“I—” she started. His lips brushed against the point where her jaw met her neck, butterfly light, and her eyelids fluttered closed.
“You are singular, in the entire world, Jenna. This has already gone beyond a mere seduction.”
Desperate to escape the spell he was spinning, she grasped at straws. “I can’t. I’ve never—” And yet, she realized with astonished horror, her body coming alive in ways she’d never known possible, she could.
“I know,” he said, the look on his face hungry and dark.
In the face of all that power and gravity centered on her, she realized she could all too easily.
He didn’t just want her. Want was too weak a word for the fire that burned in his eyes.
The pull of it was overwhelming. She wished she could claim the magnetism between them stemmed completely from outside herself, that his need for her, how it poured off him, was responsible for the force of her attraction to him, but she could not. It would have been a shameful lie to blame what was building and blossoming entirely on him—though his words flowed over her like silk—when she knew that at least half of it erupted from within her, a seed of desire heretofore unknown bursting to life.
Who was this man, this creature of pleasure and luxury—a man she had only ever seen in passing and the exact kind of man to whom she had been invisible over these past three years—who seemed so driven to have her?
And why did the fact of it make her body smolder and heat?
Like glass in a kiln, the reasons, even the need for reasons, could not withstand the growing fire between them.
There was nothing gentle in her resistance melting away, just like there was nothing gentle about the way he was seducing her. Everything between them was up front and direct about its own dangerousness. Just like the man himself.
As if a dam had burst within her, twenty-nine years of chastity exploded at him, rushed at him in a wave so powerful that he was no longer the one driving the momentum of their seduction, but her.
Her fingers came to his hair at the exact moment his hand cupped the back of her skull and tilted her face upward.
She caught the flash of fierce green fire in his eyes before he descended, devouring her in a kiss that was more like a conflagration.
Her skin ignited everywhere on contact, exuding heat and glow so intensely that she knew that despite the circumstances, despite everything that was so very wrong with this, this moment and this man were exactly right—the union for which she had kept faith all these years.
And even still, there was no time for any of it. They had already wasted too much time talking. All too soon she would need to return to her duty.
Urgency drove her fingers, as confident and persistent in removing buckles and releasing the latches of her gear in front of him as they were in writing reports and disarming sparring opponents.
Her inner voice had spoken and she wasted no time with trepidation.
Like with the bawdy pre-wedding rituals that Priory folk guffawed through, her faith taught that there was nothing wrong in physical love, no practice taboo, so long as both parties entered into it with their hearts joined and open, willing and eager to find joy in each other’s bodies.
Her faith also taught that physical intimacy was a sacred bond between paired souls, each made to soothe and comfort the other. She accepted that, took it as fact, but she had never anticipated that she would recognize her pairing at first meeting—let alone feel it with such certainty. Nor had she ever imagined that she would feel her partner’s hunger for her as a tangible thing.
But she did. Awareness and, of all things, understanding of him thrummed through her body and bones and even teeth. Hot, electric, almost magical—in no way like the practical fantasies of a woman whose greatest romantic hope up to this point had been to end up with someone she found both attractive and kind.
Instead, her destiny stood before her—gorgeous, dangerous, and as far from kind and tame as it was possible to be.
He was nothing like she had imagined, yet he was hers, matched her in a way that she didn’t understand and had never experienced before—neither in the world of the capital nor her Priory community.
And they had already delayed this moment for too long. Not merely over the afternoon, but throughout their lives up to this point.