Chapter 12 #2
“Always and forever,” he murmurs back. Like that answers everything. Like it does. We can argue and shout, but at the core of it all, we are together. We are one.
He reaches up slowly, his knuckles dragging down the line of my jaw, my throat, the ridge of my collarbone.
Unhurried. Deliberate. I feel every nerve ending in my body wake up and pay attention.
The cave is cool, but I am not cold—not even close.
His scent wraps around me, fire, storms, and something wilder underneath, something that belongs only to him, and it makes something deep and instinctual pull tight in my chest.
He lowers his head and presses his lips to my throat, and I feel the low rumble of a groan vibrate against me.
“You have no idea,” he breathes against my neck, “how long I have wanted this.”
“Then stop making me wait.”
I feel him smile against my skin.
He pulls back only long enough to peel his shirt over his head and toss it aside, and the firelight does something unfair to the planes of his chest, the hard lines of his stomach, the dark ink of the dragon that curls across his ribs and up over one shoulder.
I reach out before I can stop myself, tracing the lines with my fingertips.
He goes very still under my touch, watching my face as I explore him, his jaw tight with the effort of holding himself back.
“Juniper.” My name in his mouth sounds like a warning.
“Mm?” I press my palm flat against his chest, feel his heart hammering there. Good. I want him as undone as he makes me. “I’ve barely done anything.”
“That,” he says, catching my wrist gently, “is the problem.”
He pulls me with him until we find the bedroll laid out on the floor, where someone always stays to watch the cave entrance, and he begins to slowly take off my clothes.
He takes off each piece like I’m precious, and my heart pounds as I let him.
Rain pours outside, thunder rumbling as he lowers me down onto the bedroll with a kind of careful reverence that contradicts the hunger in his eyes.
He kneels between my legs, looking down at me in the firelight, and whatever words I had dissolve entirely.
There is something staggering about being looked at the way Kane looks at me.
Like I am both the most precious and the most dangerous thing he has ever encountered.
I prayed when I was a kid for someone to love me like this, and I somehow have four dragon shifters who do just that.
He works his way down slowly, his lips tracing my collarbone, the curve of my breast, the soft skin of my ribs and stomach, until his mouth finds the inside of my thigh, and I stop breathing altogether.
He is in no hurry as he worships every inch of skin between where he starts and where I need him, and by the time his mouth finally finds my pussy, I am gripping the blanket beneath me with both fists.
“Kane—”
“I’ve got you.” The vibration of his voice against me nearly finishes me on the spot.
He takes me apart with an unhurried, devastating patience—tongue and hands working together until I am trembling, until the sounds echoing off the cave walls are entirely mine, until the pressure building inside me becomes something impossible to contain.
When it finally breaks, it crashes through me all at once, white and blazing, and I cry out into the firelit dark.
He doesn’t give me long to come down.
He kisses back up my body, and I pull him to me, my hands at his jaw, bringing his mouth to mine as I feel him settle between my thighs. I reach down and guide him, and when he pushes into me—slowly, inch by torturous inch, watching my face the entire time—I feel the breath leave my lungs entirely.
“Tell me what you like. What you want…” he murmurs, his forehead dropping to mine.
“You. Just you and me. I never needed anything more.” I roll my hips, urging him deeper, and he groans low and ragged against my cheek.
Then there is no more patience from either of us, and fire explodes from his hands on the stone, dancing around us in flying embers.
He moves and I move with him, the fire crackling around us, the cave walls holding every sound we make, the whole world reduced to this—to him and to me and the breathless, desperate rhythm we find together.
His hands are everywhere, and mine are in his hair, at his shoulders, dragging down his back as he drives me closer to an edge I feel building somewhere bone-deep.
Different this time. Bigger. Because I know what comes next. We both do.
“Juniper.” His voice is rough, his breath ragged against my ear. “Tell me you want this.”
“I want this,” I breathe without hesitation. “I want you. All of you. Every part.”
He lifts his head to look at me, and his eyes in the firelight are molten, certain, overwhelming. “Take me as your mate,” he says, his voice low and raw and reverent. “In front of whatever is listening. Let our souls be bound.”
The words rise in me naturally, like they were always waiting there.
I repeat them back to him, breathless, broken up by the way we move together, and I feel something shift the moment the last word leaves my lips—something ancient and warm and irrevocable kindling inside my chest, threading through me like light through cracked stone.
His lips find my shoulder.
The bite, when it comes, is sharp and sweet all at once—a flare of pain that dissolves almost instantly into something that floods every inch of me with warmth, with rightness, with the bone-deep certainty of something clicking into place that was always meant to be there as orgasm after orgasm slams into me, and I can only moan into him as his lips devour mine.
I gasp his name. My fingers tighten in his hair.
And the connection that blooms between us is unlike anything I have words for—a tether, a bond, a thread of something golden and permanent that hums between us like a second heartbeat.
My hundredth orgasm rolls through me in a long, slow, devastating wave, and I feel him follow me over the edge with a roar that echoes off every wall of the cave.
For a long moment afterward, neither of us moves.
His breathing is ragged against my throat, his lips pressed gently against me.
My hand rests over his heart as the storm swallows up any sounds with massive crashes of thunder.
Kane lifts my arm, seeing the mating mark on my upper arm.
I see one on the middle of his throat, and I lean up, kissing it softly.
“Kane.” I break the silence softly. “I’m never leaving this island, not without you.”
He lifts his head and looks at me, and something in his expression—open and undone and utterly certain—makes my chest ache with how much I love him.
His thumb brushes my cheek. “Mine forever, then. How can I say no to you?” he says quietly. Not possessive. Just true.
“Yours.”
Kane sits up, a growl echoing from his throat.
“Someone is coming.” We quickly throw our clothes on before two shadows appear in the cave entrance.
Witches. One male and one female. The female steps forward, lowering her hood.
“The storm confuses the Mindless, and I really want to see my best friend.”
Wini.