Chapter Twenty-Eight #3
The plan of infiltration we’ve sketched out is loose at best, but there is one incontrovertible factor.
Sea level. We need it at its absolute lowest if we want even a chance to bring our dinghies ashore at the rocky cove on the eastern side of the island.
According to Soren, it is a treacherous stretch of stone only exposed for two hours at a time.
We cannot miss that window.
Nor can we exceed it.
“A delay until tomorrow night’s tide will do only one thing,” he continues haltingly. “Assure Arwen’s death.”
“She will not—”
“I cannot lose her.” His jaw tightens, locking in his volatile emotions. “She is all that I have.”
I stare at him, a new ache in my chest. I want to say the words that will contradict that statement.
You have me, Soren.
You have me.
But I do not.
For all our many conversations since I tumbled unexpectedly from a portal and landed at his feet, for all that we have been through together these past weeks…
we have not ever hit on the heart of the matter.
Even as we channeled bow to bow throughout the course of this voyage, speaking of everything from geography to the gods…
we never addressed the most important topic.
Us.
What we are. What we may yet become.
Not in so many words.
“We press on,” he says decidedly, expression dark with determination. “We finish this. We get Arwen back. And then…” His eyes find mine, so bright with longing it spears me straight through the heart. “There will be time for other conversations.”
My brows go up, silently asking a question I am too afraid to voice.
“There are things we need to discuss.” His gaze shifts back and forth over my face, as though he is memorizing my every feature.
Then, it drops down to the Remnant that peeks from the top of my leather bodice.
“There are things I need to explain to you. Things you do not yet seem to understand. But this…” His focus flashes briefly to the door. “This is not our moment.”
“Right,” I breathe, disappointment crashing through me. “You’re right. Of course you’re right.”
Soft light slants in through the windows at the stern.
The sun is setting. It will be dark soon.
But in this moment, with the cabin bathed in buttery twilight and Soren a handspan away from me on the bed, I do not think about what awaits us in the dead of night.
All I see is him. His angular features, his savage beauty.
All I feel is my pulse, thudding madly at my throat.
I tell myself to get up, out of bed. To find my daggers and my boots, to braid my hair and prepare for the battle to come. But I do not get up. I sit there, spine pressing hard against the headboard, knowing if I move a single muscle, I’ll reach for him.
Soren exhales harshly, as though he knows my thoughts. As though he shares them. His hand slides behind my neck, warm and solid. He tugs me forward until we are a hairsbreadth apart.
“We will have our moment, Rhya. We will have more than a moment,” he says, and it is a vow. “The things I need to say to you…The things I want to do with you…”
Longing cascades through me, irrepressible. Turning my bones to water. My voice is a breathy whisper, “What sort of things?”
His eyes go half-lidded. “Gods help me, I…”
His mouth is suddenly on mine, hard and fast. A hungry, reckless kiss that says everything we are both unable to express with words.
I kiss him back, equally desperate for him.
Pouring all my need into my fingers as they fist in the white linen of his shirt and pull him down on top of me.
He growls low in his throat as we collide, his larger frame crushing mine into the thin feather mattress of the captain’s bed.
The thready sound vibrates through me like a mallet on a drum, striking deep chords of passion.
Setting off an unstoppable lust that threatens to carry me away.
And though we’ve said there is no time, though we’ve adamantly declared that this fractured instant is not meant for us…
neither one of us seems capable of stopping now that we’ve begun.
The planes of his body are deliciously firm against mine, stealing my breath along with my inhibitions.
The throbbing evidence of his need nestles in the crook of my thighs, hard and undeniable, and I feel my own amplify tenfold, an animalistic urge that shocks me to my core.
I hardly recognize myself—this desperate creature who fumbles for buttons and claws to get closer, closer, closer.
I want to tear off every piece of clothing that keeps us apart with my teeth; want to shred the fabric from his limbs and erase every barrier that has ever come between us.
I want nothing but him and me in this bed, stripped to the skin. Laid bare, body and soul.
With the bond still muted, I may not be able to read his thoughts, but Soren’s actions make it abundantly clear he feels the same.
His fingers work at the tight lacing of my leather bodice as mine skate under the hem of his shirt to trace the indentations of his muscles.
