Page 80 of Kazimir

Before she could resume hostilities, I bent, got one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, and lifted her.

She gave a soft startled laugh and wrapped herself around me automatically, naked and damp and glorious against my chest.

“Bed,” I said.

“Excellent plan.”

I carried her there while the fire watched, while the golden sword waited in its half-closed case, and while every civilized intention I had left gave way to a more honest form of worship.

I laid her on the bed as if speed would have profaned the moment, though everything in me strained toward the opposite. The sheets received her with a sigh, pale against her skin, and for one suspended breath I only looked at her—hair damp over the pillows, mouth still swollen from my taking, body open to me with the kind of trust that made monsters pray.

I climbed over her slowly.

My hands framed her face first. Thumbs along her jaw. A kiss on her forehead because tenderness had become less embarrassing with practice. Then lower. Her mouth. Her throat. The damp column of her neck where her pulse moved bright and alive beneath skin I knew too well to mistake for fragility. I kissed the center of her chest, the upper slope of one breast, then took the nipple into my mouth until her back arched and her fingers found my hair with a little desperate force that pleased me beyond reason.

“Kazimir,” she whispered.

The bond carried more than the sound. Want. Trust. The sweet, fierce impatience she had whenever I turned methodical and made her wait for what she already knew I intended to give.

I answered without moving my mouth from her skin. Patience, svetoch.

She sent back a pulse of mock offense so vivid I nearly smiled against her breast.

My hand slid down her body. Over the soft plain of her belly. Between her thighs. She was already slick, the heat of her opening flooding my fingers the instant I touched her. I circled her clit once, twice, just enough to make her gasp and spread for me. Then I coated myself with that welcome and settled between her legs.

Her eyes held mine.

That had become one of the sacred things. Not because either of us lacked shame in the ordinary sense. But because looking made lies impossible. There was no place for performance in a gaze like hers when I pressed the head of my cock to her entrance and felt her body tense in anticipation.

I went in slowly.

The first inch always felt like crossing a threshold built precisely to fit me and still somehow capable of astonishment. Warm. Tight. Alive in a way no language ever reduced without insulting it. She breathed in sharply, fingers tightening on my shoulders. I held still. Let her adjust around me. Let my own body remember discipline rather than conquest.

More, she sent, not in words but with the determined little tilt of her hips.

I obeyed.

Another inch. Then another. Her mouth fell open. My name touched the air, softer this time, and I kept my gaze on hers as I seated myself fully inside her. The final depth stole a rough sound from both of us. I braced my forearms beside her head and simply stayed there for a moment, buried deep, feeling the pulse of her around me and the answering strain in my own body.

No one had ever fit me like this. Not merely physically. Fatefully. Devastatingly.

I kissed her once, hard enough to mark the moment, and began to move.

Slow at first. Withdrawal measured. Return deliberate. Every stroke a negotiation between restraint and the older, uglier instinct to lose myself in her and let consequences pant outside the door until morning. She met me with equal intention, lifting into each thrust as if drawing me deeper by right rather than allowance. The mattress whispered under us. Firelight shifted over the carved bedposts and caught on damp strands of her hair.

I heard her before she spoke—felt the swell of emotion through the bond like a tide rising against old stone.

Mine.

The word was not possessive in the human, petty sense. It was recognitional. Reverent. Terrible in its honesty.

I answered with a harder thrust that made her cry out. Yours.

Her lashes fluttered. Her body clenched around me at the thought.

That road between us remained the most dangerous miracle I had ever been granted. No diplomacy. No misinterpretation. Feeling arriving in its first language, before mouths could dress it up or hide its teeth.

I slid a hand between us and found her clit, stroking in a slow, relentless rhythm that matched the pace of my hips. She broke beautifully under coordinated attention. Her thighs widened. Her heels pressed into the bed. Wings did not emerge, but I felt the instinct of them in the subtle shift of the air, that minute quickening around us when strong feeling brought her closer to every part of herself at once.