Page 57 of Rose and Shadows
I wasn’t shy or reserved about showing my body to my men, but with Sylas, it was beyond even that. He had a way about him that bled so beautifully into all of us. A sexual empowerment that he gifted us with. He’d done that so deeply and so wonderfully with Lazriel, and he just… he just continued to. There was no shame, no instinct to hide or to restrict ourselves in any way when it came to our sexual desires.
I sauntered toward the bed and his eyes never left my body.
I stopped at the edge, just before the drapes, and then I hooked my fingers into the waistband of both my panties and my leather pants, then gave him a little show of shimmying them down my legs.
“Breathtaking,” he uttered. “Every fucking inch of you.
“Right back at you,” I said, as I kicked them off, pushed the drapes aside, then literally pounced on the bed.
I was crawling up his body in the next second.
But as I leaned in to kiss him, he held up a finger.
His power sparked, and then he had his arms wrenched above his head and secured in magically glowing crimson cuffs to the headboard.
“Sylas… what are you—”
“You need control, don’t you? Not just comfort and connection, but release beyond a mind-bending orgasm.”
“I… yeah… I mean, what you walked in on definitely made that clear… what I nearly did… but you don’t have to…” It was well-known among those who he allowed close to him that Sylas couldn’t stand feeling helpless. Yet, here he was offering methis?Not just surface-level submission from him, not just the illusion of me having control and calling the shots.
His eyes shone at me. “For you, I will.”
Holy. Hell.
Emotion took me and I had to blink away the tears starting to well in my eyes as I leaned down and brushed my lips over his cheek. “Hell, Sylas. I love you. You know that? I love you.”
His breath caught. He shifted, as much as he could with him restricted by the cuffs. “Since you crafted that illusion for me during the binding spell.”
“What?”
“That’s whenIknew. When Cornelius was performing the spell to bind my magic and you pulled me into that illusion made to comfort me because you fully understood the weight of me losing my power, exactly what it did to me… and you spared me as much as you could, went out of your way to…thatwas when I first knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I was ready to speak those words to you.”
“Oh my God, that was when you knew you loved me?”
He nodded.
“It was weeks ago.”
“With everything that was happening at the time, I wasn’t sure you’d be in a headspace to hear them from me—or anyone.”
He knew about what had happened when Lazriel had first spoken them to me, then.
“Sylas, you don’t have to do that. I appreciate it, I really do. But I don’t want you holding yourself back or holding off on telling us what you need.”
“Let it all out, huh?”
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“Then… I love you. I fucking love you. No-doubt-about-it, deep and undying love.”
I chuckled, then leaned in and kissed him.
There was nothing slow and easy about it this time around—it was fucking ravenous. Lips smacking, teeth gnashing, tongues basically lashing, and we were both panting through the amazing insanity of it.
I shifted on him, rolling my hips and grinding against his big cock, and it had him groaning into my mouth.
I smiled and broke the kiss, then slashed my tongue over his nipple, making my way down his chest.
