Chapter Fifty-Eight
“You just died,” my husband pointed out.
“All the more reason to seize the day. Because now I’m alive and I feel good.” Better than good.
He began to walk toward me hesitantly, almost as if he didn’t intend to do so. “Your vow.”
“The goddess told me that no such vow exists. Lysimache did it to prevent priestesses from becoming pregnant. She thought it would give them more power.”
His eyes darkened at this information. I saw the way his chest began to move more rapidly as his breathing turned shallow.
“I came back for you. Because then, now, I always love you,” I told him. I stood up, using one hand to hold on to the linen. “And you have me. All of me. My heart, my mind, my soul. And now I want you to have my body.”
His hands involuntarily went to my shoulders, and I heard the stifled groan he made in the back of his throat. I reached up with my free hand to run my fingers along the contours of his face. “Yield to me, Xander.”
I felt his fingers digging into my skin and the pressure was delicious. He didn’t say anything to my invitation, didn’t move.
“The last time I saw you speechless was when I told you I could do magic,” I said.
“You are magic.” The words broke free from his chest, rumbling and deep. “I have been under your spell since the day I met you.”
“Xander . . .”
I saw him shudder in response. “It shatters me every time you use my name.”
Leaning up, I pressed a kiss to the underside of his jaw and said, “I seem to recall you telling me that I would be calling it out over and over again.”
Golden flames burned in his eyes. “I think I should make good on my promise.”
Now I was the one trembling. “I do, too. I wouldn’t want you to be an oath-breaker.”
“You’re not impaired in any way? The goddess didn’t give you honeyed wine?”
I smiled. “No.”
His voice turned hoarse. “I’m afraid that if I really touch you, you’ll disappear. That this is some fever dream and you’re not actually here.”
I reached for his left hand and took it from my shoulder, placing it directly over my heart. “I’m very alive.”
He left his hand where I had placed it. “This seems like such a momentous occasion, I feel as if I should make a speech.”
“We have done enough talking,” I told him.
My husband looked at me with such tenderness, such warmth, such love, that it made my heart overflow. He leaned in to kiss me. Brushing softly, sweetly against my lips. Kisses light as butterfly wings. Devastatingly sensual. He kissed me like I was a gift. Cherished.
Adored.
Every pass of his lips, every sweet and delicate touch, told me how he felt. They were all expressions of how much he loved me.
But he had lit a fire inside me long ago, one that was always simmering beneath the surface, waiting, wanting to be fed. It demanded more.
He moved his mouth from mine and I tried to follow after him.
But he ran his lips along my jaw, stopping to press a kiss here and there.
He moved to my earlobe and sucked it into his mouth, filling me with a shivery and trembly pleasure.
Then he scraped his teeth along the skin, and this new sensation had me melting toward him.
“You like it when I talk. When I tell you how beautiful you are and how much I want you.” He murmured the hot words against my wet earlobe, and my shivering got worse.
Then he nipped at my neck and moved his way down to the pulse point near my collarbone, which he sucked into his mouth, rendering me mindless.
“You like when I tell you how much I want you,” he said. “And when I say how much I enjoy those breathless, erotic moans you’re making right now.”
I hadn’t even realized.
Then he released me, taking a step back. I was panting, not understanding what he was doing. “Why—”
“Drop the linen,” he commanded me.
That sent a lightning bolt of desire shooting down my spine. Without hesitation I released the linen, letting it fall to my feet.
I didn’t try to hide myself. I wasn’t embarrassed, wasn’t shy. I welcomed his gaze. I wanted him to look at me. To watch the way his muscles clenched and tightened, how hungry his expression became, the way desire lit up his eyes.
It made me feel powerful.
“Do you know that you have the most perfect breasts in all of Ilion?” His voice was ragged, edged with want.
“You might be a little biased,” I said, enjoying the way his gaze heated my skin, as if he were touching me. “I’m certain there are many people who would disagree with you.”
“I will gut anyone who would dare to speak such a lie.” Then to my great joy, his hands went to his belt, which he quickly removed. His tunic was next, and I realized how much I loved watching him undressing, baring himself to me.
Then he started unwrapping his undergarment and the air in my lungs solidified. When he finished, my mouth went dry and my mind stopped working. He was magnificent. There was no other word to describe him.
We had been hiding from each other for so long, keeping secrets, telling each other lies, but now we were both totally vulnerable. Open.
Nothing between us.
There was an ache inside me that needed . . . something. “What do I do?” I asked.
“What is it you want to do?” His voice was silky and seductive.
“I want to kiss you. Touch you . . . everywhere. Do things that will make your eyes roll back in your head.”
“If you knew how little effort that would take on your part to accomplish, I don’t think I’d ever have a moment’s peace again,” he said with a strained laugh.
“Would you mind?”
“Not in the least.”
When I took a step toward him, he held up his hand. “Stay there. Not yet. Give me a moment longer. I have imagined this so many times that I want to savor it. And I won’t have your first time—our first time—be over too soon. I won’t let you rush me.”
“Have you seen yourself?” I demanded, impatient.
