Chapter 17 #2
Delphine LeClair stood inside his guard and did not move.
His breathing had shortened. The curse pressed against his arm from inside, and Delphine’s presence pressed from outside, and between the two pressures his control had thinned to a membrane that one word or one touch would dissolve.
Two centuries of maintaining the distance between what he wanted and what he allowed himself to take, and the exhaustion of it sat in his bones now, heavy and final.
“If I stop holding back,” he said, and the sentence carried the gravity of a last warning he hoped would not be heeded, “I cannot be careful with you.”
Her eyes did not waver.
“Good.”
He closed the distance.
His mouth found hers with none of the urgency that had driven the kiss in his kitchen.
That kiss had been an eruption—months of pressure released in a single point of contact.
His lips met hers now and stayed. His hand rose to her face, his palm settling against her cheek, his thumb tracing the bone beneath her eye.
He held her there and kissed her with the slow attention of someone who had stopped fighting.
Her response matched his pace. Her mouth opened against his, and her hand came up to his wrist where it held her face. Her fingers wrapped around his and held on.
The kiss deepened without accelerating. His tongue found hers, and the contact sent heat down through his chest and into his abdomen.
His free hand went to her hip, his palm pressing into the warmth that radiated through the linen of her clothing.
She stepped into him, and the last inches between their bodies collapsed.
Her chest pressed against his. Her hips aligned with his. The hand at his wrist tightened, and her other hand slid between the buttons of his shirt and gripped the fabric over his heart.
His mouth left hers and tracked the line of her jaw.
His lips pressed against the hinge of it, then against the soft skin below her ear, then against the tendon that ran the length of her neck where her pulse beat its rapid rhythm into his mouth.
Her head tilted, giving him the same access she had given in the kitchen, in the minutes before they separated—and the offering extended past the skin.
Her fingers released his shirt and moved to his collar. She worked the top button loose without pulling away from him. The second button followed. Her fingertips traced his collarbone, and skin against skin sent a current through his chest that the curse could not replicate and could not override.
He returned to her mouth and kissed her with the patience he had denied himself for the entirety of their acquaintance in this lifetime—he allowed himself to taste her fully, to learn the geography of her lower lip, to discover the specific pressure that drew sound from her throat.
She answered each discovery with a shift of her body against his, her hips pressing forward, her hand releasing his wrist to find his hair.
Her fingers slid through the slightly shaggy strands and gripped.
The pull traveled his spine and pooled at its base.
His hand at her hip tightened and he became impossibly hard.
He drew her flush against him with the full strength of an arm that had spent centuries capable of more force than any mortal body could produce, controlled now to the degree that brought her close without bruising what he held.
She broke the kiss to breathe. Her forehead pressed against his chin, and her exhales landed against the opening of his shirt where her fingers had bared his skin.
“Stay.” The word arrived before he could consider its architecture — no neutrality, no measured distance.
Just the fact of what he wanted, and then immediately the awareness that wanting was not the same as asking.
He pulled back enough to see her face. “Are you sure.” Not a question the way questions usually worked.
A door he was holding open, with every intention of letting her decide whether to walk through it.
Delphine held his gaze. Her hands settled against his chest, deliberate, unhurried — the touch of a woman who had made her decision well before this moment and was tired of waiting for him to catch up.
“I’ve been sure,” she said. “The question is whether you’re done finding reasons not to be.”
Before he could answer, her fingers moved to his buttons.
“I’m here,” she said. “I want all of it. Tonight.”
His hands moved to the hem of her blouse.
His fingers drew the fabric upward, and she lifted her arms and let him pull it over her head.
When the garment fell from his hand to the floor, the lamplight found the skin of her shoulders, her collarbone, and the dark satin of her bra where it crossed her chest.
Her hands went back to his shirt. She finished what she had started at his collar, working each button with her full attention.
The shirt opened down his chest, and her palms pressed flat against his skin—one above the curse mark, one below it.
His breath caught. Her hands carried warmth, a living heat that belonged to blood and muscle and to the frequency of Delphine LeClair’s heartbeat conducting through her palms.
She pushed the shirt from his shoulders.
The fabric slid down his arms, over his forearms, and off his wrists where it joined her blouse on the floor.
Her eyes dropped to his chest—the scar tissue that marked battles she could not imagine, then to the curse mark itself, visible as a faint darkening beneath the skin of his left forearm where the beacon lived and burned.
Her fingers traced the mark. He flinched—not from pain, but from the intimacy of contact with the thing he carried. Delphine followed the edge of the darkened skin with the care she gave the most fragile archival documents.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Not now.”
He pulled her against him. Skin to skin, her bare shoulders beneath his hands, his bare chest pressed to the warmth of her body. His mouth found her neck again, and he pressed his lips to the hollow where her pulse collected its strongest signal and stayed there, breathing her in.
She made a sound against his ear. Her fingers dragged down his back, and the path they traced left heat in their wake.
He backed her toward the bedroom with his mouth on her throat and her hands already at his waistband and the century of restraint dissolving so fast he could feel the crescendo coming already.
By the time they reached the bed she was down to nothing but the mark of his mouth on her collarbone, and he was still working on the problem of needing her everywhere at once.
He knelt. Her breath went sharp. His hands found the inside of her thighs and his mouth found her center. As he lavished her, listening to her moans, the sound of his name on her lips once more, he relished in her pleasure, restraining his own enough to give her the climax she deserved.
The taste of her was all consuming, everything he’d dreamed of. The sounds she made, his name on her lips as she cried out with her pleasure drove him to heights he’d never thought possible.
As her aftershocks calmed, her hand fisted in his hair and pulled.
Looking him in the eyes with determination, a flush over her pale skin, she demanded, “More.”
He rose from his knees and removed the rest of his clothing, tossing things behind him, never taking his eyes from hers.
Delphine pushed herself to the center of the bed where Bastien lowered himself over her.
His body settled beside hers on the mattress, and his hand found the curve of her waist, while her leg shifted to make room for his body between hers.
He kissed her. His hand traveled her body with the patience she had earned through months of standing inside his distance and refusing to leave it.
A catch of breath when his palm crossed her ribs.
A shift of her hips when his thumb traced the ridge of her hip bone.
A sound pressed into his mouth when his hand settled between her thighs and he smiled.
He had pleased her, and nothing else in the world mattered to him more.
His hands trailed back up, ghosting over her breasts as he took one peaked nipple into his mouth, completely submerged in the moment as her breaths increased and he sensed her heartrate picking up again.
Her hands mapped him in return. Her fingertips traveled his shoulders and followed the ridges of scar tissue down his back.
She did not avoid the scars. She traced them, reading his history through her hands, and his body answered each passage of her fingers with a tension that built at the base of his spine.
Delia had touched him with reverence. Careful hands on a body she sensed held more than it revealed.
She had been gentle—her fingers light, her mouth tentative, her body offered with a tenderness that had made him ache for reasons she could never have understood.
He had loved her for it. He had also held himself in check through every moment of their intimacy, containing what he was, controlling what she received, ensuring that nothing in his response would reveal the centuries that separated his experience from hers.
Delphine did not handle him with such reverence.
She handled him with appetite and lust and her own way of showing him how much she wanted him in return.
Her hands gripped his shoulders and pulled him closer.
Her mouth found the scar beneath his collarbone and pressed against it, open, her tongue tracing the raised tissue.
Her hips rose to meet his body, and the motion carried no shyness and no interest in receiving less than what he could give.