Chapter Fifty-Three #2
No physical alertness to make sure her loved ones weren’t in danger.
No tense neck muscles from being hunched over scribbled theories, or mind full of a thousand tabs so she didn’t forget anything.
So she didn’t once drop the threads of all the clues and ways this conspiracy could go.
If she dropped them, people could get hurt, and her mother’s final message could be lost. She needed to be focused and physically in control of herself, her strength, her senses, her Empyreal. Always.
But not now.
Not with Kyan.
It went beyond bliss into some other kind of paradise.
She turned her head and he lingered at her lips, drops of water speckling his, keeping them wet and a breath away, as if they both knew: so many times they’d been stopped, interrupted.
Not tonight.
They were alone. There were no constraints.
She made a small sound, barely realised she’d let it out, and his eyes went so dark she shuddered slightly. Then his large, soapy hands were stroking up her stomach.
Her back met his body as he stroked around her breasts. Up; over. Teasing, gliding strokes where water had made her slick.
Nicole breathed against his mouth, tortured, desperate. He squeezed softly, and the liquid ache between her legs became so intense she couldn’t help her broken moan. Couldn’t stop her body twisting in his arms and the pleasure of her breasts plastering against his chest.
She went up on her toes and stubble met her, then the softness of his lips on hers.
He kissed her tenderly. Slow, but with a dangerous heat.
Nicole sank into him. His arms – those steady, incredible arms – wrapped around her as his tongue stroked, hot and deep over hers, and a snarl of pleasure stirred at the back of his throat.
His hand ran up her naked back and into the dripping dark shapes of her hair as his tongue seared her mouth and deepened the kiss. She gripped his slick shoulders to keep him close and crush her hips to his.
But she wanted to look at him.
Nicole pulled back enough, blinking against the hot spray of water, and located the soap, while he stood, powerful and ready—
Every inch of his body was muscle and every inch of hers responded to the sight. The decadent chest with its fascinating swirls of dark hair that she wanted to trace endlessly.
And then the most secret part that made her swallow hard.
The large size. The proud detail.
She focused on soaping her hands so she didn’t stare and reached up to stroke them over his chest. It shuddered under her touch, muscles shifting. The wide pecs, the uneven, deep groove of his muscled stomach. His arousal shifted against her stomach as she moved lower.
She was careful to stroke away the blood where Logan had tried to take him from her. Most of it had washed away, but the sight had been seared into her memory. Her teeth clamped together at the reminder, recalling the flash of the blade, the deep, cruel drive—
Kyan stroked his thumb across her mouth to soothe the little snarl she hadn’t realised she’d made, and she looked up to find a small smile on his lips.
‘Mo ghrá,’ he murmured.
She blinked. ‘What does that mean?’
He paused, seemed torn. Tortured. ‘I’ll show you.’ His knuckles stroked her stomach, slowly going lower.
Her breathing near stopped. He watched her parted mouth, then paused.
‘Don’t you dare stop,’ she said.
A smile lifted his lips as his hand slipped between her legs.
Nicole sucked in a breath as he palmed her. Stroked. She nearly cried with relief at the bliss, at how her body went limp. He stroked as he bent to kiss her and her hands roamed over his body, reaching up to grip his hair as her breath turned choppy.
He growled and nipped her mouth.
And then one of his thick fingers slowly pushed inside in a way that had a scream of pleasure trapped behind her teeth.
Her vision turned to stars.
‘Don’t smother yourself,’ Kyan growled.
He pulled out slightly and her body moved with him, seeking him, the sudden feeling of emptiness too much.
‘Let me hear you,’ he said against her mouth, the words a nearly broken plea. ‘I’ve been waiting to hear you.’
She scrunched her eyes shut. ‘God, Kyan—’
‘That’s it.’
‘I thought about you at night,’ she whispered. ‘When I shouldn’t have. When I couldn’t do anything about it and it got me so—’
‘Tell me,’ he rasped.
She gripped his wet hair desperately, her other hand reaching for where his arousal strained between them.
He shuddered as her fingers closed around him, his hiss of relief whispered over her mouth as she tested his weight and width in her hand. Heavy and hot.
And hers.
Kyan
KYAN COULDN’T FORM A COHERENT SENTENCE. HAD BARELY been able to since he saw Nicole naked beneath the water, every line of lithe muscle and soft curve gloriously unveiled. And now, with the feel of her around his fingers, her wet mouth on his, the sound and scent of her as her fingers gripped his—
Fuck.
He was nothing but every long-forgotten desire.
Nothing if not ruined and saved, bound and freed.
He was raw and alive after the fight, as if he’d yanked a tarp off emotions he’d been suppressing for years. He’d used all of them. Let them all pour out of him to stop Logan.
The love and anger.
The sense of duty, and revenge.
The need to prove himself in front of Nicole, to her, even to the memory of the Druids. It had unlocked floodgates that made him feel so much lighter, even if he was also near trembling and wrung out, trapped in some strange, primal place.
A place that needed her skin against his lips, her heartbeat where he could taste it on his tongue.
Kyan stepped closer, bending to hook her leg around his waist and lift her clear off the slick tile. It forced her to wrap her arms around him. He’d never let her fall, but he couldn’t let her keep touching him like that.
Not if he wanted her screaming his name first.
He’d made her a promise in Estwood, and while he couldn’t yet keep it to the letter – not until she was completely safe – he intended to fulfil as much of it as he could.
She watched him beneath her lashes with all that explicit hunger.
She was a hunter. His hunter. She wanted him.
And he was damned if he wasn’t going to give her whatever the hell she wanted.
Kyan’s eyes nearly shut as she told him more: about what she’d thought about him doing to her.
About how it felt.
His chest shuddered as he tried to keep ahold of himself. But she had done this since Estwood: unmade and challenged him with every glance, every word.
He hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind in those narrow, cot-like beds in the Wake’s mission apartments.
He hadn’t wanted to touch himself thinking of her, but his body had ignored him.
Grown hard, his muscles tense, trembling when he’d remembered the feeling of her tongue gently stroking across his bloodied lip, the sound of her moaned gasp as he’d gently parted her legs that last night in Westmoore House and shown her how good he could make her feel.
How he’d wanted to give her everything, anything, again and again.
How he needed her more than he’d ever needed anything.
It didn’t scare him. Empyreals were immortal.
Their loves, when they found them, he now had no doubt, were long and unbreakable.
He knew that kind of love was a little feral in its hunger and fiercely protective, even with the deep calm that came with knowing each of them could protect themselves. That didn’t matter.
He kissed her through the haze of pleasure and she began to shudder as his thumb worked in tandem with his fingers. Then he wrung the release from her until she screamed and bucked and clamped around him.
‘There she is,’ he groaned against her mouth, his pulse hammering. ‘The things I’ve thought of doing to get you to make that sound.’
‘Kyan.’ It was a sob, a sigh.
It was so fucking glorious he could have died.
She nearly sank down the tile and satisfaction swam hot and gold in his veins.
So, he carried her from the bathroom one-handed, the other grabbing a towel to lay over the bed. And as he laid her down, the glow of firelight gilding her warm skin, he wanted to ask, cadé mar a mbíonn tú san oíche …
How are you at night …
… nuair a ní bhím leat?
… when I’m not with you?
An bhfuil mise de dhíth ortsa an oiread agus a bhfuil tusa de dhíth ormsa?
Do you need me as much as I need you?
The questions would have told her what he felt.
Instead, he showed her.