Chapter 85 He's coming with me
“I love you.” Hale hugged my shoulder, as his chest rose and fell. “Night take me, I love you Draki.”
“No. I love you more.” I tilted his chin up and caught his lips. “I love you so much more.”
I devoured his lips as he thrust into my fist, the friction of him against my own dick making our bodies jolt with sizzling currents.
My heart still ached at the memory of our fight. At his confession, the assumption he had nursed for years that he was placeholder, second best to Nymphaea.
How could he forget that I fought the Firstborns for him once, and would do it again. I would burn the world, literally, for his sake.
Just then, he moved his mouth to my neck, a possessive bite in an attempt to muffle his groans.
My back arched and my balls strung up. I could not hold on much longer. Not like this.
“Let’s always be this way,” I whispered urgently. “Like this. Always.”
His head moved in a nod, teeth still in my neck, sounds louder now as his hips trashed widely, discordant.
He was close.
“Look, sweet love.” I gripped his neck tightly, and he pulled away finally.
One look at his hot, throbbing cock sliding against mine, and he fell over the edge.
He set me off.
The stab of heat went up my tailbone and tore through me as my body bowed to the force of my own erection.
It had always been like this, Hale and I.
I did not need that clever mouth or sweet hole to unravel. He was enough, his eyes, his words, just rubbing against him like this. My teasing, mischievous, always teasing knight.
Boneless, I fell back against the carpet, still holding him to my chest as I struggled to breathe normally again.
“You're OK?”
“I don’t need your after-care dragon.” He panted into my chest.
“Yet you nuzzle against me like an abandoned cat.”
He was off me in a blink, but I was a heartbeat faster, pinning him back to my chest. “Stay. I like you this way.”
After a few seconds of silence, he grabbed my wrist and licked my hand clean.
I pulled his face up to kiss him, because how could I resist the taste of us on my lover's tongue? The uniqueness of vastly different creatures.
And this kiss, it was nothing like our usual. It was sweet, slow and savoring.
I moved my tongue in his head, greedy, intent on stealing every last bit of us till all I could taste was him. Mint and lemon.
We were breathless and hard when he pulled away. But he rested his head on my chest again, and I let him.
I liked it. It did not matter that he weighed as much as I did, he was not heavy.
He was not heavy because he was mine.
“I like you this way,” he whispered, repeating my words. And then he ran his tongue across my pec, through my shirt.
“Don’t go seeking trouble now, wolf.”
His response was a deep laugh. And then we fell into silence.
This was one of those few times our heads were blank. I wanted the moment to stretch because there was no telling the next time we would experience this.
“Do you have to go?” I sunk my fingers in his hair.
Again, that baritone laugh. “You have never been clingy.”
“That’s not an answer.” I continued running my fingers through his hair, feeling the soft brush of the fine silk that shared a color with the moon.
“You know I have to. I would rather not deal with the Japanese on top of these issues springing up in the districts. I’ll return their property, and hopefully they agree to my terms and stop turning our tourists away.”
He pushed off me. Our little moment was gone.
I sat up, watching him shrug his jacket off and roll up his sleeves to his elbows.
“So you're really letting that thief off?” I zipped my pants. And when I met his gaze again, I loved the longing I saw there.
“What else is there to do?” he shrugged. “The kid reminded me of Finn when we first met. Young and lost. There's that stubbornness too. I would have to torture him to death to get the name of his sponsor.”
“You are too kind.” I rose to my feet and turned for the bathroom to the left of my study.
His stride shadowed mine. “And you still have much to learn about being human.”
I scoffed, amused. “I don't. I have no dealings with them.”
At the bathroom sink, I washed my hands and smoothed down my shirt while he watched me, leaning against the door frame.
“Ogling me, darling?”
“I could hear your fight all the way from the other side of town.”
Turning the water faucet off, I shot him a glance. Then I turned to pluck a piece of wipe from the automatic dispenser.
“What about it?” I made sure to keep my voice even, mask my irritation.
But this was Hale. There was no fooling him. “You cannot go on this way,” he whispered, and there was this paternal tone that added significant weight to my mounting irritation.
“What way? Searching for my wife, trying to protect her from that blue-skinned monster and stop this godforsaken reincarnation cycle?”
“Doing all the wrong things.”
He walked into the bathroom, stopped beside me and studied his reflection in the mirror.
“You should know her better than anyone else.” He tugged a piece of wipe loose from the dispenser. “Control alienates her. This was the exact attitude that made Flore…”
We both froze. It was likely a mistake, but I couldn't believe he would speak her name.
Mention her.
We never spoke about her. We never discussed the woman Nymphaea was in her second lifetime.
“Finn will come with me,” he tossed the wipe in the trash. “I will protect him. Even if he were not mine, I would still protect him, because I would die protecting what was yours. You know it.”
I turned my back to him, hurrying back to the study because I could not trust myself.
But damn the stubborn man, he got in front of me.
The wind of his sudden movement knocked down two heavy leather-bound books from a shelf with a loud thud, and we turned to stare at them.