Chapter 38 #3
Brand reached across, flattening his palm on the back of her round thigh and dragging it up to the reddened handprint by his face. He kneaded the spot, itching to sink his teeth right into it.
“What did you say?”
“You don’t want to say please? Then… Make. Me.”
His lids slid closed, jaw slackening. It was possible he’d imagined the way she’d wiggled ever-so-slightly beneath his touch, taunting him.
“Just so we’re both perfectly clear, I’m going to ask you to repeat that one more time.” He squeezed a little harder, fingertips grazing her hot core. “Feel free to rethink it, change your wording, take it back. Whatever you—”
“I said, make me, Demon.”
That time, she absolutely pressed back into his hold, her pitch higher. Almost begging.
His markings flashed briefly. One breath, two… Make her wait. Make her squirm. And…
Smack! She cried out, her nails sinking into his lower back.
“Now, will you please dry us off?”
For a moment, she didn’t move, and a knot of dread formed in his gut. Maybe he’d misread the situation and her cues. “Luna—”
Goosebumps broke out, his body shuddering as the water evaporated.
“Take me to bed, Brand.”
The uncertainty bled out of him. “Exquisite creature,” he rasped, finally giving in to the desire to nip her supple flesh. “Perfection.”
He set Luna down on her feet, her oil-slicked skin gliding over his.
“This discovery has been a delightful interlude.” His fingers sank into her curls and he pulled her in.
“But this first time, we’re making a choice to be bound for eternity.
I don’t want to take you to bed. I want to walk at your side, as you asked me to do, each of our own volition.
” He laid a light kiss on her forehead. “No regrets, little moon. Just us. Together.”
Her eyes welled and she shuffled closer, wrapping her arms around his middle. “Together,” she whispered.
The tension built as they stared at one another, their breaths mingling, the moment rife with all the potential of a shared lifetime.
And then it broke.
Lips and tongues and teeth met in a frenzy as they stumbled, only parting when the backs of Luna’s knees finally hit the mattress and she sprawled back across it.
Brand was halfway onto the bed when he was caught by her beckoning, sea glass eyes, swirling with silver, and they stilled him in a way nothing else ever had.
Trembling hands replaced fervid ones as he laid himself between her thighs. He didn’t want to rush. Didn’t want to lose this moment to a lapse in control. Didn’t want the memories to blur years and years from now because he hadn’t bothered to savor every damned second.
Brand’s gaze followed his fingertip as it traced the high arch of her brow, over faint lines that held the secret details of her life in their furrows.
“I would memorize this face,” he whispered. “Immaculately rendered by the Sisters and housing a soul that was crafted beside my own.”
He trailed down her jaw and around the edges of her gasping lips, to the iridescent freckles concentrated there, blurring the boundary between blush and ivory.
“It will greet me in the mornings and be the last thing my eyes see before they close at night.”
Across her cheekbones, to a tiny scar above the bridge of her nose, the story of its presence one he longed to hear.
“It will be the beacon of my life. The shining light that leads me through every darkness.” He gripped her chin and pulled her to him. “And Sisters, how I love it more than any other sight.”
His lips brushed hers. A single sob left her as she trailed her fingers through the short hairs of his beard. Up into his hair, nails scraping along his scalp.
The sound burrowed its way into him as he notched his cock against the molten center of her, clinging to the hills and valleys of her soft sublimity.
No sooner had he felt her readiness than his horns started curl.
Heart pounding. Eyes screwing shut.
Shite.
Ringing started in his ears. He wouldn’t change completely, but he’d forgotten to tell her. Didn’t want to frighten her. To—
“Brand, look at me.” He did, and she clasped his hand and brought it to her chest. “This heart beats for you, remember? It’s yours,” she husked. “Take it.”
The command in those words was punctuated by a tempestuous look of longing so stark it snatched his breath away. He jolted when her hand wrapped around him, teasing and pumping, urging him closer. Deeper.
His greater half rushed to the surface in answer, his markings flaring to life as he surrendered to it. To her.
Eyes on hers, breath sawing, he let his touch trail like whispers up the length of her leg. “Who am I to deny you?”
Brand splayed his fingers around her thigh and buried himself to the hilt.
Luna’s body lifted from the bed and surged against him, and he felt it to his bones when they cried out in tandem. The old version of himself was ripped away with the sound, replaced with something better on his next gasping inhale.
At last.
Stars swam in his vision and he stilled, trying to breathe through the life-altering sensation of being joined with her.
Her, who filled his lungs and pierced his skin. Her, who swept through to undo the aching knot in his chest and fill him with ease. Her, who strengthened him. Made him new.
Her, her, her. Everything was her.
“Luna.”
“Stars, you feel so…” she moaned, the silver in her eyes multiplying. “Do you feel that, Brand, how perfect it is?” Luna dug her heels into his backside, taking even more of him as her lids drifted shut and she uttered pleas for more.
Power rippled out when he began to move, the canopy ruffling and doors rattling, their souls and bodies and magic twining together as the mating bond began to forge itself in the fire between them.
He fucking burned for her.
Light poured from him, glowing pieces of his markings abandoning him to dance over her skin and sear themselves into her flesh, connecting their bodies in yet another way.
