Page 66 of Gates of Rapture (The Guardians of Ascension #6)

She arrived within minutes, wearing her jeans, just like his jeans. He used to wear leather, but no more. Leather had been all that he’d been allowed to wear for centuries, then later all he’d worn to sustain his seductions. Jeans were so down-to-earth.

She smiled. “You smell like wine, and it’s getting to me.” But her eyes narrowed and her head tilted. “Something has happened?”

“Your sister just saved my life.”

“Grace? How?”

He asked her to sit beside him on the sofa. For the next hour, he told her everything about his life, about his association with Grace, about the redemption pools, about serving Greaves, about Leto, even about his early centuries often chained to a bed and passed from master to master. Everything.

She touched his fingers gently and with compassion. Later she rubbed his arm. She shed tears with him. She kissed his cheek and neck. She embraced him.

She told him about her reckless life, her lack of focus, the dangerous choices she had made over the centuries, then her journey here on Third. “I’ve never felt I belonged anywhere. And now you’re here. I hardly know what to think.”

“Will you date me?” he asked. “I mean, the breh-hedden will be difficult to withstand anyway. But if it’s okay with you, I’d like to date you, go out with you. I don’t want to just hop into bed with you.”

“I want to apologize for the last time I saw you. I kind of panicked and left you standing at the observation deck.” She drew a deep breath. “I’m not good with relationships. I never was. I’ve often thought it was a warrior kind of thing. I don’t know.”

“All I’ve ever known is how to seduce a woman. But I don’t want that with you, even though I know the breh-hedden would make it so easy.”

She nodded. “Tell me about it. All I can think about right now is how to get you out of your jeans.”

He laughed, but his expression sobered almost as quickly.

“I want you so badly right now that I ache. But I think it would be wonderful to wait. I want you to trust me as I’ve seen Grace put all her faith in Leto.

I haven’t been trustworthy for most of my life.

I think it’s something that has to be earned.

“Also, I intend to complete Beatrice’s redemption program. And that will take time.”

Patience took his hand. “Casimir, I’d like nothing better than to date you. And I will wait as long as you need me to wait before we share a bed.”

Casimir felt his heart open as it never had before. He couldn’t believe this was happening to him. He felt as though an angel had taken pity on him, had believed in him, and had given him a method by which he could transform.

Of course, in reality, that angel was Grace.

***

All the walls had come down. That was the truth that Grace knew as she slid into bed beside Leto. They were back in the villa guest room and wouldn’t return to the cabin until the Seattle Colony was safe from Greaves permanently.

Something mysterious and magical had happened during the time that she and Leto had battled Greaves in Leto’s cabin.

She had passed through some kind of veil that had given her new insight into herself.

She had embraced Endelle’s ability to live out loud, and Beatrice had helped her to see that by returning as she had to Leto, to serve as obsidian flame, she had already begun the process of becoming real in her life, of giving up her ghost-ways.

Leto, it would seem, had experienced something similar. He was fully present when he looked at her, when he touched her face, as he did now, when he kissed her.

She slid beneath him and parted her legs. She wanted this moment with him more than anything, to have him make love to her with both hearts wide open.

“I love you so much,” he whispered.

She looked into his clear blue eyes. Her heart strained toward him. She would never get enough of him, of being this close, of looking at him. “Everything is different now, isn’t it?”

He smiled a very soft smile. “Yes. That separation I felt is no longer there. Earlier in my cabin, facing death, somehow I began to see things more clearly, especially my relationship with you. I let go of my holding back. I realized that if I had been fully engaged with you, Grace, if I had shared myself with you in a deeper, more profound way, we probably wouldn’t have ended up in that situation. ”

“I know what you mean. And because of my ghost-ways, I didn’t have enough life experience to do battle with Greaves. In that sense, I was as much to blame that the situation devolved as it did. But I’m here now, Leto.” She squeezed his buttocks, and his smile broadened.

“Me, too.” His gaze fell to her neck, and what do you know, his fangs emerged.

Her back arched.

He smiled a little more. She lifted her hand to touch the sharp tip. She punctured her thumb, then let the blood pool. She slid her thumb into his mouth and let him taste. He closed his eyes and groaned. He pushed his cock up against her hand. She squeezed his crown.

