Chapter Fifteen #2
“So much,” she went on. She was alarmed to find her voice thinning before she could say anything more, say the three words she really needed to say, but it mattered little—Kai claimed her mouth, along with anything else she might have told him.
Her words were swallowed by his kiss, her mind consumed by it, her fleeting courage sedated and forgotten.
It was slow and sweet and devouring. He kissed her the way he always did, like it was the first time, and he wanted to spend hours tasting her in every way imaginable.
Like it was the last time, and he could not bear to stop.
His fingers threaded her hair and sent a cascade of flutters down the length of her spine, and when she sighed into their kiss, he sucked her lower lip between his teeth.
She could do this forever, she thought. Just this.
And then, as Kai’s hands drifted down her body and he drew her closer by the small of her back, she realised that no, she could not.
Not just this. She shivered at the warmth of his palms curving around her bare waist, and realisation seemed to jolt through them in the same precise moment; that Adeline still stood before him almost entirely naked.
Their lips parted in frenetic unison, his tongue gliding over hers, the kiss turning messy and frantic.
Her hands scrambled blindly at his shirt, fingers finding the thick embroidery of its hem and fumbling so pathetically that he took pity and broke away to do it himself.
His stomach tensed and flexed as he stretched to pull the shirt over his head, and the tightness that gripped Adeline’s chest at the sight felt an awful lot like a sob.
Something caught in his shirt collar as he tore it over his head; a pendant she hadn’t seen before, rough seaglass that seemed to offer a faint glow despite the dim light around them.
It caught the vibrant green in his hazel eyes, and they shone with wicked amusement when he finally freed himself of his shirt and caught her stare.
He moved to draw her in again, but she stopped him with a hand pressed firmly to his chest; Kai raised a brow.
His eyes caught on the movement of her hands as she tucked her thumbs beneath the band of her undergarments and rolled them down her thighs, then shimmied them over one heeled foot, then the other.
She leaned back and braced herself against the counter, using that leverage to lift and seat herself, parting her knees for him.
The silence had a weight to it. A heat.
And when Kai’s gaze raked down her body, when his eyes darkened with that same heat, Adeline thought, distantly, that she would remember that look on his face for as long as she lived.
It would change her; it would be written into her very being, a formative part of her from this day forward.
Epic poems had been crafted on far less than the way Kai Cumhaill looked at her in that moment.
He was so profoundly beautiful she couldn’t help but wish she had something meaningful to say.
Something worthy of that aching perfection, sitting before this man with her thighs spread wide and knowing he would worship her if she let him.
She didn’t have the words. She didn’t deserve this, but Goddess, she wanted it, and it had been some time since she had dared to want anything for herself.
So she spread her thighs wider.
“You made me a promise,” she whispered. “Come here, Your Majesty.”
As though a tether had snapped at her command, Kai was upon her in less than a breath, his mouth on hers.
His hand combed through her hair as he crushed himself closer, and she moaned at the realisation of how badly he wanted her.
He was so hard it made her ache, and the straining ridge of his cock pressed the seam of his trousers over her core again and again until she could not help but grind mindlessly back, rolling her hips like she could have him right there, clothes and all.
She reached down to wrench his belt open, and Goddess, the sound he made against her mouth was barely human, the way it rumbled up from the depths of his chest, and set his teeth together.
It should probably not have made her moan in response.
He pulled back to hold her eye, his broad chest heaving as he slid his belt free and dropped it to the ground with a clash of metal on tile.
“Slow,” he reminded her, a warning in one deep, broken word.
She wasn’t sure if she’d even managed to nod; not as he rolled his trousers past his hips, and the whole length of him sprang free.
So thick, so hard, he was nearly pressed to his own tensed stomach.
Kai gripped himself, and as his eyes dragged over the length of her naked body, he teased two long, languid strokes from the base of his cock to the head.
Adeline felt his deep, worshipful groan in a throb between her own thighs, the force enough to make her hips lift.
“Kai,” she pleaded. “Fuck me slow if you like, but fuck me.”
