Page 36

The spring was the slow discovery of each other’s skin. This is heat and fury—his hand fisting the pillow beside my head as he kisses me hard enough that my skull presses into the mattress and my back arches up into him. His tongue pushes past my lips, the weight of him settling between my thighs, and he’s pressed against the thin cotton of my underwear, separated from me by two layers of fabric that might as well be nothing.

Without warning, he tears his mouth from mine, and his forehead drops against my collarbone, his body shaking with the effort of stopping. Then his hand closes over my hip again, the restraint gone, and there are no numbers left to hide behind. There’s only the friction of Kieran’s body against mine and the desperate way his mouth is moving over my lips, like he’s angry at himself for doing this and angry at every one of the forty-seven paces he wore into the floor before giving in.

I roll my hips up against him, dragging myself along the length of him, and the groan that tears out of his chest vibrates through my ribcage and settles between my legs. He rocks forward in response, grinding against me through layers of fabric that feel like nothing and everything at the same time. The pressure lands on the ache that’s been building since he sat on this bed, and the cotton between us is soaked through. He has to feel it, because his next grind is slower, deliberate, pushing into me like he’s mapping exactly what he does to my body.

My head falls back, and I lock my ankles behind his back, pulling him harder against me.

I need to touch him. In the spring, his hands were the ones that unraveled me. His fingers found me, and he worked me until I came apart against his chest.

Now, it’s my turn to give him the same.

So, I reach between us, my hand finding him through the fabric of his pants, hard and straining against the constraints. His hand snaps around my wrist, reflex-fast, combat-fast, his grip iron and his arm trembling. For three full seconds he holds my hand still against him, the war playing out in the tremor running from his shoulder to his fingers.

Without thinking, I summon my magic into my trapped palm and release a slow, rolling wave of heat that pours through the fabric and into him. His grip on my wrist convulses and breaks apart, a guttural sound ripping out of his chest as he shudders with a violence that makes the headboard slam into the wall.

He’s shaking as my fingers find the button of his pants and work it free. Then he goes utterly still—his breath suspended, his arms braced on either side of my head, trembling at a frequency my scanning could measure if my scanning were still functioning.

The zipper is next, each tooth releasing in the silence like a countdown, and his forehead drops to my shoulder, a low sound grinding out of the back of his throat as I wrap my fingers around him.

He’s burning, localized and intense, pulsing against my palm with every rapid beat of his heart. He’s also bigger than my hand fully accounts for, and the feel of him bare against my palm sends a fresh wave of heat flooding between my thighs. When I stroke him from base to tip, his hips buck into my grip, once, hard, and the headboard cracks against the wall again.

Kieran Cross is losing control, and the satisfaction that rushes through me makes me stroke him again, slower, tightening my grip. His hips start moving with my hand—controlled at first, then less so, then not controlled at all. A groan grinds out of his chest, and each thrust into my fist comes harder than the last, the mattress springs creaking under the force of a rhythm he’s stopped rationing.

His breathing is ragged against my neck, his free hand is gripping my waist, and he’s pulling me against him even though there’s nowhere closer to go. Every stroke drags another rough sound out of his throat, and each one lands directly between my legs, until I’m pressing my thighs around his hips and rocking against him in time with my own hand.

This is real. This is happening. I’m in bed with Kieran Cross, and my hand is wrapped around him, and he’s moving with me instead of pulling away from me. I don’t want him to stop. I don’t want him to think. I just want him to be with me.

So, I trace my thumb across the head of him, spreading the slickness in a slow circle that makes him gasp into my neck. Arching into him, I find the rhythm he can’t hold anymore, twisting my wrist on every upstroke, giving him back every second of what he gave me in the water when his hands took me apart.

