Chapter 4 Fire & Fangs
FIRE the fever of her seeps through her soft clothing, and I swear the room tilts.
She lifts her chin as if to argue, but I’m kissing her.
Claiming, coaxing, devouring.
Centuries of restraint burning away in a single breath. She tastes like the sweetest rain after the direst drought. She makes a small, desperate sound into my mouth and I’m gone.
Found and lost.
I map the bones of her face with my thumbs, learn the new lines time has drawn and the ones magic has preserved. “Heaven and hell and every fucking thing in between, you came back,” I breathe against her cheek, disbelief and gratitude surging through my very bones. “You came back to me.”
“Only for a moment, Lucien,” she pleads, and I feel the shiver move through her like a message sent from some distant, hostile shore.
Let her believe that if she wishes. But the world will shatter and burn before I let her go.
Existence only remained because it held the faintest possibility that she might be within it.
And to its eternal credit, it delivered her to me.
Any attempt to reverse that…to deprive me of the only woman who has ever made the centuries bleed, who turned eternity itself into something worth enduring, who carved her name into every heartbeat I’ve stolen and every sin I’ve committed—will be answered with ruin so absolute that even the ashes will whisper her name in fear.
“Then I’ll make the moment holy enough to melt saints. ”
Her mouth drops open in silent wonder and yes, perhaps a little fear at the absolute resolve in my tone as I lay her back.
As silk sighs, then ripples, then rips.
Her pulse flutters beneath my mouth on her throat, then collarbone, each beat a strike of flint intensifying my hunger. She threads her fingers into my hair and pulls hard, the way she hasn’t forgotten I like, and the sound that rips out of me is not civilised.
I jerk out of my coat, toss it blindly, and…she pulls back, a wash of abject sorrow dousing her face, as the fire throws gold along the scars the coven left.
She touches one, and I flinch, not from pain but memory. From seeing myself through her eyes.
“Oh Gods, Lucien, look what they did to you,” she whispers. “They could’ve destroyed you. K-killed you.”
“They tried,” I scoff, carnage in my voice. “But they didn’t finish.” I catch her hand and kissing the centre of her palm, then draw my tongue over the delicate lifelines, revel in her unguarded shiver. “They will never fucking finish.”
She opens her mouth but I drag my fingertips over her plump, rosy lips. Lips I can’t wait to feel on my skin…wrapped tight around my cock.
At that savagely delightful thought, I slow down.
I have to. I don’t want to frighten her, don’t want to push her back into whatever cage still rattles the chains inside her.
I nose along her jaw, her ear, breathe her in like I’m learning oxygen from the beginning. “Once we start, I’m not going to stop, dear girl. Be warned.” It’s a fair warning. I mean it.
Her eyes meet mine, stormy, torn and beautifully turned on. Then she shakes her head, her lush curls bouncing. “I don’t want you to.”
Sanction granted, I let myself worship, ignoring the ‘because this might be all we have’ reflected at the back of her eyes.
I worship her with teeth and tongue and blood.
My mouth follows, hot where my skin is not, tracing open kisses along the hollow of her throat, the sharp point of her collarbone, the delicate dip where her pulse flutters wildly beneath my lips.
With hands that remember and a mouth that relearns, I find the sounds I used to drag from her—the soft, shocked catches of breath, the low, helpless sighs when I get something exactly right—and the room fills with them, a hymn I’ve waited too long to hear.
When her nails score my shoulders, I welcome the sting; it roots me in the present, proves this isn’t another dream designed to break me.
My fangs graze her skin, nipping but not breaking it…yet, but the promise of it makes her tremble, and the next sound she makes lodges like a blade in my chest. Her nails dig into my shoulders again, no barrier between us, the pressure almost painful.
I want it. I need it. The marks of her desperation and desire branded into me, the way I intend to imprint mine on her so she and the world itself will never forget that she belongs to Lucien Devereaux D’Armand.
“Lucien—”
My name leaves her lips in a whisper, half plea, half command, and I groan against her flesh, the vibration making her shiver.
“Say it again,” I murmur, voice roughened by centuries of denial. My tongue flicks out, tasting the salt of her skin, the memory of what was once mine. “Say my name. Let me hear how much you’ve missed me.”
She should defy me. She should make me crawl for it. But the words pour out, breathless, unguarded. “I’ve ached for you. So very much. Lucien.”
The sound tears something open inside me.
My growl is pure possession, a sound older than language. My hands find the laces of her corset, underneath the ripped silk, pulling slowly and deliberately, each tug a calculated cruelty.
More fabric give, loosening just enough to tease before I finally rip it all off, the sound a low moan from both of us, hers of surrender, mine of victory.
Her breasts spill free, heavy and full, bruised rose nipples already tight with need. My breath hitches, as I take in the sight of her, and then my mouth is on her again, hot and wet, sealing over one peaked bud with a slow, sucking kiss.
Elara cries out, her back arching off the bed, her fingers tangling in my hair as if to anchor me there. I take the invitation, teeth grazing her nipple just enough to sting, and the sharp sound that escapes her goes straight to my cock.
I drag my tongue over the mark to soothe it, then move to the other, giving it the same devotion, the same suckling claim.
Her pulse stutters against my lips, her body trembling beneath my hands like it remembers me even if her mind still doubts.
My free hand slides lower, down the curve of her ribs, over the soft press of her stomach until my palm finds the heat of her delicious cunt waiting between her thighs.
Even through the layers of silk and lace, I can feel her warmth, the answering ache that mirrors my own.
I press my hand there, circle and maddening rotations, not enough to relieve, only enough to remind her what’s coming.
Her hips jerk and chase after my touch.
“So responsive,” I murmur against her skin, the words a dark caress. “Always so eager for me. Even after all this time.”
I dispose of the last of her clothing and with uncouth eagerness, watch the cool air hits her exposed, silk-smooth skin. Watch as she bites her lip, her breath coming faster as my gaze rakes over her.
“Fuck,” I breathe, my voice thick with awe. “Look at you. My sexy doom and my eternal treasure.”
She frowns up at me, breath unsteady. “Sexy? Lucien… what does that even mean?”
My gaze drags over her like a brand, dark with hunger and the remnants of fury. “It means you make me hard even when I’m furious with you,” I murmur, my voice rough as torn velvet. “It means I’m going to teach you every filthy meaning that word can hold.”
Her lips part, a tremor running through her. “Every…?”
I step closer, jaw tight, the need to take and reclaim her pounding through every vein.
“Every one you can take,” I promise. “And then the ones you can’t.”
She swallows, and something in me breaks open—hunger, memory, possession all tangling in my chest.
“Sexy…” she tests out.
Sexy.
The word tastes new on my tongue, crude and modern…and I want it because she said it.
Because her confusion made it innocent, and her breathless little tremor made it filthy.
I lean in, my mouth at her ear. “I’ll teach you a hundred variations of it. And I’ll make you repeat them all again,” I breathe, “until the sound of them ruin me.”
She’s fully bare to me now, her pussy glistening under my hungry stare, lips swollen and flushed with arousal. My fingers trace the inside of her thigh, calloused and possessive, before my palm cups her, thumb brushing over her slick folds.
She jerks at the contact with a broken sound, and my chuckle is unabashedly dark and triumphant.