Page 356 of Black Reign

His mouth finds mine before I can ask for the list.

The kiss turns open-mouthed and deep, slow enough to taste every year we spent wanting this without ever saying it. His tongue strokes against mine, deliberate, and the low sound he makes pours straight into me. I answer with one of my own.

He eases the dress higher, palm sliding over the bare skin of my thigh. The wool of the blanket is slightly rough beneath my back; the night air is cool against the places he bares. When his fingers reach the soft inner curve of my hip he pauses, waiting, even now.

I lift into his touch.

“Mon Dieu,” he breathes against my mouth. “Tu es si douce.”

His hand continues upward, tracing the line of my body as if memorizing what photographs could never give him. When he finds me already wet for him, his forehead presses to mine and he stills completely.

“Vesper.”

The name is almost a prayer.

I open my eyes. His are nearly black in the starlight, watching every flicker of feeling that crosses my face.

“Xavier.”

He kisses me again—hot, open, unhurried—while his fingers stroke me with devastating patience. I rock against his hand, chasing the slow build, and he whispers filthy, beautiful French against my lips between every kiss.

“Comme ça… oui… juste comme ça, ma femme.”

When I am trembling and aching and half out of my mind, he shifts over me. The weight of him is solid and real and so long imagined that tears sting the corners of my eyes. He braces on one forearm, looks down between us, and carefully nudges my creamy thighs apart with his knee.

The first slow push of him inside me steals the breath from both of us.

Xavier’s entire body shudders once—subtle, almost restrained—as he sinks deeper into his Vesper. A low, broken sound escapes him, half French, half nothing at all. His eyes close for a heartbeat, lashes dark against his cheek, as if the pleasure is almost too much after years of only imagining this. I feel him pulse with pleasure inside me. He’s huge. Hot and it fills so good as his cock stretches me.

“Fuck,” he whispers, the English rare and wrecked. “Sabine.”

I feel every inch of him. The thick head… the heat. The impossible rightness of finally being joined with no screens, no encryption, no distance left between Ghost and Vesper.

He holds still, buried to the hilt, giving me time. His mouth finds mine again in an open, shaking kiss while his body trembles with the effort of restraint.

“Tu me détruis,” he breathes against my lips. “You destroy me.”

I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper.

That is all the permission he needs.

He begins to move—slow, deep strokes that make the stars blur above us. Every thrust is measured, deliberate, as if he is still learning me by heart. His mouth never leaves my skin for long: open-mouthed kisses along my throat, the soft underside of my jaw, the corner of my mouth. Between them he speaks low, heated French that turns my blood molten.

“Ma Vesper… mon épouse… tu es si parfaite autour de moi.”

I answer him with soft, broken sounds and the tight clutch of my hands in his hair. The years of wanting pour through every place we touch. When the pleasure begins to crest I whisper his name like a secret, and he drives into me just a little harder, a little deeper, watching my face as if the sight of me coming undone is the only thing that has ever mattered.

“Viens pour moi,” he orders softly against my mouth. “Come for me. Let me feel it.”

I do—shaking, crying out against his open mouth, every muscle locking around him. Xavier follows a moment later with a deep, shuddering groan, his body tightening above mine as he pours into me, forehead pressed to mine, whispering my name like it is the only word left in any language.

We stay like that for a long time, breathing the same star-cooled air, still joined, wedding rings warm against each other’s skin.

There is laughter once when the dog chooses an extremely inappropriate moment to stand, stretch, and wander closer.

Xavier lifts his head.

“No.”