Page 83 of Dark Destiny: The Fates' Bargain

He cupped her face so carefully, so gently, as if her cheeks were made from delicate glass, and he lowered his head slowly enough to allow her to change her mind a hundred times, but she wasn't going to. Instead, she leaned in.

The first touch of his mouth was soft. Just warmth, just the shape of his lips learning the shape of hers, unhurried, asking rather than taking, and Sullha had never been kissed like that before.

She made a small sound against his mouth, and it undid him.

His arm slid from her shoulders to her waist and gathered her in. He deepened the kiss, still careful of his fangs, angling around them with an unbelievable control that must have cost him.

She put her hands on his solid chest, feeling his heart pounding under her palm, hard and fast, and kissed him back with everything she had been carrying in her heart for years. Because this hadn't started when Yaaf the man had returned to theenclosure. It had started a long time before with the boy who was her best friend.

The room faded away.

There was only his mouth, and his hand splayed warm across her back, and the small sounds they both made, and somewhere far beneath the sweetness a slow heat was building that she had felt before only in a dream she'd pretended to forget. Except this was better than the dream, because it was real.

When they broke apart, she leaned her forehead against his jaw, and her mind went to a strange place.

She suddenly understood the goddess and her choices.

Completely, suddenly, all the way down. Areana had stood in a penthouse full of natural light and told a room of doubting women that she had given it up gladly for a hole in the ground with her truelove mate.

An hour or so ago, Sullha had thought the bond a shackle, but now she knew better. Now she sat in a small underground room with a meal slot in a reinforced door, in the arms of a male the world had tried its best to eliminate, and she knew with perfect clarity that if it were not for Tomek, she would hand back the pretty house in the village, the garden, and the mountains outside the window without a second of grief, to stay right here with him.

29

YAAF

Sullha made a small sound against Yaaf's mouth, and it traveled through him like an electrical current.

He'd believed he remembered desire. He'd experienced it before the enhancement program, filed it away as something that had taken so much of his bandwidth that there hadn't been much left to devote to higher thinking. Not that there had been much room for higher thinking after the brutal training either. He'd welcomed the muting of it, had felt liberated by it, and had pitied the other males who were ruled by it, soldiers who spent their entire allowance in the brothel.

Not that there was much else to spend it on unless they were into expensive watches.

But kissing Sullha was not what he remembered from before. That had been an itch, while this was a tide that was rising through channels he'd thought were sealed, roaring into places that had stood empty so long he'd forgotten they existed, and every place it reached lit up and demanded more. Her waist under his arm. The warmth of her back through the thin dress.Her fingers curling into his shirt, over his heart, which was hammering like it was trying to escape his chest.

His fangs itched, filling with venom even though a kiss alone shouldn't have done that. He couldn't bite Sullha, and he had to somehow pull back and command his fangs to retract. Kissing her around them required precision that took more discipline than he had ever needed for anything, because his fangs were not responding to his will. They had their own opinion about what should happen next, and that was sinking into her throat.

Not yet.

She would choose the when and where. But the need was a live wire, pulsing with bursts of unconfined energy, and it was all his, except that it couldn't be because nothing was ever completely his anymore.

At the edges of his mind, he sensed the seven pressed against the privacy walls they'd erected and were struggling to hold. What was going on inside him was too enormous to contain in the small corner of the hive mind that he had carved for himself. Not even with all of them doing their best to allow him privacy.

Wonder leaked through the link like light under a door, seven minds tasting the echo of what was flooding him and pulsing with awe, because none of them had felt this before either, not ever like this, and he was too far gone to resent the audience or begrudge them the experience they all hungered for.

More beautiful than we remembered,someone breathed through the link, barely a whisper, and Yaaf ignored it, because Sullha's hands had slid up to his shoulders, and she was kissing him back.

Then the sound of heavy footsteps stomping down the corridor broke the spell.

Boots striking concrete with a deliberate, evenly spaced thunder that no Guardian trained in silent movement would produce unless he was doing it on purpose. The performance grew louder, stopping just outside the open door, and then someone cleared his throat with a sound like a clogged engine rattling.

Sullha broke away from him and pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, with a sheepish look in her eyes that was adorable. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair was messy, and the last thing Yaaf wanted to do was let her go, Guardian or no Guardian waiting outside the door for permission to enter.

"Sorry about the interruption," Alfie said, still standing where they couldn't see him and he couldn't see them. "I got a call from upstairs, and I texted you that I'd come get you in ten minutes, but I got no response."

Yaaf pulled his phone from his pocket and saw the message sitting on the screen.

Party's winding down. The little guy is asking for his mom and for you.

"I didn't hear it come in." Yaaf held out the phone for Sullha to read the message.