my mouth over and over in deep, drugging kisses that have me arching for more and nipping at his lower lip when he doesn’t give it fast enough.
Stone grates against my back as he rolls his hips, but all I feel is searing pleasure as he hits the perfect spot. “Again,” I demand, then whimper into his mouth when he delivers.
The fever he’s worked me into threatens to devour me, and there are still so many clothes between us.
His hand glides under my thigh and the rumpled hem of my gown, and he runs the backs of two fingers between my thighs, right over the fabric of my underwear. “You’re fucking soaked for me,” he growls.
The tantalizingly light touch rouses a surge of power that only adds to the crackling heat gathering low in my belly.
“Well-the-fuck-aware.” I smirk, rocking against those fingers, and kiss him like I might lose him if I surrender his tongue. “Have you seen you?”
He huffs a laugh against my lips, and then we’re moving. I expect to feel the bed against my back at any second, but he surprises me by unhooking my ankles and setting my feet on the floor in between the high-backed armchair and our bed.
Then his mouth is on mine again, stoking the fire that already rages too hot to survive much longer. Clothes fly.
I reach for the button at his waistband.
He breaks the kiss only long enough to tug my nightdress over my head.
I shove at the water-logged leather of his pants.
He strips me out of my underwear.
If undressing is a race, I definitely win, but he’s startlingly quick with his boots. All it takes is one look to remind me just how much I’ve won.
“Mine,” I whisper, tracing the carved edges of his abdominals with my fingers. “I keep waiting for it to wear off,” I mutter as he palms my lower back and tugs me toward him.
“What?” he asks, sitting in the armchair and lifting me into his lap.
My knees bracket his muscled hips, and my heart flutters impossibly fast. “The complete awe I feel when I remember that you’re mine.” I stroke my hands over his shoulders and down his chest. “That by some miracle, I’m the one who gets to touch you.”
“Hasn’t worn off for me yet, either. Don’t think it will.” His gaze drifts over my unbound hair and body with a hunger so sharp it could slice through dragon scale. “This is all I thought about last time I was here without you.”
Oh, yes. I start to lower myself, more than ready to feel every inch of him inside me.
He hisses through his teeth when the head of his cock slides between my thighs, and I do the same when he rubs against my clit, sending sparks skittering along every cell in my body. “Not yet,” he says through gritted teeth.
My fingers dig into his shoulders. “I might actually die if you make me wait—”
“Never said you’d be waiting.” He lifts one of my knees to the top of a padded chair arm, then the other, and stares up at me with a wicked smirk as his hands slide to my ass.
“Grab hold, love.”
Before I can ask where, shadows tug my hands to the top of the upholstered chairback and hold them there. “What are you—”
“Worshipping.” He lifts my ass and brings my hips straight to his mouth.
I cry out at the first sweep of his perfect tongue, and it’s only his hands and shadows that keep me from collapsing. White-hot need streaks through me like lightning, and power rises to a frequency that vibrates along my skin when he does it again. And again. And again.
“I’ll never get enough of you.” Xaden licks and lashes and sucks like he has no other plans for the night, driving me absolutely mindless, holding me in place as my hips rock for more.
“Xaden,” I moan. Pleasure and power spiral, hot and urgent, winding within me so tightly that my muscles lock and my thighs start to shake. “Don’t stop.”
He sends me right over the edge.
Lightning crashes, illuminating the room, and thunder immediately follows as I break into uncountable fragments, shattered by the waves of bliss that come, and come, and come. Instead of letting up, Xaden slides two fingers inside me and moves in time with his tongue, and the orgasm that should wane kicks into a second that’s just as bright, if not slightly sharper.
“You’re so slick, I’ll be inside you in one thrust,” he says as I start to descend, falling limply against the back of the chair, my arms trembling in the aftermath. “Stay right there.” He kisses my stomach, then slips out from underneath me.
I tug at the shadow bonds, but they hold fast. Fuck, I want to touch him, kiss him, devote myself to his body the way he just did mine. But if this is what he needs—
“You are every fantasy I’ll ever have.” His lips brush the shell of my ear, and I shiver. He draws my right knee down to the seat, and the chair creaks as he sets his left behind me. “Give me your mouth.”
