Page 72 of Synodic

“Rowen, if you can hear me, it’s me, Keira,” I barely managed to gasp out as blood rushed to my head and made me dizzy.

A disgusted laugh rattled through his chest. “I will never believe another word that comes out of your mouth.”

The pressure at my throat intensified. His towering body leaned into me, trapping me between his wall of muscle and the rocks that stabbed into my back. His gaze hazed over, and his lips pulled back into a feral growl.

“Rowen, I am trying to save your life. Let me. If you don’t, we could both die in here.”

He pulled me forward, offering a brief reprieve, only to slam me against the rocks once more. Stars bounced across my vision as he pushed his body against mine, his chest and acute hatred smothering me.

Rowen could have easily killed me by now, but he was toying with me, drawing out his retaliation in a slow, torturous dance.

He was stiff to the point of breaking, but would he break me first? Only to snap out of it in the morning to see what he’d done. Mourning my lifeless body crumpled on the cave floor?

“Rowen, you need to listen to me. You are hallucinating from the venom in your wound. The wound I just mended,” I gasped out, my eyes pleading him to remember. He had warned me the hallucinations would happen, but I could never have predicted they would turn this violent—this deadly.

I thrashed beneath him. “Please, Rowen,” I begged, hoping to get through to him. After everything, I was going to die here at the hands of the one sworn to protect me at all costs.

Rowen’s grip grew tighter around my throat, strangling me, his face indented with murderous determination. The time for talking had ended. He meant to kill me now.

He leaned in, bringing his lips to my ear as if he wanted whomever he thought I was to intimately hear this last curse. Was this what he had been so carefully hiding behind that indomitable mask? This vendetta. This deep-seated kernel of revenge that had grown and twisted into a noxious thorn bush.

I did the only thing I could think of. I had always wanted to do it, and now right before I died, would be the only chance I’d ever get. So I’d take it, even if it was the last thing I ever did.

I slowly turned my head as much as I could against his tightening hold and kissed him featherlight upon the cheek.

As the glisten from my kiss evaporated on his face, his body wavered, and his hands loosened around my throat. Whatever hallucinogenic spell he was under broke, and his eyes snapped to mine. “Keira?” he breathed out my name as if it were a sacred prayer.

Overcome with relief, I gulped in all the glorious air I could.

Cradling my neck, he slowly tilted my gaze until I was staring directly into the pools of his evergreen eyes.

He was seeing me now.

His thumbs lightly grazed along the curve of my jaw. “Keira,” he groaned again, his voice husky and low, and his eyes drank in my face as if it were the first time he’d allowed himself a drop of water.

Before I knew what was happening, he crashed into me, his lips on mine. I gave out a small cry of surprise as his mouth claimed mine hard and fast enough to bruise. His hands were in my hair, then at my waist, roving all over my body like he couldn’t hold me close enough. My entire being responded to his in a way I’d never felt before—he called to my every fiber, igniting the canvas of my existence to life. And I crashed right back into him.

My fingers threaded through his hair, my mouth opening to his as his tongue pushed between my lips, and I tasted him for the first time in a burst of ginger, musk, and minted moss. Rowen groaned at my returned fervor, his tongue tangling against mine, beckoning me to push back. Which I did, gladly. I drove my kiss just as hard as he delivered his, the both of us searching and devouring.

His kisses were urgent and starved, all tongue and teeth and roaming limbs. I burned everywhere as he consumed me, our bodies melting into an all-engulfing fire—neither of us a care in the world for what would emerge from the ashes.

Rowen firmly traced up my body, following the outline of my hips and ribs until his fingers grazed the sides of my breasts.

But his weren’t the only roaming hands.

I caressed my fingertips down his strong chest, along his two necklaces, and my touch hitched at the scar right above his pounding heart. My strokes explored down, tracing the outlines of his sculpted abdominal muscles, and I grazed past the moss bandages flush against him like a second skin. Rowen shuddered as my touch left tiny trails of shimmering iridescence on his body.

“Please,” he groaned desperately against my skin, clutching me as if I were a dream on the cusp of fading. “Tell me this is real.”

“It is,” I managed to breathe out.

“Thank fuck,” he said before possessing my mouth yet again. He pulled me harder and tighter against him, his hands finding never-ending ways to entangle me. His calloused touch brushed past my hip bones and overtop my underwear, my thighs inching open for more. Suddenly, he was between my legs, palming and rocking me with the heel of his hand. My moan echoed throughout the cave as his hungry mouth dove to my neck.

I let my head fall to the side, further exposing the length of my throat to him as his lips trailed down my sensitive skin, claiming me with swift flicks of his tongue and teeth.

My legs turned to mush beneath me as he touched me through my panties, touched me everywhere. His broad fingers explored me over the thin fabric, slowly tracing and discovering the shape of my clit as our lips thundered together again, our kiss deepening.

Where just moments ago his touch was preventing me from breathing, he was now the only thing keeping the air in my lungs, and I couldn’t get enough.

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