"You’re breathing in like I’m expensive tea, love."
"You sll better than expensive tea," lissa murmured against his throat, her voice low and velvet-rough with sothing far warr than amusent.
"I should hope so. So of those teas taste like soone boiled a forest’s trauma... while others taste like they were harvested from the gardens of gods who knew exactly how to make a woman forget her own na."
A sound escaped her, low and amused against his neck. "You really ruin every tender mont."
"No, I season them, adding heat and hunger in the mix. The kind of flavor that lingers on the tongue long after the cup is empty."
His sigh left him quietly, satisfied and utterly content, like a prayer finally rising from its knees.
Everything the world demanded of him could wait; power, plot, threat, progenitors and gilded families sharpening knives inside perfud rooms could wait.
There was only her now; her warmth and her scent.
The devastating pressure of her body against his, and the bone-deep knowledge that, for once in this absurd, overfunded, beautifully cursed life of his, he was exactly where he was ant to be.
"I love you, lissa," he whispered into her hair, the words barely louder than the breathing between them but weighted enough that even the room seed to beco still around them.
A tremor passed through lissa, subtle yet imdiate, travelling from her body into his arms as though the confession had touched sothing too tender to remain motionless.
It was not because the words were new.
He had said them before to her, in many tis to count: sardonic, arrogant, teasing, desperate, fierce, stripped bare of every defense, even.
But there were monts when familiar words changed weight because the silence around them had changed.
Here, in this amber-lit quiet where both of them had set down performance and stood before each other with the unadorned architecture of their souls exposed, love did not sound like a sentence.
It sounded like law and concept that made up his very being.
Like he could never be able to live without her in his life.
"I know," she whispered after a long mont, though her voice trembled enough to betray how deeply she had received it. "That’s the problem."
Phei’s hand stilled briefly in her hair. "Loving you is a problem?"
"Loving," she said, lips brushing the side of his throat with deliberate, sinful slowness, "is like letting a storm into the house and then discovering the storm knows exactly how to warm its hands around your heart... and exactly how to make the rest of you burn."
"That is a very dramatic way to call handso."
"I did not call you handso."
"You implied atmospheric importance. And the distinct possibility that I intend to ruin you beautifully tonight. I’ll take it."
She knew Phei understood what exactly she ant underneath those words but underplayed, she realized really, she did noy have to say it in the first place; because no matter how dangerous their love was, Phei would never let go or choose anything else.
lissa finally lifted her face enough to look at him, and the grief in her eyes had not vanished entirely, but it no longer ruled there. Sothing warr had taken its place. Sothing luminous. Dangerous and alive.
"Phei," she whispered, and the way she said his na did more to him than most declarations could have managed with a trumpet section.
"Yes?"
Her fingers slid slowly from his shoulder to the side of his neck, and her thumb rested against the pulse there as though verifying he was real.
"Take ."
The words entered him slowly, not like command and not rely like desire, but like trust stepping out from behind doors it had locked for years.
Her lips found the ridge of his jaw and pressed there tenderly before trailing lower, touching the skin behind his ear with a softness that made his pulse betray him so violently it probably deserved disciplinary action.
From there she descended with feather-light kisses down the column of his throat, unhurried and devastating, her mouth leaving warmth behind as though marking a path only she had permission to travel.
Her teeth grazed the place where his neck t shoulder, not hard, just enough to leave small possessive indentations in his skin, her signature written in a language older than houses, older than nas and bloodlines arrogant enough to believe they had invented belonging.
Phei sighed again, and sothing essential inside his chest loosened from the moorings of self-control and drifted helplessly toward her — while sothing far darker and more ancient tightened lower, the slow, heavy throb of a man who had already decided exactly how he would claim every inch she was offering.
"My beautiful lissa," he murmured, voice lower now, roughened by the hunger he no longer bothered to hide.
She kissed the mark she had made. "Yours?"
"Yes. Mine," he said, and the word ca out quiet enough to be intimate but certain enough to start wars if the wrong person argued.
"Every breath. Every sigh. Every trembling inch of you that’s currently pressed against and pretending it doesn’t want to be naked and worshipped until the sun forgets how to rise."
"And you?"
He smiled against her hair. "Tragically claid. Terribly unavailable. Society mourns... while I plan exactly how I’m going to make you scream my na until your voice breaks."
"Society can choke."
"There she is," he whispered, laughing softly. "The woman I adore and I intend to have writhing beneath until she forgets every other na but mine."
Her answer was another kiss, warr this ti, slower, and Phei felt the last delicate strand of restraint inside him look at the situation, file a complaint with managent, and resign.
He lifted her with the gentleness of reverence and the ease of strength his hands sliding beneath her thighs as her legs wound around his waist and her arms tightened around his neck. She clung to him with the sa surrender from earlier, though now it carried warmth instead of grief, hunger instead of trembling, belonging instead of fear.
The heat of her pressed so intimately against his stomach that even through layers of silk and clothing, he could feel the promise of her, the soft, yielding warmth that made his blood run hotter and his grip tighten possessively.
Phei began walking through the amber-lit penthouse with the slow, processional gravity; bearing sothing consecrated toward an altar only the two of them could see.
He carried her past the windows where Hell’s Paradise glittered shalessly below, past the orchids glowing pale near the glass, past the books that had witnessed her quieter hours, past the grand piano still holding the last ghost of their dance in its dark polished body.
The city outside might as well have been a kingdom they had abandoned without regret.
His mouth found her neck and he bit down gently, claiming without cruelty, answering the marks she had left on him with one of his own.
lissa arched into his hold with a sound caught sowhere between a gasp and a prayer, which frankly was where most reasonable reactions to Phei belonged, though he had the decency not to say so while her fingers were in his hair and her mouth was dangerously close to his skin.
He kissed the upper curve of her chest where silk shifted beneath his mouth, felt her fingers tighten, felt the frantic and defiant hamr of her pulse beneath his lips, and the knowledge of her alive, warm and wanting him narrowed the world until nothing outside his arms seed worthy of mory.
Their mouths found each other while he carried her deeper into the penthouse, and the first kiss ca slow and searching, a prelude written in warmth, breath and the last fragile restraint still pretending it had employnt.
The second kiss deepened, hungrier now, tongues eting in a slow, sinful slide as though both of them had rembered at the sa ti that patience was virtuous only when one had not already suffered enough for several lifetis.
The third kiss consud whatever remained between them, open-mouthed and absolute, tasting of every unspoken promise they had ever made in the dark — and by the ti the door to her bedroom slipped behind them, neither of them had any remaining interest in the world outside it.
Only the bed.
Only the night.
Only the long, slow devotion of two people who had finally decided that love, in this mont, would be spoken in gasps, in marks, in the wet sound of mouths and the trembling of bodies that had waited long enough.
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