Page 29 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)

She leaned down, nose to nose, and said, “Then give me everything.”

And that broke him.

His hands gripped her hips and thrust upward, hard enough to lift her from the dirt. She shouted, her head snapping back as his cock drove even deeper inside her, filling places she didn’t know existed.

The rhythm changed.

He fucked up into her, over and over, her body meeting each stroke with a grind, a cry, a rush of liquid heat down the insides of her thighs. She rode him now with abandon. Panting, glowing, laughing at the impossibility of it.

“Oh my God,” she gasped. “You feel—fuck, you feel like too much—”

His mouth was at her breast, his hands holding her open, his hips pistoning into her with deep, rhythmic power. He thrust up harder, sharper. She screamed his name.

“Nora,” he growled. “You’re glowing. You’re mine.”

She was.

Her orgasm hit her like fire.

She clenched around him, legs shaking, vision going white. She writhed in his lap, gasping, sobbing, grinding against the base of his cock as wave after wave tore through her.

The desert answered.

The ground beneath them pulsed once, then bloomed.

Pale desert flowers erupted around their bodies in a slow wave of life. The air shimmered. Petals fell like ash.

And Asher came undone.

He roared, head thrown back, body rising off the ground, cock jerking inside her as he came hard, deep, flooding her with heat and light and devotion. She felt it—felt every pulse of him, every twitch, every stretch of muscle beneath her.

He kept moving.

His hands lifted her, then dropped her back down onto him. Again. Again.

She rode him through it, desperate and full and crying, her body glowing gold and red and rose-lit.

Another orgasm hit her, louder, deeper. She collapsed forward onto his chest as he rolled his hips in shallow, grinding thrusts, drawing every last wave from her.

“Don’t stop,” she sobbed. “Don’t ever stop—”

His hand slid between her thighs, thumb circling her clit, coaxing every last spark until her entire body seized around him again.

The third orgasm cracked her open.

She came with a broken sound, shaking apart in his arms, voice lost to wind and bloom and breath.

They collapsed into the dust, locked together. Panting. Drenched. Changed.

The storm had passed. The fire had gone out. Their bodies lay entangled in the cradle of the Hollow, limbs crossed, skin sticky, glowing faintly in the dark like embers still alive beneath ash.

The wind had gone soft again. The exhale after the scream, after the vow, after the claiming.

Petals clung to her skin, to his chest, to the sticky lines of gold where bark had cracked and healed. The desert had gone quiet, finally satisfied.

Nora’s cheek rested against the curve of his chest, her palm flat over the space where his heart now beat steady and deep beneath warm bark. His arms were wrapped around her like he had no plans to let her go and no need to prove anything about it.

Her thighs ached. Her cunt throbbed. Her voice was gone.

But she was smiling.

Her body hummed with him, with light, with the land. The glow that had once flared uncontrolled now warmed her steadily from within. The mark at her throat had settled into something more permanent, etched, humming, proud.

She had taken him.

She had been changed.

Not broken. Not swallowed.

Made whole.

Asher breathed softly beneath her. One hand cupped the back of her head. The other traced lazy lines along the curve of her spine. His body was no less monstrous now, but it felt different. Softer, somehow. Real. Like a myth learning how to be a man again.

Like something earned.

His voice, when it came, was low. Unsteady. Awed.

“You walked through the fire and came back.”

He touched her face like she might vanish. Like part of him still believed she should have.

She wasn’t supposed to survive this.

Not the heat. Not the hunger. Not him.

He hadn’t been made for love.

He’d been made to endure. To wait. To break.

But she’d come anyway.

And she’d stayed.

Nora smiled against his chest.

“I didn’t,” she whispered. “Not all of me.”

Her fingers curled into his ribs like roots finding home.

“But maybe that was the point.”

He made a sound, not quite a laugh, not quite a sob, and kissed the top of her head. She shifted, sliding her thigh further over his hip, body draped across his with all the weight of someone who never wanted to move again.

Around them, the Hollow glowed.

Flowers bloomed where blood had spilled. The cracked earth had softened. Even the Watcher, now split and silent, had stilled, its shadow recast not as warning, but as witness.

Nora lifted her head. Looked around. Looked at him.

“It’s done,” she whispered.

“No,” he said softly. “It’s begun.”

She smiled again, and this time it reached all the way down, curling into the hollow places she'd forgotten how to fill.

She didn’t know what would come next. But she knew the shape of it.

Ash and bloom.

Ruin and root.

Him and her and the land that would never stop wanting.

She curled closer, tangled her fingers in his, and closed her eyes.

And the desert, at last, bloomed with her.