“Only in the mirror.”
“I never would have imagined that I could be jealous of an inanimate object.”
He laughed again. “I give you my royal permission to look upon me as often and as long as you’d like.”
“I am going to take advantage of that offer.”
“I’m glad that the way I look pleases you.”
“It drives me to madness,” I confessed.
“Good. It means we are suffering from the same affliction. Because I have not felt entirely myself since I first laid eyes on you. You’ve turned me into something new. Something better. The man I have always hoped I would be.”
His words made me melt, had my heart expanding in my chest. I loved him so much that—
Then he reached for me and dragged me against him and I lost the ability to think. Our heated flesh pressed together . . . it was everything I had ever wanted.
“By the goddess,” I murmured, reaching up to feel his muscles twitch and spasm under my fingers. This was what he’d said I should do—that I should touch him. I glided my fingertips down, across the ridges in his abdomen, heading toward—
He grabbed my wrist. “Not that.”
“Why not?” That was the most interesting and different part of him.
“Because it will be over too soon if you do.”
“But why—”
“Lia, I promise to answer all your questions later. For now, let me revel in the warm, naked woman in my arms that I need to kiss more than I need to breathe.”
His mouth finally returned to mine, and the smoldering sensuality of kissing him with no clothing in our way was intoxicating. One kiss glided into the next, until my mind was coated with pleasure.
He deepened the kiss, his hand moving to the back of my head to maneuver me into the position he wanted. His tongue claimed mine, hot and wet, stroking, and I could taste his desperate desire. Despite all his claims about planning to go slowly, he was quickly unraveling.
I was no better—I was completely lost in the taste of his mouth, the feel of his body, the sound of his ragged breathing. He ignited me, drowning me in flames.
He began to guide me, leading me to our bed. When my knees hit the back of it, he picked me up by the waist and then laid me down. He followed, caging me with his body.
“Are you nervous? Scared?” he asked me.
I reached out to run my hand across his shoulder. “No. I’m with you. I’m more excited than anything.”
“I’m nervous and scared,” he admitted.
“You are? Why?” I asked, trying to hide my smile.
He still saw it and leaned down to kiss me quickly. “Because I want this to be perfect for you.”
Each word melted into my skin like falling embers. “I’m with you. It already is perfect.”
He smiled. “If at any point you want me to stop, tell me and I will.”
“My king, that order will never come,” I promised.
He made a raw and hungry sound that had my breath hitching and my pulse beating uncontrollably. Then his mouth was on mine again, kissing me into mindlessness, making me woozy and dizzy. There was so much pleasure not only in what he was doing, but in knowing that we didn’t have to stop.
That we could be with each other fully, and in every way imaginable.
My hands ached with an incessant need to touch him, to hold him against me, to explore every inch of him that I could. Our bodies moved together, pushing and pulling, ebbing and flowing, and each time I brushed against him, my nerve endings lit up like a thousand fireflies.
Then he moved his lips away from mine and I whined in protest.
“The goddess was right,” he said, punctuating each word with a kiss on a different part of my body. “I was made for you. Made to protect you. To serve you. To love you. To worship you. To pleasure you. To taste you.”
My mind was so hazy and the things he was doing had me writhing under him. “You . . . you have tasted me.”
“Not everywhere,” he said with a wicked gleam in his eyes. He proceeded to kiss and nip and lick his way down my torso, his hands palming my breasts. He kissed my stomach and my muscles tightened under him.
“What are you—”
Then he put his hands on my hips to hold me in place and moved his face down. I felt his tongue brushing against me and I arched up in response. What was he doing? He couldn’t!
I meant to reach for him to move him away but then he did it again and I didn’t want him to stop because it was glorious. He had told me once that he could use his mouth on me, and if I had known . . . by the goddess, if I had known!
Being flame-kissed meant that I couldn’t be burned, but this man knew how to burn me from the inside out.
My stomach knotted and unknotted as tension built and built inside me. I closed my eyes to better savor the threads of pleasure that shot through me. Liquid heat pooled in my core, making my entire body feel hot and tight.
“Xander, Xander . . .” I began chanting his name over and over as I arched my back, my body bowing, taut as a lyre string. The pleasure was too much. Overwhelming. I didn’t think I could take more.
But he kept proving me wrong. He filled me with shooting stars and sparkling aether that spiraled and coiled inside me. My body sang with pleasure, feverish, yearning. I felt the same icy heat and fiery cold that I did while doing magic. It flooded into me, lifting me higher and higher.
Then suddenly, shockingly, the tension inside me snapped.
I violently shuddered, quaking as I cried out—falling, falling, falling into an abyss where waves of pleasure and overwhelming sensations spread through me, cascades of soul-destroying delight turning me intangible so that I felt like I might float away.
He kissed one thigh, then the other, and kissed his way back up my body while I tried to catch my breath.
“So responsive.” His voice was rough with desire. “So passionate.”
“What . . . what was that?” I panted.
“What I promised you. The first of many.”
I raised my limp arms to him. “I need you.”
“Then you shall have me,” he said. “In every way possible.”