Page 57 of The Nightmare Bride

“Just give me a second, will you? Use it to beg some more, if you like.”

“Please,” I whispered. When he still didn’t move, I raised my head and lapped at his birthmark, trying to coax him into continuing. He shuddered at the contact, then opened his eyes, flooding me with the heat of his regard. The hand behind my knee tightened, his body nudging at mine.

“Harlowe Hollander,” he said.

My head thunked back down against the bed. “What?”

“Your name. Not ‘just Harlowe.’ Not anymore. You’re Harlowe Hollander.”

A sting stabbed my eyes, even while my body cried out for him. “That’s my last name?”

“Yes.”

“You were trying to remember your own last name?”

He chuckled. “No. I was trying to remember what I told you. Before. So I can tell you again. Because this time, the words are mine.”

I lost myself in his eyes. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I would let him say anything he wanted, as long as it convinced him to get inside me already. “So say it.”

“I will. But don’t worry. You needn’t say it back.” He tilted his hips, sinking into me, inch by torturous inch.

Oh, thank goddess. I ran my hands up his back as pleasure thrummed along every nerve.

A tormented sigh bled out of me as he seated himself. Gods among us, but the fit was exquisite. He found a slow rhythm, one that saturated me with sensation.

“In the sacred embrace of the swamp,” he said, “here under the watchful eyes of Zephyrine, I pledge my heart and soul.”

My eyes snapped open, and...wait, when had they closed?

His starry gaze locked on mine, as if he were mapping every reaction sparked by the joining of our bodies. Molten pleasure pooled along my spine.

“I vow to forsake all others and seek refuge in your arms.”

“What?” I whispered, although I’d heard him clearly. I just didn’t understand.

He kissed me, soft and deep, never altering his rhythm. “Like goddess-blessed oaks, we grow alongside each other, our roots entwined, reaching for the same sunlit heavens.”

Wait. Those words. I’d heard them before. Said them before.

The world’s heartbeat faltered, plunging the moment into stillness. Sweet Zephyrine. Our wedding vows. He was saying our wedding vows.

“We remain as individuals.” Every slide of his body ignited a constellation of pleasure, one star after another bursting into existence, lighting up a whole sky. “But together, we stand against the winds of adversity. United, we weather life’s storms.”

A soft cry rolled out of me. They were beautiful, these words. Dense and lush and graven with meaning. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t listened the first time.

“When you need shelter, I offer you my shade. When you need uplifting, I share my dappled light.”

“Kai.” My voice cracked. Wonder rushed in to seal up the break.

“Shh.” Stroke. Slide. Quiet ecstasy. “Let me finish.”

My hands drifted to the small of his back, which flexed and dipped. Every surge stoked the rising glow within me. “Yes. Please. Please finish.”

“I offer you my years.” His voice thickened. Roughened. “My heart and my body, and a place at my side. I vow never to leave yours, until darkness takes me.”

I struggled to keep my gaze pinned to his. My lashes fluttered, trying to close, yet I was captive to the way he moved. To the searing pressure that pulled every piece of me toward a flame-lit center. “Oh, gods. You’re going to make me?—”

“By the whisper of the wind,” he rushed out. “By the beating of our entwined hearts, I pledge myself to you, now and forever.”

He made a sound that let me know I could finish.

My eyes closed. Bliss arrowed through me, silver-tipped, lighting a blaze along every nerve. It spread and consumed me, became me, until I could taste the cypress-smoke heat of him, see the molten glow of his touch as it pulsed behind my eyes.

I was crying out. Keening louder than the nightmare. Losing control of my body as it detonated, transforming me into a shower of white-hot satisfaction.

Holy.

Shit.

It peaked and lasted and finally faded to a sparkling afterglow.

By the time I could feel my body again, Kai lay limp atop me.

I almost regretted having missed the particulars—the tense of his body, the quiver of his muscles—but I had gone somewhere else.

Ascended to some stratospheric pinnacle I’d never reached before.

“It can’t possibly get worse than that,” he mumbled into my shoulder.

I laughed, but there was hardly any life in it. It sounded weak and wrung-out, just like me.

“Don’t be unimaginative,” I said. “It can definitely get worse.”

He raised his head. “Oh? I’d like to see you try.”

I slanted a brow upward. “Is that a challenge?”

“Do you want it be?”

