Page 39

Even with the guidance of Kat’s lights, their path through the woods was ungainly.

They fought through the brush, which only got thicker the farther they got from the road, until at last they burst into a moss-spackled hollow, which had them tripping on nothing but the sudden lack of obstructions in their path.

Only by clinging to each other did they manage to stay upright, shushing their breathy laughter like a pair of drunken teenagers trying to sneak beneath their parents’ notice.

“If another Lesser Lord comes stomping through here, I swear on the Seal—” Emory started, and he got no further before Kat had snuck her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him up into a kiss.

The last time they’d done this, they’d been desperate.

Feverish. Fumbling in the dark. Barely taking time for the niceties once they’d ducked into Mira’s tent.

There was urgency driving them now, certainly—more than a few things Kat wanted to do to Emory immediately or she was sure she’d die—but it could wait while they savored this moment.

The drag of his lips as they parted for her.

The firm hand he snuck around her waist, the other coming up to tangle in her hair.

Death no longer loomed on their horizon.

There was no certain end urging them to take what they could while they could.

Every moment of slowness was one that promised a thousand after it, a constant, reassuring refrain that they had time.

Kat found herself grinning too much to kiss him properly, which only got worse when he pressed a frustrated peck into the corner of her mouth.

“We’re gonna get in trouble,” she singsonged.

Before, those words might have yoked him back, reminded them of what they had to lose, but instead Emory stepped in closer, his hips shunting against hers as her back met a tree trunk she’d barely noticed looming behind them. “I intend to,” he rumbled into the join of her neck.

They might have been the sweetest three words she’d ever heard him say. Emory, who calmed the troops in the chaos of the fore, who kept them in line, who held himself back whenever it was proper, that Emory committing himself to both her and the consequence of having her in no uncertain terms.

She couldn’t possibly ruin it by checking if he was sure, so instead Kat let one hand drag slowly down his chest, over the lacings of his pants, her breath catching as he pressed into her touch. He dropped his forehead to her shoulder as she ran a knuckle up and down the seam he strained against.

“Taking your time, hmm?” Emory whispered—which would be one thing if he weren’t also letting his hand work a slow, pacing path up and down the curve of her waist.

“As much of it as I can,” Kat replied. This wasn’t hesitancy. This was indulgence—as much as they could spare, for as long as she could standit.

Past a certain point, it became a dare, an impossible challenge for both to hold themselves back.

Emory’s hand wandered down, toying with her lacings as he leaned back up to recapture her lips.

She sighed into him as he worked one hand into her waistband, pushing through her curling hair to find the heat and warmth and wet of her.

Not to be outpaced, Kat fumbled with his ties—losing, some distant part of her brain was aware, the war it was taking to keep this slow—and wrapped her hand around him.

“Hosts,” he gasped at her touch, the rough pads of his fingers falling into step with the leisurely pace she set as she began to work him up and down.

There hadn’t been time, last time, to figure out what he liked, how he liked it. She’d had to ask for the answers.

If the past month had proven anything, it was this: Kat was nothing if not a tenacious learner.

It cost her dearly to pull back from his touch, but it was worth it for the soft noise Emory made as she sank to her knees.

“Not…fair,” he keened, and she had to wonder how the lights still dancing around them made her look.

The reverence in his eyes said it was somewhere in the vicinity of blasphemous, and that was before she took him in her mouth.

Kat knew there was only so much he’d let her get away with, so she took to her task with gusto, determined to keep his brain from catching up with the rest of him for as long as she could manage.

The hand he had in her hair went taut, and she felt him lean forward to brace the other against the tree behind her as his breathing got more and more ragged, barely smothered by the obscene, wet noises her mouth made as she worked him over.

With one hand on his hip, she could feel the tension in him starting to build, and for a moment she dared to think she could coax him right over the edge far earlier than he’d ever consider dignified.

Just as that thought had begun to transform from a whim into a goal, Emory pulled her back abruptly, a groan spilling from his lips as he dropped to his knees and crushed his mouth over hers.

Kat let herself be pushed back into the cradle of the tree’s roots, forgoing her grip on him to shuffle until she’d found a position where nothing dug uncomfortably into her flesh.

As she settled, Emory’s lips began to wander down her body, his nose tracing over her collarbone as he left feverish kisses against whatever skin he could find.

She nearly murmured a warning as his hands began to tug down her waistband, but he seemed to sense her objection a second before she voiced it.

He leaned back, pulling off his shirt and coaxing her hips up just enough to slip it underneath her.

Mollified, Kat took a moment to settle and enjoy the sight of his muscles on display as he worked her pants and underthings down to her knees.

She didn’t know what she’d been thinking back at the river. This was far better than the sight of him soaked but still coveredup.

Emory sat back on his heels, his shoulders gilded by the light of her magic. “Tell me,” he rasped.

“Need instruction?” she fired back, though something in her was distantly glad for the chance he’d given her to breathe, to cool.

His lips quirked. “Orders,” he corrected.

Sprawled beneath him, indecent and flushed, Kat could barely hide how intensely that had worked on her. She drew up one knee, laying herself open for him to find out exactly what he’d done, and breathed, “Fingers.”

