Page 43 of Hunted By the Wraiths
“Hi,” I said, looking up at him.
“Hi.” He was braced above me, his scales shifting through a spectrum of greens and golds I’d never seen. “You’re overdressed.”
“So are you.”
We fumbled with the rest of our clothes, graceless and eager. His scales caught the dim light as he moved, and I cataloged the damage. Patches where scales had been burned away and grewback wrong. Lines of scar tissue that would never hold color right. The Consortium had marked him, changed him, tried to break him.
But he was still mine.
I pulled him down for another kiss, wrapping my legs around his waist. He groaned into my mouth, and I felt him trembling. Not from pain. From want. From need held in check.
“Maris,” he breathed against my lips. “I need?—”
“I know.” I reached between us, guided him home. “I know, love. Come here.”
He pushed inside me slowly, carefully, watching my face the whole time. The stretch, the fullness, the rightness of it made my head fall back. He pressed his forehead to mine, and for a moment we just breathed together, overwhelmed.
“Fuck,” he whispered. “How can this be...”
“What?”
“How perfect you feel. How perfect we—” He moved slightly and we both gasped. “This. I forgot it could be like this.”
I hadn’t forgotten. I’d remembered every second, used those memories to torture myself with what I’d lost. But this was better than memory. This was real, present, his weight on me, his scales warm under my hands, the sound he made when I clenched around him.
He started to move, slow and deep, and I lost the ability to think in complete sentences. There was just sensation. His mouth on my throat. His hand gripping my hip. The slide of him inside me, hitting angles that made sparks shoot up my spine.
“Look at me,” he said, and I opened eyes I hadn’t realized I’d closed. His face was intent, focused, memorizing. “I need to see you. Need to know this is real.”
“It’s real.” I touched his face, traced the edge of a scale. “We’re real.”
His control snapped. The kiss he gave me was messy, desperate, a claiming. His rhythm faltered, his hips stuttering against me. I could feel him getting close, fighting it, trying to make this last after a decade of starvation.
“Don’t hold back,” I panted, gripping his shoulders. “Thoryn, don’t. We have time now. We have?—”
“Forever,” he finished, the word a raw groan. He thrust deeper, harder, a possessive, final stroke that buried him to the hilt. “We have forever.”
That was all it took. The promise of it, thecertainty.
His hands gripped my hips, lifting me, and the careful, reverent pace was gone. He moved like he was staking a claim, driving into me with a rhythm that was all hunger and possession.
And the bond... instead of screaming, itsang. It was a feedback loop. Every pulse of pleasure in me echoed in him, amplified, and returned to me stronger. I felt his want, a crushing, desperate need that mirrored my own. I felt his hands on my skin, his mouth on my throat, the scrape of his scales, the slide of him inside me—I felt it all as if it were happening to both of us at once.
He leaned down, his mouth finding my ear. “Feel that?” he growled, his voice vibrating through me. “That’sus. No pain. Just you.”
He bit my shoulder, not hard, just enough to make me cry out as I arched against him. The pleasure was too much, a white-hot coil tightening in my center.
“Thoryn, I’m?—”
“I know,” he rasped, his own control shattering. “I can feel it. Come with me.”
He thrust twice more, deep and devastating, and the universe exploded. My climax ripped through me, a raw scream tearing from my throat, and I felthisrelease at the exact same instant—a dual explosion that lit up the bond like a supernova. His whole body went rigid, a guttural roar vibrating against my chest as he shuddered, his name a prayer on my lips.
After, we lay tangled together in the too-narrow bed, slick with sweat, limbs intertwined, trying to catch our breath. His weight should have been uncomfortable, but I didn’t want him to move. Ever.
“You okay?” he asked against my shoulder.
“No,” I said honestly. “I’m approximately six hundred percent better than okay.”
