Page 90 of Angels Are Falling

I angled my body away from him so he wouldn’t realize I was shaking in my seat. Talking to him about my confusing feelings was out of the question as well. I was barely holding it together.

I was clearly broken.

Perhaps I was merely responding to attention from a drop-dead gorgeous man who was out of my league. I had been cataloging his face in small, stolen glances all day. Kai with his beautiful face. Kai with his perfect body. Kai with his unwavering patience. I’d registered it all and filed it away because of Stefan. But the loyalty I’d been holding on to was in vain. It had been pointless for a long time. Stefan was in Beirut with Ruby. I was in a car with a man so unreasonably good-looking it felt like a trick, and for the first time, I let myself feel it without apologizing.

To this day, I still didn’t understand why Kai Cavendish agreed to share me, an insignificant woman, when he could have had any woman in the world all to himself. But tonight, I had officially stopped caring. While I had him, I wanted to lose myself in this gorgeous, brilliant, and slightly arrogant man. I wanted to take everything he had to offer.

We didn’t speak again until the car pulled up in front of our hotel, though Kai’s hand never left my shoulders. He reluctantly let go as I climbed out, still reeling from his confession and my shameful reaction to it.

The driver produced a room key as Kai was leading me to the elevator. We hadn’t seen the room yet since we’d been too busy exploring the city.

The elevator doors closed. Kai didn’t touch me, but his nearness felt like asphyxiation. The floor numbers climbed as we stood beside each other in the small space, with mere inches between us. I could see us in the mirror across from me. I looked at his reflection instead of him. My heart was beating at an embarrassing rate. The sexually charged energy between us was so palpable, the desire so thick, that it suffocated me in the small space.

Our suite was on the eighth floor, with a wraparound balcony that overlooked the spread of the city. Neither of us spoke until the door closed behind us. He didn’t bother turning on the lights. The only illumination was the pale scatter of Beirut from below—apartment windows, the headlights of cars winding the coastal road, the dark smear of the Mediterranean at the edge of everything.

I turned toward him in the low light and looked at his face. A dark energy vibrated from him; he knew what I was thinking. His eyes were glazed with hunger.

For once, he wasn’t alone in feeling this way.

I watched him undo the buttons of his shirt one at a time, like some sort of slow-motion striptease. The bedside lamp caught the planes of his stomach, his mouthwatering washboard abs, and I couldn’t look away. Even when he caught me, all I could do was keep staring like an idiot. I’d spent so long deflecting his gaze, focusing elsewhere every time his eyes found mine. I had no idea why I’d bothered. There was no way to ignore Kai Cavendish. Especially the attention he gave you when he looked at you like that, like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at.

“You are so fucking hot.”

It took me several seconds to realize the words had slipped out of my mouth. Kai’s cocky, wolfish grin didn’t help matters.

Sorcerer! He had the power to put words in my mouth and made me say them out loud as well.

But Christ, who could deny it? Kai was extraordinarily beautiful. I had acknowledged this fact before, just as you acknowledged the weather. Tonight, I felt it. The angle of his jaw. The dark eyes that never missed anything. The way he held himself with absolute control, which I once saw as coldness, but it wasn’t. It was discipline.

The words hung in the air between us. His mouth curved, and I knew what was coming: a smug comment that would snap me back to reality. I made a decision before he could respond. Whatever I’d been holding back, whatever I’d been preserving out of loyalty to Stefan, I let go of. I crossed the room and jumped into his arms. Almost by intuition, he caught me just as I slammed my lips against his, grabbing the back of his neck to drag him closer. I licked his lip, seeking entrance into his mouth.

Kai was frozen. I’d never made the first move before.

He broke the kiss just long enough to look at my face, searching for something. Whatever he found there, his exhale was slow and shattered.

“Amelie.” He said my name like it was a question. Like he needed to confirm this was real.

As soon as the shock subsided, his hand came up to my face, slowly, as if I would vanish beneath his touch. His thumb traced my cheekbone. His other hand found the back of my neck. He kissed me back with a care I didn’t know he possessed. It turned out that all this time of enduring my rebuffs, the friction and the fury, underneath all of it, this was what it had actually been. This careful tenderness. He had just never trusted me enough to show it until now.

But I didn’t want gentle tonight.

I kissed him again, the way I hadn’t kissed him before, not the shame-ridden concessions of the honeymoon or the hazy submissions that came after.

I had never given myself permission to enjoy him. But things were different now. I was different.

He reciprocated tenfold. Without hesitation, his hand wrapped around my neck as he turned me and pushed me up against the wall. He bent his head and kissed me back, tipping his tongue into my mouth, and wrangling a moan out of me.

I couldn’t think of anything but Kai. Everything else ceased to matter, even as my phone buzzed.

I pulled back to look at him for a moment. My hands were still on him, exploring his bare chest. He had unbuttoned his shirt without taking it off completely, which somehow made the expanse of his torso even sexier.

Kai didn’t move, as if almost worried about breaking the trance. That stillness set something loose inside me. I put my mouth to his chest, then worked my way down, my knees eventually finding the floor. I spread my fingers across the flat of his stomach, feeling the muscle beneath, before letting my lips trace the same territory. My thumbs found the V of his hips, and I followed them with my tongue.

“God,” he mouthed, stunned.

Bold with want, I unbuckled his belt and undid his trousers. I reached inside to pull him out. The sounds he made when I touched him, low, barely controlled, were my undoing. It was the sound of a man who had wanted this for a very long time and had stopped believing he would have it willingly. I had given him my body before, but never this.

My fingers closed around the base of his thick shaft. Dropping to my knees completely, I swirled my tongue around his tip and closed my mouth over his cock.