Page 46 of The Nightmare Bride

“I promise to hate every second,” he said against my lips, then grabbed my ass and hoisted me, his muscles bunching as he carried me to the counter and set me down.

Our mouths went to war. I clutched at him, barely able to make sense of our fevered whimpers.

I didn’t know whose they were, only that I was drowning.

Falling. Flying apart into a wondrous expanse of crackling heat and want, want, want.

His hands roamed the contours of my breasts and belly, and I pawed at him with equally frantic fingers. He yanked my legs apart and pressed close, grinding his desire against me. He kissed me so deeply I wondered if he could taste the hunger I’d been bottling up for weeks.

Oh, goddess. He was going to annihilate me. I could already tell. An inch, a mile, and so much more besides.

His scalding fingers skated down the outsides of my thighs. He gripped the hem of my nightgown and lifted.

“Don’t stop kissing me,” I gasped into his mouth. “Don’t you dare fucking stop.”

He answered with a hungry sound and moved his hands to my neckline, instead. Then he gripped the keyhole closure and just...

...ripped. Down the middle. Like it was easy. Like it was nothing.

His mouth never left mine as he flung the halves of my nightgown apart.

Air hit my bare skin, and I forced my legs wide, opening to him, granting him every scrap of control.

His tongue plunged into my mouth, and I bit down hard enough to earn a groan.

My hands scrabbled at his back, fingernails etching lines into his skin.

I’d broken some invisible barrier. Strayed far beyond the point of surrender. But I might as well wreak some havoc now that I’d resolved to climb onto the pyre and set myself ablaze.

Kai’s rough hands collared my waist. He finally broke the kiss and pressed me back until my elbows hit the counter. We stared at each other, panting. The marble wicked the warmth from my skin.

He perused the length of me, his dilated eyes lingering on the swell of my breasts, then the valley between my legs.

“You’re exquisite,” he said. “Exceptional in every way.”

Before I could respond, he dropped to his knees. I barely had time to coil in anticipation before his tongue slid against my wetness. No pause. No break. Just dazzling destruction unleashed.

I cried out as my head fell back. Sweet Zephyrine, if I’d thought that thing he did with his tongue felt good on my neck, letting him do it there made me want to levitate off the counter.

He licked and lapped and sucked. My eyes crossed behind closed lids, my entire body quaking as the void threatened to engulf me.

Then he slipped two fingers into me and I nearly rocketed free of my skin. The boundaries of myself collapsed to a shimmer.

He kept going. And going. Until I started to fold inward, a star verging on implosion.

“Oh, fuck ,” I gibbered at the ceiling. “Fuckfuckfuck, you have to stop. Please. Or...”

His tongue slowed as his fingers disappeared. When I opened my eyes, he stood between my splayed legs, his face hard as he yanked his breech-laces from their eyelets. “Or what?”

“I’ll come.” I sounded as parched as a person could get.

“The problem being?”

“I want to do it with you. Around you.”

“Well.” He flashed a half-smile, this one rigid with promise. “That doesn’t sound entirely unenjoyable.”

He jerked his pants down, then gripped my thighs and yanked me to the counter’s edge.

My nightgown rumpled beneath me, still caught around my elbows, the torn halves trailing into the darkness.

A glance into the mirrors offered me a thousand versions of sculpted magnificence—the rippled texture of Kai’s ribcage and the high globes of his ass.

The creamy, cabled length of his thighs.

The rounded crowns of his shoulders, bronzed from the sun.

My breath thinned to a standstill. I slid my attention back to him, then downward, to where he’d already lined himself up.

My tongue went dry. Goddess, it would hurt for a second. Maybe for a few. And right then, I could have wept, because I absolutely needed it to. I needed to feel him, all of him, needed to transmute this bottomless craving into something I could name, something I could lose myself in.

He paused, one hand drifting to my waist. It was the first tender touch all night, but I knew it wouldn’t last. It was a prelude, the last lull before he unleashed all the ferocity caged into the straining lines of his body.

“Gentle?” he said. “Or rough?”

“Rough.” I widened my legs. “If you’re gentle, I’ll kill you.”

“Gods. My vicious wife. I was hoping you’d say that.”

Wife . The word bounced around in my head, nonsensical, because hadn’t he signed the annulment already? I gathered a breath to ask, but his grip clamped around my waist, and he buried himself in me in one clean thrust. Everything in my head vaporized to white-hot silence.

Fucking.

Hell.

He eased out, then drove in again. My spine arched, bending me back onto the marble, baring my throat to him.

He filled me up painfully, perfectly, oh-so-right, and I made a sound that might have been a word or an appeal or maybe the death cry of every moment in which I’d resisted him, probably knowing the whole time that I would end up right here, entirely at his mercy.

He surged into me. A groan tore from his throat, delicious enough to feast on for weeks. He wasn’t fast, but he wasn’t slow, either. Just forceful and unforgiving, and it was everything I’d wanted and more.