His grip tightens on my waist, the rhythm of his hips stutters, and his muscles coil tighter and tighter beneath his shirt. My name comes out of him broken in the middle, half warning and half plea, and he presses his open mouth against my throat, breathing me in like he needs the contact to stay assembled. His hand leaves my waist and slides down, his fingers pressing against me through the soaked cotton of my underwear, and even wrecked—especially wrecked—his fingers find the exact spot that makes my hips push up into him, rubbing me in tight circles timed to my strokes.

My thighs start to shake, and his fingers slip under the thin cotton of my underwear, moving in tight, perfect circles. It’s not long until my back arches off the mattress, my cry muffled against his shoulder as the release tears through me in waves, my thighs clamping around his wrist, my grip spasming around him.

He makes a shattered sound against my throat, and his hips are driving into my hand again, chasing my grip, all that legendary discipline reduced to instinct and want. His hand abandons my underwear to fist the sheets beside my head, and he rises over me, both arms braced, using the leverage to thrust into my grip in deep, punishing strokes. He’s all shadow and burning gold, and the sight of Kieran Cross unraveling over me is the single most devastating data set I’ve ever collected.

Then, on the nightstand, steel rattles.

The pile of blades is trembling against the wood, every dagger and knife vibrating in its sheath. One of the daggers lifts a full inch off my folded jeans, and Kieran growls against my neck, a sound of pure frustrated effort, and it slams back down. The headboard creaks under his other hand, the air over the bed shimmering with heat distortion, warping the darkness itself.

Releasing the headboard, he finds the hem of my tank top and pushes it up, bunching the cotton beneath my ribs. The air hits my bare stomach, and he shifts his weight, rising off me just enough to create a gap between his body and mine, angling himself down toward the exposed skin below my navel.

His whole body locks, every muscle going taut at once. For one suspended second, he’s perfectly still above me, his free hand braced against the headboard, his chest heaving, my hand still wrapped around him. The blades on the nightstand rise as his thermal output tears past every number I’ve ever recorded—120, 130, 140…

The sound he makes is low and shattered as his hips jerk forward into my hand, and he pulses in my grip as his release hits my bare stomach. Steel crashes back onto the nightstand in a chaotic clatter, the headboard cracking beneath his grip, his body shuddering over mine in wave after wave as he empties himself against my skin.

It sizzles on contact, burning in a way my body has no framework for, because fire witches don’t burn. Yet my skin is blistering along every line and streak where his release landed, steam rising from each one in thin white curls as the heat eats deeper.

A cry tears out of me, and Kieran’s eyes snap open. They’re blazing gold, and when they drop to my stomach, the horror that floods his face is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Because he’s looking at his own release glowing white-hot against my flesh, watching it burn me in real time, and the gold in his eyes swallows the last of the green whole.

Before I can process what’s happening, he rips himself off me and the bed in a single motion, and his blades launch into the air. The daggers, the boot knife, the belt blade, all of them stacked on top of my folded clothes on the nightstand… they’re glowing white-hot, spinning in controlled, vicious arcs around the room like a cage of molten steel.

I ignite a fire shield around us to soundproof the room—something I should have done the moment Kieran pulled me close and every wall he’d built broke between us—just as a dagger buries itself in the dresser. A second blade tears through the curtain, and the fabric ignites on contact. The boot knife embeds in the headboard six inches from where my head was a moment ago, and the wood around it chars instantly, a perfect circle of scorched grain spreading outward.

Kieran’s thermal signature is wild and spiking, surging in patterns that don’t correspond to any emotional state I’ve catalogued, and the weapons keep spinning. It’s like his body is trying to contain a power that was never meant to fit inside a human frame, and the container is cracking.

A blade screams past my left ear. The heat trail sears across my cheekbone, and I flinch hard enough that my elbow cracks against the nightstand. Pain shoots up my arm and into my shoulder. The impact jars my crossguard dagger loose from the pile of clothing, and it slides across the surface and stops at the edge.

The moment I grab it, the three thermal zones light up against my palm—warm at the base, hot at the guard, and cool at the pommel. Then I ignite a heat shield tight against my skin, shove myself to my feet, and start moving toward him.