Chapter Eighty-Five
Feralyn
The layers, his words, his kiss.
I’m fucking marrying you, Feralyn Alva Grayson.
I should have been drowning in grief. Not having thoughts of how glad I was to never have to tell my father that I was in love with his wife’s son. I should’ve been a more pious daughter, dutiful.
But I wasn’t.
My half brother and his wife had come for dinner. Ares had left without him and Helios getting into a fight. Night had fallen hours ago, and the stars were out.
Helios was going to marry me.
I was soaring in a bright, sunlit-painted sky of hope.
My future husband carried me into his bedroom and set me on my feet before stripping off my sundress with one practiced movement. Then he lifted me by the waist and laid me on his bed.
There was no fanfare.
There was no mad rush to rid our bodies of clothes.
There was only my sun god, keeping his eyes locked on mine as he pulled his T-shirt over his head, then shucked his jeans and crawled on top of me.
After changing out of our riding gear earlier, neither of us had bothered with underwear, so when he lowered himself between my waiting thighs, our bodies met, flesh to flesh.
Then all of my emotions—love, belonging, surety, rightness, conviction—were passing my lips, bound in a single sentiment as I wrapped my arms around him and buried my face against his neck.
“Home.” I drew in a deep inhale of his earthy musk that was mixed with soap and laundry, and I knew that Helios would always be my home.
“I feel you, beautiful.” His piercing, warmed by his body heat, touched me a fraction of a second before both it and the head of his cock rubbed against my clit.
Sharp desire flared, and my core pulsed with urgent need, but I put a hand on his hip and leaned back to look up at him because all of a sudden, this was more than important. It was crucial that he knew, that I said the exact words. “You’re my home.”
“I know, woman.” Staring down at me with those endlessly deep gray-blue eyes, he stilled. “Why do you think I call you Haven?”
“I know it was a chiding reprimand at first. Then when you found me, rescued me…” My voice caught, but under the weight of his powerful body, his commanding presence, I swallowed down the past. “You used the nickname to give me familiarity. You made it into a term of endearment.” He gave me a part of himself.
“You gave me a piece of home.” I loved him more for it.
My warfighter cupped my cheek and once again stepped into the battle he’d been waging for us, for our love.
“You don’t have a nickname, and it’s not a term of endearment.
” His deep voice lowered. Then he gave me his fierce loyalty and dominance.
“My Haven.” His closed fist hit his chest directly over his heart.
“You. Here. Right where you fucking belong.”
My eyes welled, and I laid my hand over my enraptured and fluttering—but thoroughly conquered—heart. “You. Here. Right where you belong.”
Leaning down, my assaulter, my storm-eyed dominant, he ever so gently brushed his lips against the back of my hand. “You dwell in my fucking soul.”
A frisson of sheer joy erupted across my skin in a heated map of shivers. “I love you with everything that I am.”
His lips landed on mine.
Then, with all of his scars on the outside, my Delta Force operator, my sun god, he drove his pierced cock deep, where all of my scars dwelled on the inside, and he painted our sky with brightness.