More, more, so much more, because this wasn’t the quiet fulfillment of Merron or the others, but something knife-edged, a totality of pleasure that pushed me toward some desolate brink.

Kai claimed me again and again, and I began to unravel, the layers of myself falling away with every buck of my body against the counter.

“Squeeze my throat.” My whisper was barely audible over the sound of my own fade to extinction. “Just a little.”

He obeyed, circling my neck with a calloused palm.

Pressure thinned my airway—not much, but enough to ignite bright stars in my vision. Every sensation daisy-chained itself to the next. Weight became desperation became pleasure became ecstasy.

Oh, goddess. I was going to die, in bliss. And yet I’d never felt more alive.

My awareness shrank to the scrape of breath against silence, the dearth of air in my lungs, the gift of Kai’s body in mine.

He gave himself to me, swift and certain.

Somewhere within me, greed sprouted wings and grew a heartbeat of its own.

I cared about nothing but him, the friction of him, and more and faster and yes, yes, yes, just like that.

Then he stopped, abruptly. The pressure at my throat vanished as he withdrew. I was empty, suddenly. So empty it hurt.

“No,” I wailed, propping myself up on my elbows. At first, I thought he meant to punish me, but he gathered me up like a ragdoll, pulling the shredded nightgown from my arms and throwing it aside. He carried me to the bedroom, then tossed me onto the bed.

Before the mattress had even finished bouncing, he was on me again, inside me, the angle even deeper this time, though I would’ve said such a thing was impossible.

My eyes rolled back. He curled over me, fastening one hand around the nape of my neck as he drove into me, faster now, brutal and beautiful and consuming.

I let go. Between one heartbeat and the next, I dissolved into a cataclysm of pleasure. He was a paradise of heat and firmness, a living artwork I couldn’t stop touching.

That angle. Oh, shit, that angle. He was exactly where he needed to be. Nothing else mattered. Just him, on top of me. Around me. In me.

That abyss surfaced from the deep, coming to claim me, and I bucked my hips, wanting nothing more than to fling myself into its blissful black reaches.

“Come for me, sweet wife,” he whispered, and bit down on my earlobe.

That silver flash of pain joined the roar inside me, giving me the last push I needed to crest the rise and go careening down the other side. I spun apart, a billion star-studded pieces cascading through the dark. Wave after wave consumed me as I called his name.

And then he was doing the same, mincing my name with silken curses as he buried himself deep and stayed there, his whole body contracting. The pinnacle lasted and lasted and finally released him. He melted atop me, an inescapable weight.

I lay there, boneless, my legs twitching. Aftershocks rippled through me.

Moments passed. Or minutes. Maybe a lifetime.

“Fuck,” he said, imbuing the word with at least ten times as many vowels as it actually had. “That was...”

“Awful,” I hurried out, unwilling to hear anything else.

His chest heaved with formless laughter. “Right. Precisely the word I was looking for. I don’t know that I’ve ever suffered anything that torturous.”

I slid my hands along the planes of his back, finding him slicked with even more sweat than his lawn battle had earned him. Something about that delighted me, knowing he’d had to work harder for this than for anything else. “It was...unique, though,” I said. “As experiences go.”

“Yes, well. I would’ve called it singular, myself.”

Singular . Even that was an understatement. Zephyrine knew I loved sex, but I hadn’t known it could feel like that . Nor did I know how I was supposed to content myself with the stock variety again, now that I did.

He lifted his head. Sweat dimmed his hair to dark bronze while a rosy afterglow lit his face. “I suppose we’ll have to do it again. See if it can get even worse.”

My stomach tightened. Which verged on comical, considering I’d just had the best orgasm of my life, five minutes ago. “You’re right. You’ll probably have to try everything you can think of.”

One eyebrow kicked up. “Oh, really? Everything? Because I can be surprisingly creative, when I put my mind to it.”

A flutter rolled through me. “Is that a threat?”

“Do you want it to be?”

I lifted my chin. “Maybe.”

“Fine.” He chuffed a soft exhale. “Then yes. But you’ll have to tell me where the line is.”

Something twinged beneath my ribs. “There isn’t one. Not tonight. You can do whatever you want to me.”

“ Anything ?”

“Well, within reason. I’ll tell you if it’s too much.”

His expression darkened into something diabolical, and my pulse gathered speed like a stone bouncing downhill. I might regret this in the morning. Goddess, I hoped I would regret this in the morning.

“What about you?” I whispered. “Any hard lines I should know about?”

His blue stare skewered me to the bed. “Yes. There is one thing. Something I absolutely, unequivocally refuse to do with you tonight.”

“What’s that?”

“Sleep,” he said.

I squeaked, then caught myself and glowered. “Fine. I guess I can live with that. If I absolutely have to.”