Chapter 18 #2
Something in my chest tightened, and I reached for him despite that other, unsettling sense in my body, the sense that I wasn’t entirely sure was my own. My hand caught in the front of his shirt, fingers curling into the fabric, grounding myself.
His first kiss was slow, exploratory. His lips nudged mine open. The slide of his mouth against mine unspooled something inside me.
My other hand came up, finding his shoulder, then the back of his neck, drawing him closer.
His hands slid to my waist again, pulling me fully against him, the contact firm now, certain, his body aligning with mine in a way that felt both familiar and newly overwhelming.
My breath caught, then deepened, my thoughts scattering, dissolving into sensation faster than I could gather them back.
He deepened the kiss, his mouth moving against mine. My fingers tightened in his shirt, then slipped inside, finding the warmth of his skin and the rippling muscle beneath.
He made a quiet sound against my mouth, something low and rough. His hands moved again, one sliding up my back, the other settling at my hip, guiding us closer still, until there was no space left between us at all.
The world narrowed to him. All my fears and failures and frustrations blurred at the edges, distant and indistinct. He drew back to look at me, his breath unsteady.
“Nothing needs to be held in reserve now,” I murmured.
Whatever tension had been in his face fell away. He pressed me down on the bed, covering my face and my throat with kisses. I reached for the edge of his tunic and pulled it up, urging it over his head, and Fear hesitated.
I paused, uncertain what was wrong. Did he not want me after all?
Fear caught the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head, revealing the hard squares of his abs, the way his lean waist gave way to a broader chest and then his powerful shoulders as he once again leaned over me. Across his shoulder and heart was a mark. It had not been there before.
I touched it, tracing it with my fingertips, trying to make sense of it. A wishflower, and behind it, a shield—or rather, the head of a shovel. It was what I had traced onto his skin for my sigil, rendered into beauty.
“What is this?” I murmured.
“I tricked you into wearing my mark,” he told me, taking my hand in his. He ran his thumb across my finger that wore his ring. “I could not bear not to wear your mark as well.”
He brought his hand to the sigil on his chest. “Just as you drew it on my skin.”
I didn’t know what to say. Something yawned wide inside me, something wild and hungry. Maybe he did love me. The thought sang in my mind as I put my hand on the back of his neck and urged his mouth back down to mine.
His mouth met mine hard enough to steal the breath from me. Fear kissed like he fought, as if restraint was something he practiced only because the world demanded it of him, not because it came naturally.
I could feel his carefulness fraying now.
His hand slid beneath my shirt, rough palm against bare skin, and I arched into the touch before I could stop myself.
He made a low sound against my mouth at that, something pleased and almost disbelieving, as though he still could not quite trust that I wanted him this way.
I pushed him back enough to look at him. His hair had fallen loose around his face, dark against the lantern light, golden eyes fixed on me with terrifying focus. There was always danger in Fear when he looked at me like this. Not because he would hurt me. Because he would undo me.
“You did that for me,” I said softly, touching the mark on his chest again.
His gaze flicked down to my hand. “I did.”
“You hesitated as if you didn’t want me to see it.”
“I wasn’t sure what you would make of it. Of my desire to be marked by you as much as to mark you as mine.”
Something in my chest tightened so sharply it almost felt like grief. He carried my mark over his heart simply because he wanted to.
I kissed him again before I could think too hard about what that meant.
He caught my waist and rolled us, pulling me over him so I sat astride his hips. His hands spread across my thighs slowly, reverently. No matter how gently he touched me, the strength in his arms and shoulders was on display in his rippling, lean muscle.
“You are staring,” I murmured against his mouth.
“You are beautiful,” he said immediately, as though it offended him that I had not already accepted this as fact.
I laughed softly, and he smiled. Gods, that was dangerous to, that he looked pleased every time he managed to make me laugh.
My fingers traced down his chest again, over hard muscle and warm skin and the sigil itself. The wishflower. The shovel. I might have failed in the one thing that he had brought me here to do, but he still wore my mark.
Fear’s hand slid into my hair, thumb brushing my cheek as he watched me too closely. “What are you thinking?”
I should have lied.
But I was tired of lies between us.
“That no one has ever chosen me the way you do.”
His eyes darkened; something raw crossed his face so quickly I almost missed it.
“Cara,” he said quietly. He didn’t call me Never this time; there was not his usual teasing in his voice. He pulled me down into his arms as if he could not bear the distance anymore.
The kiss deepened, slower now, less frantic, and somehow far more dangerous for it.
He stripped my clothes off with gentle hands, slow and worshipful, pressing a kiss to every inch of exposed skin.
I ran my hands over the hard planes of his shoulders as he teased the tip of his cock around my clit, my body tightening with need.
My breasts felt full and heavy, and I reached for them, massaging them myself, my nipples peeking between my fingers, so that I could watch the way he focused on me, the way his breathing altered.
“You have the most perfect breasts, and I love the way you touch them.” His hand moving his cock against me became rougher, needier. “If I didn’t need to feel you around my cock, I’d want to come across them..”
I gripped his shoulders and dug my heels into the soft bed, tilting my needy, throbbing clit up to meet him, trying to force him inside me. He grinned at my desperation, but it was only a quick flash before it was replaced by the same wild need that I felt.
He held himself still for me, his hand gripping his cock, and let me slowly raise myself up to sink into him. I pushed up hungrily, feeling him stretch me, feeling it hurt, and I did not care one bit.
He bit off a groan, and then he was moving, pressing himself down into me. I collapsed into the bed and let him take over, his body braced above mine, his cock pumping into me over and over. It still stretched me, but it felt so good, too.
He said softly against my cheek, “Good girl. That’s my girl.”
He rolled his hips at the end of each stroke, his cock hitting something deep inside me that turned the world around us into a blur of pleasure, and turned my body to liquid heat. “Fear,” I whispered, my hand on his neck, and he leaned forward and kissed me.
I moaned into his mouth, overcome by his heated body against mine, the sense of being wrapped in his warmth inside and out. I turned my face and kissed his cheek, then found the hollow of his throat.
My fingernails sank into his skin as I came closer and closer to the edge. He didn’t seem to notice. “You are so perfect,” he murmured. “So beautiful. Come for me, Never.”
He sounded so fervent, so certain, that for once in my life, I could believe I was beautiful, I was perfect. I wanted to stay in this moment forever.
My legs locked around his waist, my body pulsing around his as he murmured more sweet nonsense into my ear about how good I was doing, how perfectly I was taking his cock, how much he adored me.
Until both of us lost our words, falling over the brink together, my body shattering around his in the most perfect orgasm I’d ever had.
Afterward, he gathered me into his body, his cock already hard again against the curve of my ass, offering soothing words as he held me close. My body rippled with the aftershocks of my orgasm as he gently caressed my skin.
I felt treasured beneath his hands, wanted in a way that had nothing to do with plots or rebellion or Lightbringer herself.
As if all that mattered to him was me. For tonight.