Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Lady Sharine’s shoulders were shaking, her efforts not to laugh clearly unsuccessful. A snort escaped her at that moment, and then it was all over. “You make your mother sound an ogre!” She poked Titus in the hard slab of his abdomen. “Avelina is perfectly lovely and Phenie was not traumatized but scandalized at the thought of her mother having relations!”
Aodhan loved the dynamic of Titus’s tight-knit family—including the afeared and utterly loved First General Avelina. All of Avelina’s children would battle the world for her, and Aodhan had understood why the instant he met her.
“My mother is like that with you because she’s intimidated by you.” Titus looked at Eh-ma’s tiny form with a beaming smile before picking her up and kissing her with loud enthusiasm. “I’m so glad I have you to protect me.” His dark eyes held all the love and adoration Aodhan could’ve wished for, for Eh-ma.
When she touched the archangel’s face with one hand, Aodhan decided it was a politic time to cough into his hand and shrug his travel pack from his back. In it was his and Illium’s gift to First General Avelina—for tonight, the family gathered to celebrate the day of her birth. And that family included Titus’s “stepson” and his beloved.
* * *
* * *
Having missed Illium like a limb torn from his body, Aodhan swept him into his arms when he arrived close to sundown. They could’ve kissed for eons, but Illium was almost late. So after satisfying himself with the barest taste of his lover, Aodhan pushed the other man to the bathing chamber. “Quick. I already laid out your clothes.”
They had a permanent suite at all of Titus’s main residences, complete with clothes and any necessities. But instead of hurrying in to freshen up, Illium hauled him down with a fist clenched in his tunic and nipped at his lower lip. “Hi, beautiful.”
Aodhan blushed.
A scalding wave of molten heat.
As if this warrior with his firm lips and muscled arms, his forearms ridged with veins and his jaw a defined line, hadn’t been calling him beautiful for centuries. Because it hit him the same every single time—deep inside the softest, most vulnerable core of him.
“Hi,” he whispered, his voice husky. “You cut your hair.” He ran the strands through his fingers.
“Only a trim.” A suckling kiss of his lower lip, a tug. “Come scrub my back.”
Aodhan knew he should say no, knew it was a bad idea…but he’d been following Illium into bad ideas for a lifetime. So it was that he found himself naked in the shower with the only man who had ever made him feel safe in a way that wasn’t about outward threats but about the heart.
“You’re going to get us into trouble,” he murmured as he kissed Illium’s back from behind while undertaking his scrubbing duties.
Water ran over both their bodies, steam rising to curl in the air.
Illium’s wicked smile was visible in the curve of his cheek as he angled his head to one side to glance back. “You like trouble, Adi. That’s why you love me.”
Throwing down the washcloth, Aodhan gripped the other man’s jaw with one hand and his hip with the other as he claimed the kiss he’d wanted from the start. The one that was open and raw and of a warrior who’d missed the other part of his heart for too many days. He could taste Illium’s own need in that kiss, feel it in the tension of his body, all that taut muscle and sinew under his hands, against his aroused flesh.
Their breath was the steam now, their bodies coming flush as Illium turned…only for Aodhan to pin his hands to the tile of the shower wall with his own. Those beautiful, ridiculous eyelashes dripped beads of water, Illium’s lips swollen from the force of Aodhan’s kiss. “It’s a good thing you heal fast,” he murmured as he moved against Illium with teasing precision. “Or we’ll never hear the end of why we were late.”
“We won’t be late.” A glint in those pretty eyes right before he twisted with a muscular fluidity that had Aodhan pinned to the wall by Illium’s body, Illium’s strong hand between them moving in a rhythm that turned both their breathing harsh. “We’ll. Be. On. Time.”
Passion unbridled burned between them, their bodies going rigid as Aodhan’s playful, powerful lover took them over the edge hard and fast with knowledge born of centuries of loving.
“Told you so,” Illium whispered huskily in the aftermath, pressing a kiss to Aodhan’s jaw. “This wing commander gets the job done.”
Aodhan cuddled him close, his smile affectionate and heart tender. “I missed you.” Illium was the light in his world—his life always lost color when his Blue was gone, his paintings never as vibrant.
Illium, a man who Aodhan knew would one day be a first general akin to Avelina, put his head on Aodhan’s shoulder, his body lax against Aodhan’s, but his wings held with warrior perfection because it was second instinct. Aodhan stroked his back, got kisses on the neck for his trouble, and wanted nothing more in life.