Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
“I know I wasn’t supposed to say it,” she choked out.
“I know I was supposed to wait, but I couldn’t imagine—can’t fucking bear—the idea of you swearing yourself to her without knowing that I love you.
I think I probably have this whole time.
Since the training room, for certain. Maybe since the moment I saw you out in that courtyard.
You had the sun rising behind your head like some kind of divine vision, you know?
Like the saints in the stained glass windows at the Temple? ”
He frowned, and she knew she was babbling nonsense. Daughters, she was astonishingly bad at this. She shook her head.
“I just mean—it’s always been there, alright?
I knew you were it for me even when I thought I couldn’t have you.
And when I realised I could, it scared the shit out of me, because love has never served my family well.
It’s been a weapon or a weakness. It’s been a wound.
But I know that’s not what this is. I know I’ve made this so much harder than it needed to be, wasted so much time, but—”
Her words thinned out on the edge of a sob she hadn’t felt coming. It shocked the breath from her, and she swiped furiously at her tears with the cuff of her dress until Kai gently nudged her hand away and ran his thumb beneath her eyes.
“But you love me.”
It was barely a whisper, almost as though he were speaking more to himself than to her, but she nodded all the same. Hiccupped through a long breath. Squeezed the hand she still held in hers.
Kai tucked a frazzled curl behind her ear, his eyes soft enough to break the most devastating fall. And she had fallen, so very hard. He bowed his head until his lips brushed her lobe; until she could hear the depth of his breath; the pain and the relief bracketing every word.
“Say it again.”
“I love you,” she said at once.
He turned to kiss her cheek, breath shuddering out of him, the warmth of his lips sending a shiver of that same rhythm through her bloodstream.
Devotion conducted through their bodies with a simple brush of the lips.
It was heady and utterly divine. She released his hand at last, winding her arms over his shoulders in a bid for balance against the sweeping dizziness that bloomed beneath his kiss.
His hands were a claim on her waist, and as his mouth moved down her jaw, she said it again; she couldn’t seem to stop.
“I love you, Kai.”
She arched her neck for his lips, and he groaned against her skin.
“Again.”
“I love—”
Kai brought his mouth down on hers as though he could swallow that confession like wine, breathe it in, drown in it.
Adeline drowned with him; she was sinking willingly into the hungry, demanding force between them, and he was her final breath.
She’d felt so much over the years, pleasure and grief and magic and pain.
She’d had life itself bloom beneath her very skin—and still nothing had ever moved through her quite as fiercely as Kai did.
He was in her veins, woven irreversibly into her being.
She felt him with her in her every waking moment, and when they came together like this, it was as though something had been missing all along, the relief so palpable she could cry.
The force of his kiss carried her backward, and her body responded by memory alone, pressing herself into his arms until he bore her full weight, her thighs finding the divot of his hips as her ankles crossed behind him.
He propped her against the back of the settee, one hand moving up her jaw even as she parted his lips with her tongue, each of them claiming the kiss in their own right, their paces off balance and frenetic.
Adeline’s longing for him was a wildfire, his a constant flame.
He was patient, deliberate where she was frantic, slowly dragging her skirt up her thighs and tugging it free from beneath her while she panted against his mouth.
He had, she reminded herself, been waiting a rather long time to hear this, to have this moment.
She could let him set their pace, but she could help him, too.
Kai’s lips curved beneath her own when her hands brushed past his, tugging her undergarments down as her skirt came up.
She caught a heart-stopping glimpse of his smile as her dress came over her head, and as though his lips had been the only seal on her endless confession, she whispered it again.
“I love you.”
The dress fell away.
“Again.”
Goddess. That one-word command in the kingly tone she so thoroughly enjoyed; it was enough to send a bolt of heat up her spine, an old echo of pleasure chasing a well-worn path.
“I—” He bent to kiss her collarbone, and her words slipped into a moan before she could gather them up once more. “I love you.”
Kai slid to his knees, hands gripping the settee on either side of her hips.
“Spread your legs for me, and tell me again.”
Her knees parted. “I love you.”
Kai paused, gaze fixed so brazenly between her thighs she felt it like a brush through her centre.
So real, such a decadent pleasure, she had to grasp at the settee to keep from toppling backward.
He looked up at her, and she saw at once how tenuous that patience really was.
How forced. His breath sawed through him, the rhythm of it so fractured she could hear the forceful thrum of his pulse shuddering through each heave of his lungs.
“Don’t stop,” was all he said.