Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 124479 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 622(@200wpm)___ 498(@250wpm)___ 415(@300wpm)
He turned to face her. His hands found her waist, and his thumbs settled against the fabric of her blouse where it met her waistband. Her palms flattened against his shirt, one above the curse mark and one below, and the mark between them quieted to a register that barely reached his awareness.
“Slower,” she said.
He bent his head. His mouth found the place below her ear where her pulse collected, and he held his lips against the skin while her breath changed beneath his hands. His thumbs moved against her waist, tracing the boundary between fabric and flesh without crossing it.
Her fingers worked the buttons of his shirt at the pace she had named, giving each its full attention before advancing to the next. The shirt opened by degrees. September’s air met his skin in stages, and her palms followed the retreat of fabric across his chest.
She pushed the shirt from his shoulders. It fell. Her fingertips traced the scar beneath his collarbone—the wound she had mapped during their first night here, when her mouth had found the raised tissue and followed its length. Now her touch moved across it without appetite’s edge, with only a desire to reconfirm what she had learned.
His hands drew her blouse upward. She lifted her arms, and the fabric cleared her long hair and joined his shirt on the floor. Lamplight from the hall found the planes of her shoulders and the sheen of perspiration September had placed across her sternum.
He unclasped her bra. She let the garment fall and stood before him with the same unguarded directness she had brought to the argument and the confession at the table.
His hands traveled her torso. The pads of his fingers counted each bone beneath her skin, and her breath caught at the third rib. Her weight shifted at the fifth. She pressed a sound between her teeth where her ribs yielded to the softer terrain below.
She undid his belt, worked the buckle and the button and the zipper with focused economy. His trousers hit the floor. Her hands settled at his hips and traced the muscle that ran from his waist downward.
He knelt. His hands found the closure of her pants and opened it and drew the fabric down her thighs. She stepped free and stood above him in the amber light. He pressed his mouth to her hip. Her hand found his head, her fingers slid through his hair, and the grip that followed carried none of the urgency from their first night and all of its certainty.
He rose. His arms encircled her waist, and her body met his, skin against skin. The contact ran the length of them and generated a heat that existed independent of September’s contribution. Her mouth found his. The kiss started where the argument had ended—past confrontation, past the exchange of accusation and concession, in a space where two people who had agreed to be afraid together discovered what that agreement tasted like.
Her mouth opened against his, and the pace held. He tasted coffee and warmth and beneath both a frequency her body transmitted through every point of contact—a signal that had nothing to do with curses or beacons or anything imposed from outside.
They moved to the bed. He lowered her onto the mattress, and she settled against the sheets while shifting shadows played across her skin. He lay beside her. His hand traveled across her stomach, along the ridge of her hip, up the inside of her arm to her wrist where her pulse ran visible beneath the skin.
She turned toward him. Her leg crossed his, and her hand found the curse mark. Her palm settled against the darkened skin with the placement she had discovered during their first morning here. The beacon dropped. His lungs opened. The space the signal vacated filled with her proximity and did not request its return.
Her mouth found the hollow beneath his jaw and stayed there. She kissed the tendon where neck met shoulder. She traced the edge of scar tissue that mapped battles she had never seen. Her mouth held no reverence and no appetite—a third quality, native to the space the argument had cleared and the trust that now occupied it.
He pulled her closer. His arm tightened around her waist, his hand pressed flat against the small of her back, and the contact drew her hips against his. She responded with a shift that aligned their bodies, and the pressure between them built without the frenzy that had characterized the first time.
This bore no resemblance to that night. The first time had been a breaking—restraint overridden by hunger accumulated across months and centuries, discipline destroyed by the force of what his body demanded once Delphine dismantled the last of its containment. He had consumed and been consumed. The shadow-wings had come because the breaking reached into a depth where his former nature lived dormant and dragged it to the surface.