Page 142 of The Nightmare Bride
He kissed me, soft and deep, never altering his rhythm. “Like goddess-blessed oaks, we grow alongside each other, our roots entwined, reaching for the same sunlit heavens.”
Wait. Those words. I’d heard them before.Saidthem before.
The world’s heartbeat faltered, plunging the moment into stillness. Sweet Zephyrine. Our wedding vows. He was saying our wedding vows.
“We remain as individuals.” Every slide of his body ignited a constellation of pleasure, one star after another bursting into existence, lighting up a whole sky. “But together, we stand against the winds of adversity. United, we weather life’s storms.”
A soft cry rolled out of me. They were beautiful, these words. Dense and lush and graven with meaning. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t listened the first time.
“When you need shelter, I offer you my shade. When you need uplifting, I share my dappled light.”
“Kai.” My voice cracked. Wonder rushed in to seal up the break.
“Shh.” Stroke. Slide. Quiet ecstasy. “Let me finish.”
My hands drifted to the small of his back, which flexed and dipped. Every surge stoked the rising glow within me. “Yes. Please. Please finish.”
“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.
