Page 69 of Flirting with Darkness

He exhaled the plea, and I took it into my lungs.

“Yes,” I said, giving him my answer in my next breath.

Our next kiss was longer, deeper. I melted against him. The next thing I became aware of, I was against the bed, Vale lying beside me.

He pulled away.

“You have to understand what you’re agreeing to. It’s a nation at war. I’m not sure what we’ll be returning to.”

He held my shoulder, firmly. And though his gaze kept wandering down to my mouth, it always came back to my eyes—examining me, making sure he understood the answer to this important equation.

The answer to the equation of what I would do now, with my new, endless life.

The easiest question in the world.

“Do I seem, Lord Vale,” I said, “like someone frightened of the unknown?”

His eyes crinkled with a smile.

“Nosy mouse,” he murmured, and this time, when I tried to kiss him, he let me. We wound ourselves around each other. My thighs opened around him. I gave him every one of my new, heightened senses, and for the first time in my life, I felt so utterly at ease with the world that surrounded me.

Vale had discarded the withered rose in favor of my skin. The petals spread around us, now nothing but decaying dust.

Unnatural life.

Rightful death.

And Vale and I, between both, beholden to neither, and everything we were ever meant to be.

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