Modern Romance September 2015 Books 5-8. Chantelle Shaw

Or became more bearable somehow. “The change you mean happened much earlier. When I accepted that I would become what I hated in order to do what I must. I do not regret avenging my family. I regret only that I share anything with the man who killed them—that in order to honor my family I became a murderer, just like him.”

      “No.” Her voice was fierce then, immediate, and her eyes glittered. “Nothing like him. You could never be anything like him. He killed children for his own selfish gain. All you did was take out a monster.”

      And Kavian had not realized, not until that moment, how very much he’d needed to hear her say that. How much he’d needed proof that she was who he’d thought she was from the start. He didn’t want to analyze it. He didn’t want to consider the implications. To hell with all that.

      She was looking at him as if he was some kind of hero. Not the monster he’d long ago accepted he’d had to become because he’d had no other choice. She was looking at him as if—

      But he couldn’t let himself go too far down that road. He couldn’t risk it.

      “Come here,” he gritted out at her, and he didn’t smile when she jerked slightly at the harsh command, or even when she obeyed. He crossed his arms over his chest and peered down at her as she drew near. “Kiss me.”

      Amaya swayed toward him, the light playing off the silken shine of her shift and the smooth intoxication of her skin. She hooked one hand over his forearm where it crossed the other, and then she went up on her toes and slid her other hand along his jaw as if she sought to comfort him. And he felt the wholly uncharacteristic urge to lean into her palm, as if she was sunlight and he could bask in her a while.

      Just a little while, something in him urged.

      “Does this mean I passed your test, Kavian?” she asked him, a smile in those dark chocolate eyes and teasing the corners of her lips. “Or are there more hoops I must leap through tonight?”

      He smiled then. Triumph and need and that heavy thing in his chest that made his heart beat too fast, too hard. He didn’t want to name it. He refused.

      “It means I want you to kiss me,” he said, as if hunger for her weren’t tearing at him, deeper and more ravenous than any he’d ever felt before. As if he could stand here all night, ignoring it. “I do not believe I was unclear.”

      “A kiss is my only reward for hours on a horse and hard labor by the fire?” She was teasing him again. Kavian understood that, even though he rather thought she took her life in her hands when she dared do it. Or maybe that was his life she held, and she was squeezing it much too hard as she went. So hard, it was almost a struggle to breathe. “That hardly seems equal to the effort I put out today to please you. Shouldn’t you be the one to please me for a change?”

      “Kiss me,” he suggested, darkly, “and you will find out exactly how pleasing I can be, azizty.”

      She didn’t laugh, though he felt it there in the air between them, music and magic, as if she had. She hooked her other hand around his neck and stretched herself up toward him, and he let her. He waited.

      Amaya hovered there for a moment, her mouth a scant breath from his, her dark gaze solemn. Kavian remembered, suddenly, their first meeting. That same look in her eyes as they’d met his for the first time. The promises she’d made him then.

      And that next morning, when her brother had come to tell him that she had fled the palace, her whereabouts unknown.

      “If you break another vow, Amaya, I will not be quite so forgiving.” He hadn’t meant to speak. He hardly knew his own voice when he did.

      But her lips curved slightly, only slightly, and she didn’t pull away. “Has this been your version of forgiving?”

      He could hardly hear her over the thunder of his own heart.

      “You’ll understand if I find that confusing.”

      “You are the only living creature I have ever forgiven anything.”

      It was a confession, gruff and unexpected. And he should not have made it to her, Kavian knew, but it mattered to him that she had not looked at him with horror drenching those lovely eyes once he’d told her his story. It mattered to him that she’d sought to defend him instead.

      He could not for the life of him understand why it mattered.

      Why she did.

      Only that she had from the start. That she made him believe he could have a different sort of ending than the one he was certain he deserved.

      “I’m honored,” she said quietly now, like nothing so much as another promise, one more solemn vow, and then she kissed him.

      She was as sweet as she was enticing, and he drank her in. He let her explore him, tasting him and teasing him, kissing him again and again until he could feel the catch in her breath.

      And then, when he couldn’t take it any longer, he slid his hands deep into her hair, he hauled her against him and he took control.

      If the tent had ignited around them, he wouldn’t have noticed.

      He simply lifted her to him so that she wrapped her long legs around his hips and her arms around his neck, and still he plundered her mouth. He angled his jaw and he took the kiss deeper, kissing her as if his life depended on it. As if he could kiss her forever. As if time had stopped for precisely this.

      And then, when she was making those wild little sounds in the back of her throat that were more precious to him than all the jewels in his possession, in the whole of his treasury and all of his museums besides, he carried her over to the bed and laid her down on the soft cloud of linens.

      He stretched out above her, pressing her deeper into the bed and taking her mouth again. And he kept on kissing her. He could not seem to taste her enough. He could not seem to slake his own thirst.

      Her hands moved all over him as if she was learning him with her fingertips, soaking him in. He shifted, slipping a hand down to cup the sweet heat of her in his palm. He held her there until she moaned, and only then did he move, slipping beneath the lacy underthings she wore and thrusting his fingers deep into her molten core.

      It was his name she cried when she shook around him, and Kavian hoarded that to him like another vow. Her voice against the night, brighter than the lanterns that lit the space around them, etched deep inside him like letters carved into the stone of his own heart.

      He was filled then with a kind of wild desperation he’d never felt before. He needed to be inside her, or die of it, and he hardly knew what to make of it when he saw his hands shook slightly as he rid her of her little slip and those lacy panties she wore, then peeled off his own boxer briefs.

      Nothing mattered but that slick initial thrust, so deep inside her they seemed more like one, and even that was not enough.

      It will never be enough, a voice within him whispered.

      And just then, he didn’t care.

      He gathered her close. His arms wrapped around her, her mouth against his neck. And he rocked into her, slow and easy. A pace he kept even when she started to shift, to writhe. To move her own hips against his, trying to buck at him and make him go faster.

      He laughed, a dark jubilation that seemed to come from every part of him, while she dug her fingers so hard into the skin of his back that he could feel her nails.

      And still he held that torturous pace. A slow thrust in, a long drag back. Again and again, driving them both insane.

      “Please,” she began to whisper. “Please, Kavian. Please.”

      She was flushed red. Her whole body went stiff and she threw her head back, and Kavian had never seen anything so beautiful in all his life. He pounded into her, his own promise and his own solemn vow, over and over, like a prayer.

      And when she burst into flame again, white-hot and endless,