Page 112 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
“Don’t stop,” she sobbed. “Don’t ever stop—”
His hand slid between her thighs, thumb circling her clit, coaxing every last spark until her entire body seized around him again.
The third orgasm cracked her open.
She came with a broken sound, shaking apart in his arms, voice lost to wind and bloom and breath.
They collapsed into the dust, locked together. Panting. Drenched. Changed.
The storm had passed. The fire had gone out. Their bodies lay entangled in the cradle of the Hollow, limbs crossed, skin sticky, glowing faintly in the dark like embers still alive beneath ash.
The wind had gone soft again. The exhale after the scream, after the vow, after the claiming.
Petals clung to her skin, to his chest, to the sticky lines of gold where bark had cracked and healed. The desert had gone quiet, finally satisfied.
Nora’s cheek rested against the curve of his chest, her palm flat over the space where his heart now beat steady and deep beneath warm bark. His arms were wrapped around her like he had no plans to let her go and no need to prove anything about it.
Her thighs ached. Her cunt throbbed. Her voice was gone.
But she was smiling.
Her body hummed with him, with light, with the land. The glow that had once flared uncontrolled now warmed her steadily from within. The mark at her throat had settled into something more permanent, etched, humming, proud.
She had taken him.
She had been changed.
Not broken. Not swallowed.
Made whole.
Asher breathed softly beneath her. One hand cupped the back of her head. The other traced lazy lines along the curveof her spine. His body was no less monstrous now, but it felt different. Softer, somehow. Real. Like a myth learning how to be a man again.
Like something earned.
His voice, when it came, was low. Unsteady. Awed.
“You walked through the fire and came back.”
He touched her face like she might vanish. Like part of him still believed she should have.
She wasn’t supposed to survive this.
Not the heat. Not the hunger. Not him.
He hadn’t been made for love.
He’d been made to endure. To wait. To break.
But she’d come anyway.
And she’d stayed.
Nora smiled against his chest.
“I didn’t,” she whispered. “Not all of me.”
Her fingers curled into his ribs like roots finding home.
