Chapter 32 #2
The crescent marks flare between us. Both of them. The garden brightens by a degree, crimson bleeding through our clothes for one long pulse.
Marcellus speaks the final words.
Maximus kisses me. His hands frame my face. His mouth is cool and sure and the bond opens between us and everything he's feeling pours through.
Someone is clapping. Julian. Of course it's Julian.
Mira is crying. She's smiling and crying. Seraphina has her arm around her daughter's shoulders.
Simone is standing at the edge of the garden with her palms pressed over her mouth and tears streaming down her face.
Lanthar watches from the tree line.
His hand is at the small of my back as we walk the corridor. My heels echo on the stone. His footsteps are silent. The compound is behind us. The candles. The faces. All of it still warm in my chest.
He opens the door. I step through. He follows and the lock clicks behind him.
He doesn't rush. His hands find my face first. Both palms against my jaw. He looks at me in the low light, and whatever he sees makes his breath change.
"My wife," he says. Testing the word. His thumb traces my cheekbone.
"That's going to take some getting used to."
"I've had centuries to practice patience." His mouth finds mine. Slow. His lips part mine and his tongue traces the edge of my lower lip and the kiss deepens by degrees, unhurried, thorough. The coolness of him against my warmth sends a shiver down my spine that settles low in my stomach.
He pulls back. Turns me around. His fingers find the hooks at the back of the dress.
He undoes them one at a time. His knuckles trace each vertebra as the fabric loosens, cool against the warmth of my skin, and each hook that releases lets the air reach another inch of me.
When the last one opens his mouth follows.
A kiss pressed to the nape of my neck. My skin prickles where his lips land.
Then lower. Between my shoulder blades. Each one deliberate.
Each one placed. Each one leaving a cool print that my body heats after he moves on.
The dress slides off my shoulders and pools at my feet. He turns me back to face him.
His eyes move down my body. He takes his time. Memorizing.
He drops to his knees.
The same knees that hit the grass when he proposed. On the floor of our quarters, his hands settle on my hips, and he presses his mouth just below my navel. Holds it there.
My hand goes to his hair.
He stays there. Cool against my skin. His thumbs tracing easy circles on my hips.
"I can feel it," I say. "Through the bond. What you're feeling right now."
He doesn't lift his head. His lips move once against my skin. Something closer to a promise than a kiss.
Then his fingers slide down. He hooks them into my underwear and draws it down my legs. I step out. He traces back up. Calves. Behind my knees. The inside of my thighs. Along the crease where my thigh meets my hip, and my breath catches.
He looks up at me from his knees. His eyes are dark and his jaw is set.
He stands. Guides me back toward the bed. I sit on the edge. He drops to his knees between my thighs and lowers his mouth.
The first stroke of his tongue is slow. Full.
He drags it through me in one long pass, bottom to top, and the sensation pulls a sound from my chest before my hands grip the edge of the mattress.
He does it again. Unhurried. His tongue flat and wide, pressing against me in a long drag, and the heat blooms outward from where his mouth is, spreading through my thighs, my stomach, the base of my spine.
He settles in. He seals over me and works me with his tongue in deliberate circles.
No urgency. He knows what makes my hips lift, what makes my breath hitch, what makes the sound come out of me that I can't control.
Every pass tightens something inside me.
A coil winding at my center, each circle of his tongue pulling it tighter.
He finds each one and stays with it until I'm shaking.
His thumbs press into the soft skin of my thighs, holding me open, holding me still. When I try to move my hips he tightens his grip and holds me where he wants me and keeps going. The pressure builds until I can feel my pulse between my legs, beating against his tongue.
"Maximus." It comes out broken.
He pulls back long enough to press his lips to the inside of my thigh.
The absence of his mouth is its own sensation, the cool air against wet skin, and I make a sound I don't mean to make.
Then he returns. His tongue circles my clit in tight passes and two fingers slide inside me, curling forward, and the dual pressure hits a place deep enough that my spine arches off the mattress and my vision goes white at the edges.
I come with his name on my lips and his grip on my thighs and his mouth still on me.
It rolls through me in waves, starting where his tongue is and spreading outward through my hips, my stomach, my chest, my fingers gripping the mattress.
He carries me through it until the shaking eases and my grip loosens and my breathing comes back in uneven pulls.
He stays there. Gentles the pressure. One last pass that makes me shiver. Then he presses a kiss to the inside of my knee and stands.
I reach for his shirt. My fingers are clumsy on the buttons.
He waits. Lets me work through them at my own pace.
The shirt opens. His chest appears under my hands, the crescent mark crimson over his heart.
I push the shirt off and press my palms flat against his skin.
Cool. His heartbeat under my right hand. Mine in my own chest. In time.
I unfasten his belt. His trousers. He steps out of them. I take him in my hand and he exhales, long and unsteady, and his head drops forward.
I stroke him once. Twice. His hips rock into my grip and his fingers close around my wrist. Stops me.
"Lie back," he says.
I move up the bed. He follows me down. His weight settles over me, braced on one forearm, and he kisses me again. I taste myself on his mouth and the intimacy of it makes something tighten low in my core.
He shifts. Lines himself up. Presses in.
Slow. So slow I feel every inch. The stretch.
The fullness. The pressure building as he sinks deeper, my body opening around him, adjusting, taking him in.
He watches me the entire time. When I take all of him, he goes still, and I feel him everywhere, the weight of him inside me, the coolness of his skin against the heat of mine, the pulse of his heartbeat where our bodies meet.
His forehead drops to mine. His breathing is ragged. The bond is wide open.
He moves. Careful. Long strokes that draw back and press in with a patience that's deliberate.
He shifts his weight to one arm. His free palm slides down my side, over my hip, to my stomach and rests there as he moves inside me.
I feel each stroke through my whole body.
The friction. The fullness pulling back and pressing in.
And his palm on the place where his children are growing while his body is joined with mine. My chest cracks open.
My eyes burn.
"I know," he says. He saw it. His thumb moves once across my skin. "I know."
He keeps moving. His pace doesn't change. Steady and sure, each stroke measured, his palm where it is and his forehead against mine and the bond carrying everything neither of us can say.
My hips rise to meet him. The angle shifts and the next stroke hits deeper, and my breath leaves me.
The pressure builds again, different this time, layered, gathering behind my navel beneath his palm.
Every nerve in my body is connected to the place where he's moving inside me and the place where his hand is resting and his breath against my lips and the knowledge we're both carrying.
"Stay with me," he says.
"I'm here."
His hips press deeper. His thumb circles once beneath my navel.
He kisses me, and I break against him, gentler than the first time, deeper, a rolling wave that starts where he's deepest inside me and spreads outward until my whole body is pulsing with it.
A sound comes from my throat that I don't try to stop.
He follows. His body goes taut, his hand presses flat against me, his face buried in my neck, and the sound he makes is quiet and broken and reverent.
He stays inside me. His weight settles. His hand doesn't move.
The crescent marks pulse between us. Slow. Steady.
"Two," he says against my throat.
"Two."
His lips press against my pulse. My hand covers his on my stomach.
We stay there. The compound is quiet. The candles in the garden are burning down. Four hearts. One rhythm. All of us here.