“Brand,” she breathed, over and over, her limbs clasped desperately around him.
He reared back, bringing her with him and settling her upon his thighs. “This is where you belong,” he murmured against her lips as he wrapped his arms around her. “Gasping above me while I kneel in worship.”
He thrust up into her, panting, his hands roaming. Down the curving line of her spine. Into her hips to pull her down and meet her advances with his own. Up the center of her body and around her nape, to tangle in the mass of her hair.
When she used his horns to tug him closer, Brand buried his face into her glorious breasts with a groan, drowning in the ecstasy of dragging his lips and tongue across her flesh, of being utterly surrounded by her.
Latching on to one dusky peak, he turned his head and sighed, listening to the fierce cadence of her heart as it beat in time with his own.
His heart, her heart… They were the same.
Brand looked down to where his cock pumped in and out of her sultry heat, her arousal dripping down his straining length, and it freed the ancient thing within him—something feral and possessive and protective—and he felt it like a lightning strike at the center of his being.
His horns curled, fangs dropping as muscles bulged. His skin changed, the deeper color of his rage rising and retreating in waves, the reddened hue only serving to highlight her twilight beauty when it finally settled in and stayed there.
Brand swelled inside of her, and Luna let out a choked whimper of approval that filled him with more satisfaction than anything else could.
He wanted nothing more than to be the source of her rapture, to fuel his own with the indescribable feeling of delivering his mate into the soaring arms of bliss, over and over.
“Touch me, Brand.” She spread herself, exposing her glistening clit. “Please.”
“Fuck. Look at you.”
He gripped her arse tighter, delighted to grant her wish.
Circling her in time with his thrusts, he watched Luna move over him through hooded eyes, mesmerized by her abandon.
By the pulse hammering in her neck when her head tipped back and she shouted to the rafters above.
The furrow between her brows, deepening with every stroke, harder and deeper. Every sweep of his fingers.
All the while, those markings pulsed and shot between them, the light flaring and waning, tunneling further into her with every pass.
Fucking Solyrian, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. And, when she went silent—when her muscles tightened and her limbs locked her in a frozen arch above him, mouth open to the sky with her own hands buried in her endless waves—he knew he would never be the same.
“Yes, little moon,” he rasped with awe, fingers strumming quicker, hips thrusting faster as he chased her completion. “That’s it. I want it all. Let me feel you come undone around me at last.”
With a wracking shudder, she screamed his name, melting and twitching and trembling, her sheath pulling at him in clamping waves that brought back awareness of how fucking perfectly she fit around him.
He loosed a strangled, “Luna,” when she grasped his horns again, not even stopping to breathe before she was pressing her forehead to his and moving with renewed purpose.
As she seized control, every aching ounce of the mind-blowing pleasure he hadn’t let himself acknowledge bombarded him.
Sweet, merciful Sisters, the feel of her.
He stared, transfixed and hardly able to breathe, at the goddess before him—completely drawn in by Luna’s unconscious seduction as her thighs flexed and her arms strained.
As her breaths stuttered and mixed with his.
He was utterly lost in the uninhibited ebb and flow of her movements as she worked her body over him.
She was wild. Stunning.
Her tongue darted out to tease his own. “Does my mate have a gift for me?” She nipped his lip, her eyes wholly silver and dancing with barely-leashed power.
“Fuck yes,” he answered, the rushed words scarcely able to escape his mouth before she was on him.
A thrill shuddered through him with the first nick, her groan sending sparks along his nerve endings. When she bit down, sinking her fangs into his bottom lip, all coherent thought left his mind.
Luna utterly devoured him. Her tongue clashed with his, no longer teasing but taking.
The copper tang of his blood filled their mouths, that boneless, wonderfully hazy feeling washing over him.
He was helpless against her onslaught, except to sink his fingers into those luscious fucking hips and hang on while she drank from him, ruined him, owned him.
With a heave, Luna broke away, bowing back. “Fill me, Brand,” she begged, her words drawn out into a moan. “I want to feel it inside me when… when I—”
“Yes, take it. Take it.” Bloody fucking Solyrian, he was finished. “Fuck, Luna!”
She clasped his head to her breasts and tensed around him, and his own raptured bellows joined her screams. Luna never stopped moving, even as she shattered and drew him deeper. Never stopped her gasping words of praise as he emptied every drop of himself into her.
The fiery light between them was blinding, building and building as they came down, their groans no longer from pleasure but from the sheer force of the bond solidifying.
It didn’t hurt so much as feel like there wasn’t enough room for the final dregs of blessing it had to give.
Not enough space beneath his tightening skin and squeezing chest.
Brand gritted his teeth and held onto her as tightly as he could, as if he alone could keep them from breaking apart.
He’d expected an explosion when it was done—a shocking detonation that would level the world—not the subtle, gentle shift as it lovingly released them. Not the quietly deafening click that rocked him to his core and allowed him to take the first full, truly unhindered breath of his long, long life.
Brand heaved unfettered air into grateful lungs, the freedom of it completely intoxicating as he dragged his open mouth up the column of her throat and seized her mouth with a searing kiss.
“Oh, Brand,” she whispered against his lips, voice hoarse and breathless.
This. This was where his life finally began.
He was home.