I look back over my shoulder and he curls over me, kissing me hard and deep.
He slides the head of his cock into position, then lifts his mouth from mine. “Last chance to change your mind.”
“Never going to happen.” I look into his eyes. “Fuck me. Make love to me. Take me. I don’t care what you call it as long as you get inside me right now.” “Need” isn’t a strong enough word for the way I’m feeling, how desperate I am to hold all of him.
“You can reach the dagger on the dresser if you—” he starts, and I silence him with a kiss. He groans, then takes my hips in his hands and pulls me downward, into the long, rolling thrust that takes me inch by magnificent inch. “Fuck, you feel like home.”
We both cry out when he pushes all the way in. The pressure, the stretch, the depth he’s hitting at this angle are all sublimely perfect. I stop tugging at the shadows at my wrists and grip the back of the chair so I can rock into his next thrust.
He starts a deep, pounding rhythm that’s as merciless as it is exquisite, and every time he returns is better than the last. Thank gods there’s a sound shield on this room, or they’d hear us all the way in the Assembly chamber. We can’t kiss deeply enough, can’t get close enough, and our efforts only serve to bead sweat on our skin. I descend into keening cries as he drives us onward, his breath panting against my lips, one of his hands tangling in my hair while the other pulls me into every snap of his hips.
That spiraling tension is deeper this time, tugging at my power, intertwining pleasure and electricity until the air charges around us. “Xaden,” I whisper. “I need…I need…”
Gods, I don’t even know.
“I’ve got you,” he promises, his voice hoarse. “My power, my body, my soul—it’s all yours.” He slips a hand down my stomach and lightly strokes my hypersensitive clit. “Take whatever you need.”
Just him. That’s all I need, and I have every possible part of him.
I shatter, my hips bucking as the release takes me, hurling me from my body into whatever realm exists beyond, then drowning me in cascading avalanches of pleasure. Lightning strikes again and again, and I catch the scent of smoke before Xaden mutters a curse and shadows fly.
Oh shit.
“Just the desk. It’s fine,” he swears, and I’m absolutely boneless as he plucks me from the chair and flips me so I’m straddling his lap again.
I sink down onto him, watching his eyes slide shut, and I wrap my arms around his neck. “My hands—”
“Not your hands I’m worried about now.” He grits his teeth and reaches to grab hold of the edge of the dresser. That explains the shift in positions. The furniture isn’t the only thing he’s holding on to, either. Sweat coats his brow, his pulse thrums in his throat, and his abs are so rigid against my stomach that he might as well be stone.
“Let go,” I order, rising up on my knees and sinking again, riding him at a faster pace that I know makes him feral.
“Fuck.” He throws his head back, and the muscles of his neck strain. “Violet. Love. I can’t—”
“You can.” My hands move to the sides of his neck, and I drop my forehead to his. “My body. My soul. My power is all right here. You love me. You will never hurt me. Let go, Xaden.” I call on just enough power to hum along my skin, enough to tell him I’m not defenseless in this moment, and then I shamelessly take every ounce of how good this feels and shove it down the bond.
“Oh shit.” His arms tense, and his hips snap once, twice, and on the third, shadow fills the room, plunging us into darkness and sending metal clanging to the ground. He drops his head to my shoulder and groans into my neck as he finds his release. “I love you.”
I sag against his chest, happily limp with exhaustion, and the darkness fades, revealing the room—and the storm raging outside—once more.
“The wood—” he starts, lifting his hands.
I begrudgingly raise my head just so he doesn’t worry us into an early grave and peek over the back of the chair. “Not a mark in sight.” My heart swells.
“Not even a fingerprint?” He tenses beneath me.
“Not one.” I look into his eyes and smile. “You’re stable.”
“For now,” he whispers, but his eyes light up. “And I’ll take it.” He wraps his arms around me and surges to his feet, carrying me along our bed.
“Are we going somewhere?” I hold on even though I know he’s more than capable of carrying me.
“Bathtub,” he says with a devious grin. “Then the dresser. Then the bed.”
I completely ignore the homework I have yet to finish. “Excellent plan.”
