Page 70 of Blood Singer

"I want your hands on me." The candlelight was warm on my skin and he was watching my face with those intent golden eyes, and my voice had gone embarrassingly breathless. "I want you inside me. I want—" His fingers found me then, finally, sliding through heat that absolutely confirmed how much I wanted this, and whatever sentence I'd been constructing dissolved into a sharp exhale. "There. Right there."

He made a low sound against my throat, and I felt it more than heard it. A resonance that started in his chest and seemed to travel through every point of contact between us. "You're so ready for me." His fingers moved in a slow, deliberate rhythm that made my toes curl against the furs. "Do you know what it does to me? What you do to me?"

"I've got some working theories," I said, because I could feel the hard length of him throbbing against my hip.

He dealt with his pants without removing his hand from where it was conducting a masterclass in patience, and when he settled back between my thighs with nothing left between us, I revised every previous understanding I'd had about wanting someone. His cock pressed against my entrance and he held himself there, watching my face, and the restraint that required was visible in the set of his shoulders and the controlled steadiness of his breathing.

"Kavan." His name came out half-plea, half-warning.

"Seven hundred and fifty years," he said, his voice rough at the edges. "And the universe sent me a woman who scolded me about sniffing people. Who is opinionated and stubborn and the most perfect creature the gods ever made." He pushed inside, slow and inexorable, and the rest of whatever he'd been planning to say apparently left him, because he just said my name instead, low and fervent, like it meant something specific.

The stretch was full and deep and so precisely right that I stopped trying to narrate it to myself and simply experienced it, the fingers of my left hand tightening in the silky white hair laying across his shoulder. He went carefully, watching my face with unwavering attention, checking without breaking his rhythm. Still taking care of my shoulder even now, even in this, and the tenderness of it made my chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with the physical.

"Tell me you're okay," he said against my temple.

"I'm extraordinarily okay," I said, slightly breathlessly. "I would, however, like to register a formal complaint about the pace."

He exhaled something between a laugh and a groan and gave me what I'd asked for.

When he started to move in earnest, pulling back and driving deep with a rhythm that was deliberate and overwhelming, I stopped being capable of coherent observation. Every thrust hit something deep that sent sparks cascading behind my eyes. My left hand was in his hair, anchoring myself. My right shoulder stayed carefully undisturbed, and I'd stopped noticing the management of it because he'd made it seamless. What I noticed instead was the specific quality of his attention. The way he tracked my breathing, adjusted his angle when I gasped, slowed fractionally when I went tense and deeper when I arched toward him.

"You're mine," he said, low and fierce, his eyes holding mine. "My mate. My blood song." His hips rolled, and I lost the ability to form a response for a moment. "Say it."

"Yours," I said, and meant it the way you mean something you've decided rather than something you've fallen into. "I'm yours, Kavan."

The satisfaction that moved across his face at that. Not triumph, but relief, the particular expression of someone who'd been afraid to want something for a very long time and had been given it anyway. That undid me more thoroughly than anything else had.

He shifted his weight onto one arm, his free hand sliding between us to find the exact place that made my vision white at the edges, and the combination of that and the deep, relentless rhythm of him inside me was more than I could hold together. The pleasure built in long, shuddering waves, each one higher than the last. My thighs were trembling. My fingers dug into his hair.

Then his mouth was at my throat, at the curve where my neck met my shoulder, his teeth scraping over my pulse point, and the sensation sent a jolt of electricity straight through my core.

"I want to bite you." His voice was strained in a way I'd never heard from him, desire and control fighting each other openly. "I want to share my venom with you, claim you in the oldest way my kind knows. But it'll hurt at first, Wildflower. It burns like fire before it becomes something else." He pulled back just enough to meet my eyes. "Do you trust me?"

"Yes." I didn't need to think about it. I'd trusted him from the moment he took me soaring through the sky. "Yes. Do it."

His teeth broke skin at the curve of my neck, and the pain was immediate and absolute.

Liquid fire entered my bloodstream. The venom spread with terrifying speed, racing through my veins and turning my blood to lava. Every nerve ending ignited simultaneously. My back arched hard off the bed, my body convulsing, and his arms locked around me and held. Not restraining, just present, anchoring me through it the way he'd held me in the air on that first flight when I'd learned to trust him.

It burned. It burned in my blood and my bones and the beat of my heart and every breath I drew. I felt myself being taken apart at the molecular level and put back together, and there was nothing to do but endure it and trust that Kavan knew what it became.

Then something shifted.

The fire transformed. The pain didn't vanish so much as transmute, becoming pleasure so concentrated it was its own kind of overwhelming. Every nerve that had been screaming with agony suddenly sang instead. I could feel him inside me with a clarity that bypassed ordinary sensation entirely, felt every movement and every point of contact as if my awareness had been calibrated to an entirely new register.

I could feel him. Not just physically. Something deeper opened between us, and through it came Kavan. Not impressions or vague emotional weather, but specific things. His terror he'd felt standing in that empty corridor outside my room this morning when he'd understood I was gone. The particular cold quality of his rage during the flight north, so different from the hot fury I'd seen at the landing platform, this one pointed and purposeful. Rhucard's compound, the fight, and the moment he'd understood he'd been wrong. The way he'd felt worse, not better, because being wrong meant more time for someone to hurt me. The flight toward the eastern estate with no certainty that he'd get there in time.

And underneath all of it, stretching back centuries. The loneliness of ruling alone. The weight of Marion's death, carried not as grief for a woman he'd loved but as guilt for the thousands who'd burned for it. The hibernation as punishment and relief simultaneously. An escape from a world he'd damaged, a sleep in which nothing more could be lost.

And then the shuttle landing, and my scent hitting him like an accusation.

I felt how angry that had made him. How much easier anger was than the alternative.

I sent something back. Not words, but the specific texture of what I'd been carrying on my own. The students I'd worried about from across the galaxy, wondering who was reading to them now. The moment on the mountain when I'd watched Kavan shift back to human form and stand in the wind with complete unself-conscious ease, and understood that I was in significant trouble.

Falling in love with someone who I'd genuinely believed might never let himself love me back.

Through whatever had opened between us, I felt him receive that. Felt the moment he understood that I'd been afraid too, just differently, and felt the particular quality of relief that comes from learning you weren't alone in something you'd assumed you were carrying by yourself.