I’m too close, he sent.

She released him, and he shifted his hips. He found her entrance and pushed. She savored both sensations: what it was for him to feel how tight she was as he made his way inside her, and how much pleasure all that pushing gave her.

I love the connection, she sent. I love being this close to you, feeling you, then enjoying the pleasure you feel. It’s extraordinary.

He moved slightly and began licking her neck above the vein. Her voice caught in sharp little gasps. Do it, Leto. Please. I’m in agony now because I feel how close you are and now I’m close all over again.

He struck and began to pull heavily on her neck. Oh, God, your blood, Grace. It’s sweeter than I remember, and the power is heady, a rush everywhere. He groaned, and she felt that he would change for her, become the beast that she loved, which made her grow lax and smile.

He kept pulling at her neck and making short jabs within her body, but the entire time he swelled and transformed. She petted his arms and shoulders, relishing the size of him, thrilling at the massive growth of his muscles.

Even his cock was bigger, broader, so that with each new push, she arched in pleasure.

I’m here, he sent. She knew what he meant because his powerful mind was suddenly pushing within hers.

Everything had changed.

That was what she thought the moment Leto pierced her mind.

She surrounded him with her arms and savored. His right hand drifted up her thigh, her waist, and squeezed her breast. She felt tears start to her eyes. She had never felt so possessed, never felt like she belonged so much as she did right now with Leto stretched out on top of her.

She overlaid his hand with her palm and pressed that she might feel the pressure of his hand once more against her breast.

He groaned.

I love you, he sent. It was so different when he was deep within her mind and spoke telepathically, as though his words had resonance.

But it was also different because there were no more walls.

The intense physical sensations began to blend with all that she felt for him and with all that love that he was pouring into her.

She took his hand and lifted his wrist to her mouth. With the practice of two millennia, she brought her fangs forth and struck.

She felt the piercing because she could feel his external sensations. It hurt yet felt so good at the same time.

His blood hit her tongue and thirst was all she knew.

She drank, and somehow the power of his blood eased back the closeness of her orgasm, holding it just offshore.

The breh-hedden hovered at the edges as well, like last time, yet it all felt so very different because his love was like a constant wave pulsing over her now.

And in the same way, she let her love flow toward him.

Leto, I want to go deep into your soul this time.

Yes, please, yes.

She pushed against his mind, then fell in, because he wanted her there. She dove to the limits of his mind, then fell again through the cloud that separated his soul.

But once inside his soul, it was as though an iridescence surrounded her and covered her—and she knew it was his love, newly birthed in the past few hours. She let him feel her love as well, and the iridescence brightened.

I love you so much, he sent.

Delight filled her, a layer over the physical pleasure, a gentle coloring over the depth of the love that now flowed back and forth, two waves meeting and passing through each other, returning to meet and pass again.

Then suddenly the breh-hedden struck, so unexpected, like a wonderful fire that erupted to great heights.

The iridescence burned bright; pleasure filled her deep within her soul, then her mind, then shooting outward to wash in heavy waves over her body. She knew she was screaming, and Leto’s cries wrapped around her own, rising high into the sky.

She felt his pleasure as he began to come, which ignited hers. All the years of loneliness and separation burned away in the face of the breh-hedden, as though a fire ripped through her and through Leto. On that fire burned, forging a rapture that simply exploded.

She withdrew her fangs. He withdrew his.

“I’m coming again,” he cried against her ear. He pumped into her, that great hulk of him, hard and fast and true and honest and beautiful.

She received what he had to give. Her body responded with ecstasy again and again, pleasure flinging her into the stratosphere, waves of heat driving her back to be flung wide again until her screams resounded through the room and his roars could be heard all the way to the edge of the universe.

After a time, she floated back into her body.

She felt him float back into his.

He lay on top of her, sated, beyond sated; she could feel in him the intensity of his satisfaction.

She was moved beyond words as she embraced him. His wing-locks wept. She was damp beneath her back as well.

“The gates of rapture,” she said.

“What?”

“It was something I read in one of Beatrice’s collections, something like, ‘Approach the gates of rapture with wonder, Lay down the past, Then fall.’” She chuckled. “I fell hard.”

“Me, too.”