Page 114 of Walking in Darkness

He inhaled each one before he would turn around and breathe himself right back into me.

And it climbed. Climbed and climbed.

This pleasure that rode in on that storm.

Before it suddenly splintered. A thunderclap.

Rending through the middle of me with the force of a bomb.

It was a breaking.

A bonding.

A joining that could never be undone.

I stifled a cry as it rolled through to consume.

To race and touch and devastate.

Joy and ecstasy.

It was a rapture unlike anything I’d ever known.

He only pulled me closer when he came, his harsh brow twisted and his mouth parted on silent, jagged rasps. The tip of his nose just touched mine as his body went rigid.

Lean muscles flexing and bowing as he jerked and shook.

Sparks of pleasure billowed and broke. Shock waves rolled over us again and again.

And in it, we were endless.

Boundless.

Infinite.

And he kept me gathered that way as we struggled to catch our breaths. To come back down from the paradise where we’d been lifted.

Those eyes burned.

White flames that tethered me to him.

He tightened our fingers that were woven together, and he brought our joined hands to his chest.

The words that fell from his mouth were a rasp. As essential as the oxygen that’d grown dense, a desperate swelling in the room.

“I don’t want to spend one minute without you, Aria. Not here or in Tearsith or whatever other plane we may be taken to. You are mine for eternity. In every reality. In every life.”

I blinked, emotion riding thick on my chest.

Intensity radiated from him.

Potent and all consuming.

Though his face twisted in sincerity. In a plea.

In that thing that had come to life between us the first time I’d seen him standing in the doorway of the room of that facility. When the man had stood in front of me in the flesh, and I knew, in that second, that nothing would remain the same.

“Marry me,” he murmured, the words gruff.