That expanse of golden skin is finally, finally, under my hands.
And it is glorious. I cannot hold back my fractured whimper any more than I can stop my body from arching off the bed as his teeth scrape a torturous path up the column of my throat, to my ear.
I feel the twitch of his smile even before I hear it in his voice. “If you mewl like that when I kiss you, I cannot wait to hear what other sounds I’ll manage to inspire…”
Skies.
I gasp as his teeth tweak the lobe.
Lowering more of his weight on top of me, he grinds his hips into mine in a way that dizzies all my senses. “Will you sing my name when you shatter, skylark?”
I will sing anything he wants, if only he keeps touching me like this. My mind is a blank of pleasure as his hands part the supple leather of my unbound bodice, then skim the bare flesh beneath. His palm grazes the peak of my nipple, frustratingly featherlight.
I want more than that.
I need more than that.
He waits until he’s elicited another pitiful whimper from my throat before he relents, palming my breast with expert attention, kneading and caressing until I am reduced to a squirming storm of want beneath him.
“Soren.” My breath hitches. My fingers dig into his skin. “Please—”
“Please what, Rhya? What is it you want from me?”
He’s enjoying this, the great tease.
He sucks my bottom lip into his mouth at the exact moment my nails score across the raised pattern of his Remnant, where the skin is excruciatingly sensitive.
The effect is instant. His whole body shudders.
He exhales against my lips, a pant of pure desire I feel in every corner of my body.
All playfulness sweeps straight out of the cabin, replaced by a ferocious need that arises inside him with the swiftness of a summer squall.
When he kisses me again, it is with such unflagging passion, such savage desire, I know his control is hanging by the thinnest of threads; when he touches me, it is no longer with teasing caresses or playful swipes, but with a barely leashed ardency that turns my bloodstream to pure starlight.
He grips my body with bruising need, clutching me close.
And I do the same, equally brutal in my eagerness for him.
Time slips out of focus as we touch and gasp, peeling away layers with shaking hands.
I get his shirt unbuttoned and push it impatiently off his shoulders, revealing his perfect chest. He uses his teeth on the laces of my pants, groaning low in his throat when I thread my fingers into his hair.
When he presses his mouth to me through the thin leather, my whole body spasms.
Skies, if he kisses me there again…
I nearly come apart just thinking about it.
His hands are at my hips, peeling down my pants, when a fist pounds at the door to the cabin.
“Brother!” Godsdamned Vaughn. “The island is in sight! Whatever you’re doing in there, wrap it up, would you?”
Soren groans, a sound of frustration, and drops his head against the crook of my thighs. “Fuck. Not again.”
Sucking in a shaky breath, I force my fingers to dislodge from his hair. My body thrums with untapped passion. My heart is a riot beneath my rib cage. Just beside it, my Remnant is stirring awake, its momentary slumber cut short by the crashing sensations that rack me head to toe.
We climb off the bed, both breathing hard, and set our clothes to rights. My fingers shake as I do the laces of my bodice and comb through my mussed mane. There is nothing to be done about the redness of my cheeks, nor the sheen of lust in my eyes.
Soren is hardly better off. I have never seen him so unbalanced. He looks shockingly young as he buttons his shirt and rolls up his sleeves, his face a portrait of boyish inhibition. The polished facade is askew, knocked off its orbit by everything we have just done.
Everything we have almost done.
“We should go,” I force myself to say, hardly able to look at him without my heart stumbling or my breath catching. “They’re waiting for us.”
I make it only a few steps toward the door before he stops me with a hand at my nape, pulling me around to crush his mouth against mine one last time.
As I kiss him back, I memorize everything about him, committing the moment to the deepest recesses of my mind in case I never get another like it.
His scent, his strength. The way we fit together like two halves of a broken plate, every jagged, ugly edge somehow perfectly aligned to create something whole and strong and healed.
The pounding comes again. “We’ll miss the tide!”
“There will come a day when I have the luxury of kissing you without interruption,” Soren murmurs against my lips, a ghost of his usual humor in his tone.
“And, I hope, a day when I have the luxury of doing more than merely kiss you.” His exhale is resigned.
“But today does not seem to be that day.”