She felt his dark laughter in the pit of her belly, and as he finally lined himself between her thighs, the depth of that laughter was enough, for just a moment, to fill the wanting, hollow ache within.
But then, with one decisive thrust, he drove his cock inside her, and she was full in earnest. Full, and whole, and alive, lit up from the inside, crying out at the delicious, brimming fullness as she locked her legs around his hips.
Her hands grasped at his shoulders for purchase, his own hands gripping almost painfully at her hips, and for a moment, neither of them moved; they just gazed at one another, speechless, awestruck, as though they’d somehow forgotten the earth-shifting perfection of the way their bodies fit together. The rightness of it.
And then Kai began to move; slowly at first, just as he’d promised, though she could tell it cost him.
His hand shook with tension when he pressed his palm to her inner thigh, widening her legs, holding her body open so he could watch his cock glide, so fucking slowly inside her, his lips parting around a deeply primal groan as the coiling tightness of her core dragged him deep inside her again. And again. And again.
“Kai—”
“Slow,” he grunted, hearing her plea in just the whisper of his name.
But his next thrust, slow though it remained, was deep and unyielding, and he held himself at the crest of that thrust for a long moment; so long his coarse hair brushed over her aching centre, and she panted at the friction, rolling her hips until she felt herself flutter desperately around him.
“Fuck,” he panted. “Fuck, you’re so close already, I can’t—I-I’m going to—”
He pulled only halfway out of her before his control slipped and he slammed in again with a resounding growl.
More friction, more pressure, the heat of him between her legs setting her ablaze.
The climbing tension at Adeline’s core seemed to swell throughout her; into her chest, pressing urgently into her lungs, insistently until those three terrifying words began to climb her throat with each igniting, stuttering thrust into her body.
“Kai,” she whimpered, then swallowed, trying her hardest to hold them at bay, because this was not the moment. “Kai, I—”
Not the moment. Not fair.
“I missed you,” she said instead.
He stopped trying to go slowly. His waning control snapped in several rapid, helpless strokes, and then he curved his hands beneath her thighs and hauled her against him.
She was airborne for a moment, clinging to his shoulders for purchase before he spun them around and collapsed backward against the counter, the mirror rattling ominously behind him.
She straddled his lap as he sat back, and the angle sent him so deep that her back arched almost violently.
“Show me then,” he ground out. “Show me how much you’ve missed me, Adeline.”
But she was moving already, riding him, grinding into him, driving him against that spot inside her that made her breath catch and her vision blur at the edges.
Nothing had ever felt so good, until Kai slid his hand between their bodies, and she cried out at the added pressure of his thick, warm fingers sliding over her slick core.
“That’s it, Princess,” he said, his voice a breathless whisper in her ear, each word broken by greedy, guttural groans. “Show me.”
She moaned his name and relished in the harsh catch of his breath as her hands slid blindly over his chest, finding his shoulder, his throat.
His pendant was cold beneath her hand, and somehow the jolt of ice through her senses only made every sensation keener; only made her move more frantically.
Her hips stuttered in their rhythm, and Kai began to move his fingers faster against her, his other hand tucked beneath her to support each of her thrusts, helping her bring them both to the brink.
“Adeline,” he breathed. He caught her open, gasping mouth against his own, a kiss that was restless and arrhythmic, and served to stifle his sounds as they each grew wilder, more desperate.
But even with her bottom lip between his teeth, Kai could not seem to help himself.
As though the words were ripped from the depths of his chest, each one reluctant and urgent and low; “I love you. I love you.”
Her orgasm was too much; an earthly force that crashed into her with little care for the mortal limits of her body. Release shuddered between every glowing fibre of her being, tearing her lovingly apart to force pleasure into every cell, all while Kai held her broken pieces together.
It was, for all of a few moments, the most intense sensation she had ever experienced.
But then the might of that powerful climax slowly eased, and as Kai surged up and into her, holding her to him while he came, gasping her name in her ear and telling her how much he wanted her, loved her, missed her—the waning heat in her belly met a burst of warmth in her chest.
She ignited all at once.