Chapter 23 #4
Dropping the blankets, Renn’s hands came firmly around my waist, pulling me tightly against him.
He nipped my lips apart and ravished my mouth, tugging, sucking, caressing.
I melted into him until his strength held me up more than my own did.
My heat mirrored his, stoked like a bellows had been set to it. Heat that surged lower, brighter.
I grabbed fistfuls of his uniform’s shirt and untucked it from his slacks.
He hummed against my lips before dipping down, winding an arm under my backside and lifting me like I weighed nothing at all. His skin began to glow as he carried me closer to a tree.
“You can’t do that,” I whispered, pressing my lips just under his ear. “You’ll get us caught.”
“No one is out here,” he protested.
“Stop glowing.”
He did, sucking the light in, but the moment he pinned me against an aspen and began placing hungry kisses down the column of my neck, he lit up again.
I laughed. “Renn.”
He growled and put me down, then stepped back and snatched one of the blankets off the ground. Unfurled it and threw it over a low branch, forming a makeshift tent. Grabbed the other one and unrolled it at our feet—
But I was on him like a wolf to prey, frenzied by freedom, by delight, by passion.
I kissed his mouth and his clavicle. Deftly unhooked the closures of his shirt.
He tugged it over his head before kissing me again, his hands tracing up and down my back, then lower to my hips, fingers digging in.
Glowing again, but the blanket masked it.
The burning made me dizzy, the way it bounced back and forth through that golden thread, the invisible link. Back and forth, back and forth. The want felt illegal, like a drug.
He cradled my face, his kisses growing softer. One knuckle glided down my throat, my clavicle, my breast. Seeking permission.
I unbuttoned the bodice myself and yanked off the dress. Pushed against him until his knee buckled. He went down with a laugh, the half-folded blanket breaking his fall. The angle of the moon sent a band of light into our improvised tent, falling between us.
Reaching up, he trailed his fingers up my jaw, into my hair. “You are beautiful. Every part of you is beautiful.”
I bent down and chastely kissed his mouth. “You are everything,” I countered.
We looked at each other a long moment, much as we had during the ceremony. Studying each other: nose, cheekbones, brow. I fell into his eyes over and over, absorbed by their endlessness. Our hearts seemed to pulse as one throbbing entity.
Slowly, deliberately, we removed the rest of our clothes. There was a reverence to it, a deference. Passion became worship as I traced the lines of his chest and stomach, his hips and thighs. As he savored every inch of me, whispering again, “Beautiful.”
He kissed my shoulders, my neck, my mouth, and turned me under him. Yet however perfect this moment was, however free and aching I’d become, my body did not forget its past hurts. Through the heat and the desire, a cool tremor shivered—memory of another’s hands on me. Violent hands. Hateful hands.
Renn felt it, too. Immediately, he stopped. Began to pull away.
“Wait,” I murmured, grasping his shoulder, keeping his body against mine. I closed my eyes. Breathed through it. Let the warmth of him spread over and through me until, one by one, tight muscles relaxed, nerves settled, and the chill dissipated.
When I opened my eyes, he hovered a breath away, watching me. In a voice as soft as goose down, he whispered, “I don’t want to hurt you, Nym.”
A single tear pooled in the corner of my eye. “You’re not hurting me. You’re healing me.”
Radiance, through the bond. Radiance lighting his body over mine.
As he kissed my forehead, his glow flickered. “You’ve only half a heart because of me.”
I pressed my lips to his jaw. “You have all of it, Renn. Now and forever.”
Lowering his head beside mine, he held me tightly. If my own skin could glow, I knew it would. And maybe it did. Maybe it wasn’t moon- and starlight falling across us, but a new magic igniting beneath my skin. A new, wondrous form of craftlock I’d always believed to be just out of reach.
But now I held it in my arms, and forever did not seem enough.
The revelations, naked honesty, and tenderness could not keep that carnal heat at bay long.
I craved him like a bee does the first spring flower.
That fervency roiled between us, bare and unfiltered.
His touch became magnetic, searing through flesh and bone, and I demanded all of him, sure I would burst for the want of him. He gave in readily.
Desire and love filled the bond, but so did pleasure, so that mine was his and his was mine. I wept for the perfection of it all. He breathed I love you into my ear, and I felt it down to my very soul. I erupted in his hands, completely undone, yet wholly remade.
Sickness, war, death, and crowns . . . everything that tied Renn Reshua Noblewight to this world, I would take just to keep him.
And I would keep him, always.