Chapter Thirty-Four #3
After a few moments, she didn’t fight the temptation to run her hands down his tensed stomach and revel in the feel of him as she tilted her head back so her face brushed his stubbled jaw.
So he might kiss her more, into the long hours of the night.
So all the desire that had been brewing inside her missing him could be satisfied.
His eyes were lambent and dark with the same hunger.
They were inches away.
Nicole brought her bent leg up higher, a soft nudge against that secret part of him, clad in pyjama bottoms. Kyan’s bare chest heaved but he got up on one elbow to lean slightly over her, enough to dip his head and brush his mouth over hers.
‘Nicole,’ he warned, his eyes glittering.
She merely looked beneath her lashes at him.
‘We have ten minutes,’ he murmured.
Right. Because her father or Dylan could come back inside and hear them at any moment.
‘I don’t want just ten minutes,’ Kyan said, the words gravel-rough.
‘I know,’ she whispered, her heart warming. ‘But I do, tonight. I just—’
I need you.
She tugged her shirt, let it slip down her shoulder.
He seemed to hold his breath until he took over, hand sliding beneath and up her stomach instead.
He kissed her as it went the rest of the way, as that wide, hot palm slid up and up, until he brushed over her breast and she had to force herself to stay quiet.
But it was so difficult—
He squeezed softly, stroked, kissed her cheek and the side of her mouth. Kissed her until the pooling heat between her legs worsened.
‘Kyan,’ she panted against his mouth.
‘I know,’ he said, hand sliding back down her stomach.
He stroked her momentarily between her legs like he couldn’t resist and her body lit up with sensation.
She wore nothing beneath her pyjama shorts, and he realised it with a low, pained noise as a moan choked in her throat.
She felt so bare. Even now, some part of her was trying to censor the eroticism of the feeling.
And why? Why, when it was so pure, so needed, so natural but decadent—
His answering snarl turned into a long, heated kiss.
Some part of her still felt restrained, her awareness of everything else still loud. But it narrowed right down with his touch, her stomach bare against his, one breast exposed, his teeth raking over her throat, his heaving chest.
Here, she wasn’t a daughter or a sister. She was a woman of her own.
She could be this sensual and satisfied and safely dangerous. She was no threat to him. She couldn’t hurt him.
She couldn’t deter him by being herself or showing him what she wanted.
But it still felt forbidden to have his fingers on the soft, barely touched skin of her inner thighs, or the aching curves of her breasts. To have this eager heat pulsing between her legs that she knew he could satisfy.
And then his thick fingers slipped under her shorts, against her.
She breathed against his parted lips, a purring need curling at the back of her throat.
His eyes were feral, his teeth gritted. ‘So wet, Nicole.’
She moaned brokenly as his head dipped to bite her breast softly, his tongue hot and wet as he licked, then sucked, as one finger slid inside her.
She clawed at his shoulder, the muscle there thick enough for her grip as heat scorched her lower body.
‘Please—’ She gasped as the slow, testing pump of his hand flushed her with blinding, desperate pleasure.
Her hand stroked over the front of his pyjama trousers, finding how hard he was, how hot and eager.
Yes.
Yes, that was what she wanted. Needed. God, she wanted to touch him so badly.
‘Kyan,’ she managed, as he slid deeper, setting a rhythm. ‘Let me touch you.’
He swore a stream of low, pained Irish, his face agonised as if he was trying to resist, and losing the battle. But he allowed her to dip her hand inside, to grip him for the first time—
Silk, steel, heat. And size. Nicole swallowed, mouth dry, near delirious.
His low, pained moan changed her on a fundamental level, ratcheting up the intensity of her own pleasure.
He needed it too. Just as badly.
Maybe worse.
His mouth stamped down on hers. The kiss tongue and teeth. Deep unspoken devotion and months of worry.
‘Tell me what you want,’ she breathed.
‘Just you,’ he gritted out as she began to move her hand up and down. ‘Just you, mo—’ the last bit was almost slurred, his eyes drowsy with bliss.
Mine, crooned that thing in her chest, that huntress, that woman inside, as she tightened her grip around him.
God, she was obsessed with that look on his face, with the feel of him; the mist of sweat forming on his chest and down the dip of her spine.
More, more, more—
Some part of her was too aware of the rest of the house, and it kept her too tense to fully let go, but touching him and having him touch all of her was so potently satisfying that she was coming undone already.
He kept up a steady pace, the heel of his right hand right where she needed it.
A blaze of pleasure spread through her limbs.
‘Kyan,’ she gasped. ‘I’m, oh—’
‘That’s it,’ he breathed, the words choppy against her lips.
Then he swore and came with a desperate inhale that turned into a deep, chesty groan. But it was the shadowed ecstasy on his face and the hard pumps of his hips into her hand that sent her over the edge.
The pleasure dragged through her like a riptide, twisting deep and momentarily stealing control of her body. The world turned into bright bliss, followed by an intense sweep of relief that had her near sobbing against his mouth.
Liquid heat bathed her hand and forearm as he praised her and struggled to breathe.
Her eyes closed, all the tension in her body abating, the satisfaction so delicious she could have passed out.
They were plastered together, panting, barely down from it when a door opened upstairs and she heard Dylan and her father’s voices.
She wanted to stay here forever with Kyan’s kiss at her forehead in the half dark of the only place he might call home, knowing, for tonight, it was safe for them to have had this.
Even if it caused a troubled whisper to coil around her heart at how much she felt for him and how something happening to him would—
No, she wasn’t thinking of that tonight.
Slowly, gently, he removed his hand from between her legs, and she bit her lip hard to stay quiet as he ran his tongue over her earlobe and bit it gently, before resting his lips at her temple.
He was shaken, she realised when his eyes met hers in the darkness, and what burned there flipped her stomach. Heat, intention, and something more.
Nicole lifted her other hand to stroke his face.
They stayed like that for a few long, perfect moments.
Then he scooped her up and carried her to the bathroom.
He set her down on shaky legs and washed his hands behind her, allowing her to do the same as she tried not to look at the evidence of his pleasure on hers, before he swept her back up with ease.
She laughed softly, her arms reaching around his shoulders, and glimpsed the affection in his eyes. ‘I can walk, you know.’
‘Don’t tempt me to fulfil my promise when I can’t,’ he said darkly.
She flushed as she recalled what he’d said to her in Estwood.
‘I want you completely undone. Feeling safe, not worried about the next day. Not thinking about anything but my body and yours and the pleasure I can give you. Then I’ll make sure your legs are so weak you can’t walk straight.’
When Kyan set her back on the bed and got in, she pushed up long enough to remove her shirt completely. His gaze barely had a moment to rake over her, but she relished the still-glazed look and the sensually brazen moment as her hair spilled down over her shoulders.
Then she sank onto his body with a sigh, needing that heat, the skin-to-skin.
He wrapped his arm around her, fingers dipping into the band of her shorts and over her backside to keep her close as he kissed her head.
Once, she had run from fear with research and hunts and control. All of those were still necessary. Useful. But it was Kyan that beat back the fear, tonight. Even as she swallowed a strange sob at the back of her throat and hid her face against his chest.
Was this relief, this bone-deep emotion?
Because she wasn’t sure she could cope if it was love.
As she slept, more deeply than she had in months, her dreams were still gilded and shimmering with slashes of paint and whispers of a divine conspiracy. But amid them was the low croon of the part of her that warned of danger.
For tonight, she tried her best to sink into her mate’s embrace, and ignore it.