He put them in his mouth first, and by the time Kat’s brain had re-formed itself from the absolute disarray the sight threw her in, he was sliding one inside, letting his thumb circle gently over her as she twitched around him. “Hosts, Kat.” Emory sighed.

That alone was almost enough to undo her right then and there.

It had been a long two months since the night they thought would be their last alive, months of living on top of each other in the decade tent without a scrap of privacy, months of aching for the feeling of him inside her again, for the way he moved, the way that battle partner tandem paid dividends when he found the place that made her arch and push her hips urgently into his grasp.

“Mouth,” she managed between her teeth, then whimpered as he withdrew his hand. But Emory only grappled her hips up until her knees could hook over his shoulders, her back scraping against the blanket he’d made of his shirt as he drew her hard against him and bent his head between her legs.

Demon that he was, he stopped just before contact, his breath sending a shudder through her. She kicked one still-booted heel impatiently against his back, and he took it for the command she was far too winded to verbalize.

He went slowly, teasing along her folds, savoring her like she was another meal on that list he’d waited the whole war to try.

Kat knew beyond a doubt she wasn’t the best thing he’d tasted today, but he almost made her believe otherwise.

With her body clutched against his, she could feel every motion he made echoed in the shifts of his weight, and she loosed one hand from where she’d braced herself just to stroke along the firm, thick line of his thigh.

Emory groaned against her, the vibration of it making her weak in the knees. With blood pooling in her head, she was starting to go dizzy, starting to worry she might faint, but she’d be damned before she let that happen.

She also wasn’t sure she had enough air left in her lungs to do anything but pant along with Emory’s attentions. The lights around them wavered, a subtle reminder she’d kept her alignment despite everything. She wondered if the angels were enjoying the show.

He had one arm wrapped around her abdomen, his other hand helping her thigh brace on his shoulder, and in the end, that was what did it—one shift of his weight where he gripped her tighter, and suddenly Kat was arching off the forest floor, heels dug hard into his back as she bucked against his mouth and cried out.

Her lights, impossibly, flared the brightest she’d ever seen them, then fell away to nothing as she crashed through wave after wave of pleasure.

Emory fought through her writhing until she forced herself up and jammed a palm against his forehead, tearing him away from her with a wet, ragged gasp.

She anchored her grip on the back of his neck and pulled herself up to crush a kiss over his glistening lips.

“Easy,” he grunted against her, and she took a moment to breathe as he soothed a hand up and down her side.

“Your…” she groaned.

“My?” he murmured into her neck.

“Your turn.”

With a lightning-quick move, she’d toppled him onto his back, pinning him as handily as she had that day they’d wrestled in full sight of the century—though it was admittedly leagues easier to pull off when Emory was doing absolutely nothing to fight back.

He flinched, shifting uncomfortably against the leaves and sticks that made up their improvised bier, and Kat sat up on her heels.

“We can stand if that’s—”

“It’s fine—”

“At least let me get the shirt—”

“ Kat, ” he said sharply, fixing her with a look that stilled every argument in her throat and sent another shiver of heat up her still-trembling thighs. “I would lay my back on the Mouth of Hell itself if it meant I could have you over me.”

“Still, let me try a little chivalry on for size,” Kat countered, then grabbed the hem of her own tunic, tearing it up over her head and tossing it in his face.

As she sank into the pause of watching him shuffle it beneath him, a thought occurred to her.

“We…weren’t exactly forward-looking the last time we did this, but you should know I’m gentled. ”

It had been an easy call when she’d reported for the physical evaluation that cleared her for duty after she’d been drafted. An Aurean healer’s hand on her abdomen, a quick flash of pain on each side of her pelvis, and no more worrying about conceiving until she decided to have it reversed.

“I am too,” Emory said. “Which I should have let you know, but—”

“Wasn’t a problem,” Kat blurted. Consequences had been the furthest thing from their minds on the night before the war ended. There was no future to face, only certain death and whatever they could do to stave off its inevitability.

It should have daunted her—the reminder that this time there would be a tomorrow they’d face together at the end of this night. A dawn that promised many more after it. Possibilities that went beyond the two of them dead in the mud by the end of the day.

But having felt that alternative, that narrow path, that promised end, the edge of its blade pressed against her throat, Kat could only see the wonder of having a choice at all.

Everything could go sideways tomorrow. They could be found out, could have their careers torn out from under them, could die in some surprise demon attack—or by tripping on a shovel and falling into the foundations of Adrien’s ridiculous road.

They could check off another item on Emory’s list of foods they needed to eat or discover something that should have been on it all along.

They could find a quiet moment, a secret place to escape to, and do this again—possibly even with a proper bed beneath them.

What comes next? used to be a question that had only one answer. Now they were limitless.

Kat called her lights and let the warmth of their glow trace up and down Emory’s body.

Alignment came naturally when there was a purpose to guide her, an artistry she meant to enact, and in that moment she wanted nothing more than to outline the sturdy shape of his waist, his chest, his powerful shoulders.

He watched her with a wretched degree of patience, his breath settling to a slower, almost soothing rhythm.

“Orders?” she whispered, when she couldn’t take it any longer.

“Ruin me,” he replied.