“I offer you my years.” His voice thickened. Roughened. “My heart and my body, and a place at my side. I vow never to leave yours, until darkness takes me.”
I struggled to keep my gaze pinned to his. My lashes fluttered, trying to close, yet I was captive to the way he moved. To the searing pressure that pulled every piece of me toward a flame-lit center. “Oh, gods. You’re going to make me?—”
“By the whisper of the wind,” he rushed out. “By the beating of our entwined hearts, I pledge myself to you, now and forever.”
He made a sound that let me know I could finish.
My eyes closed. Bliss arrowed through me, silver-tipped, lighting a blaze along every nerve. It spread and consumed me,becameme, until I could taste the cypress-smoke heat of him, see the molten glow of his touch as it pulsed behind my eyes.
I was crying out. Keening louder than the nightmare. Losing control of my body as it detonated, transforming me into a shower of white-hot satisfaction.
Holy.
Shit.
It peaked and lasted and finally faded to a sparkling afterglow. By the time I could feel my body again, Kai lay limp atop me. I almost regretted having missed the particulars—thetense of his body, the quiver of his muscles—but I had gone somewhere else. Ascended to some stratospheric pinnacle I’d never reached before.
“It can’tpossiblyget worse than that,” he mumbled into my shoulder.
I laughed, but there was hardly any life in it. It sounded weak and wrung-out, just like me.
“Don’t be unimaginative,” I said. “It can definitely get worse.”
He raised his head. “Oh? I’d like to seeyoutry.”
I slanted a brow upward. “Is that a challenge?”
“Do you want it be?”
“Maybe.”
A smile tugged at his mouth. “Then yes.”
I smiled back. “Then challenge accepted.”
He raised expectant brows, and I wriggled, managing to roll him onto his back without sundering our connection. He stretched out beneath me, propping his hands behind his head, his biceps bulging in a way that probably should have been illegal.
“Well?” His smile was nothing short of provocative. “I’m waiting. Hurry up and devastate me, my sweet wife.”
I leaned down, taking my time, turning all the honeyed tortured he’d subjected me to back on him. I tongued his birthmark, scraped featherlight fingernails down the insides of his arms, swallowed the purring groan I wrested from his throat.
He soon stirred inside me again, and I began a slow circle of my hips.
“Gods among us.” He made the words into a labored exhale. “Yes, like that.”
A devilish smile lit my face. I could do worse. Much worse. I locked my hips into a drawn-out rhythm and curled over him, as if to nip at his neck. He craned his head, exposing his throat, but I whispered in his ear, instead.
“In the sacred embrace of the swamp, here under the watchful eyes of Zephyrine, I pledge my heart and soul.”
A breath sped in through his lips. His hands splayed against my thighs. “Lioness? You don’t have to.”
“I know. I want to. I vow to forsake all others and seek refuge in your arms.”
His body stiffened—in anticipation, or surprise, or pleasure, or...all of the above, hopefully.
My hips rolled as I said the vows back to him, each and every word, though a few times, I had to take a moment and hunt for the next piece. I wasn’t an actor, who could memorize lines with no apparent effort.
But I got through it, working him into a tense knot of heavy breathing and glazed eyes along the way. Warmth spun through me with every arc of my pelvis, but I held myself back from the edge. I wanted to watch him, this time.