“Maybe.”

A smile tugged at his mouth. “Then yes.”

I smiled back. “Then challenge accepted.”

He raised expectant brows, and I wriggled, managing to roll him onto his back without sundering our connection. He stretched out beneath me, propping his hands behind his head, his biceps bulging in a way that probably should have been illegal.

“Well?” His smile was nothing short of provocative. “I’m waiting. Hurry up and devastate me, my sweet wife.”

I leaned down, taking my time, turning all the honeyed tortured he’d subjected me to back on him. I tongued his birthmark, scraped featherlight fingernails down the insides of his arms, swallowed the purring groan I wrested from his throat.

He soon stirred inside me again, and I began a slow circle of my hips.

“Gods among us.” He made the words into a labored exhale. “Yes, like that.”

A devilish smile lit my face. I could do worse. Much worse. I locked my hips into a drawn-out rhythm and curled over him, as if to nip at his neck. He craned his head, exposing his throat, but I whispered in his ear, instead.

“In the sacred embrace of the swamp, here under the watchful eyes of Zephyrine, I pledge my heart and soul.”

A breath sped in through his lips. His hands splayed against my thighs. “Lioness? You don’t have to.”

“I know. I want to. I vow to forsake all others and seek refuge in your arms.”

His body stiffened—in anticipation, or surprise, or pleasure, or...all of the above, hopefully.

My hips rolled as I said the vows back to him, each and every word, though a few times, I had to take a moment and hunt for the next piece. I wasn’t an actor, who could memorize lines with no apparent effort.

But I got through it, working him into a tense knot of heavy breathing and glazed eyes along the way. Warmth spun through me with every arc of my pelvis, but I held myself back from the edge. I wanted to watch him, this time.

And I did. His eyes turned up beneath falling lids. I savored the exquisite, shivering line of his throat as he rasped my name. The pull of taut muscle beneath hot skin, the clench of his abdomen as he spilled his pleasure into me.

I kept going, until he clamped his hands around my hips and held me still, panting and wide-eyed. I leaned down to kiss him. When I pulled back, a fresh shine had gathered along his lashes.

“Gods, you were right.” He blinked hard. “That was definitely worse. Consider me defeated. Absolutely ruined.”

“Mmm.” I hummed, gloating. “Weird that your defeat looks a whole lot like an excess of emotion.”

“Emotion? No. Of course not.”

“Uh huh.”

“Haven’t I told you I don’t have feelings?” He cleared his throat. “You’ve just caught me in a moment of extreme eye hydration. That’s all.”

“Oh, right. And let me guess. Nothing like this has ever happened to you before?”

“Never,” he said, all solemnity.

I laughed, and kissed him again, and his hands found a place in my hair. He kissed me back, with feeling, until everything went quiet within me.

I finally eased off him and nestled into the crook of his arm, letting him tuck me against his side. “Harlowe Hollander,” I whispered. “I do like that.”

“Not nearly as much as I do.”

I smiled into his chest. Beyond the window, the nightmare wailed, and for a hairsbreadth of a moment, I almost felt...sorry for it. It sounded like a child, throwing a tantrum because it couldn’t have its way.

I lay there. This would be the last time I ever heard these sounds, and some part of me felt compelled to commemorate them, somehow. To listen and remember, even though the storm had all but given up trying to break me.

A few minutes later, the wailing changed. Fat raindrops slapped against broad leaves. The plip-plop swelled to a muted roar.

I blinked. Huh. That was new. Nightmares never ended with rain. But I guessed this one was different.

I nuzzled against Kai’s side. “What do you think that’s about?”

He didn’t answer. And when I looked up, I laughed.

He was asleep. Of course.

I studied his face—the broad sweep of his brows, the taper his nose, the arrogant line of his jaw.

The wings in my chest rustled, because this was my husband.

In the truest sense, now. And what a husband he was.

If I’d fortified my defenses with high gates, he’d scaled the walls singing.

If my heart had been a cold, black stone, he’d polished it to onyx, and now it gleamed when held up to his unfailing light.

If I’d done my best to lock him out, he’d banged on the door so loudly and for so long that I’d finally opened it, exasperated, only for him to steal inside and declare himself on the front end of an indefinite stay.

Now all I had to do was let him.

I scooted closer, smiling. The last thought I had before falling asleep was that maybe being married felt different, after all.