The Promised Queen (Forgotten Empires #3)- Jeffe Kennedy Page 0,29

face buried against his skin, his flesh and lifeblood in my mouth, like kissing him but at a more profound level. Sex, even the brutal unraveling pleasure Con had brought to me, hadn’t felt this … intimate. He was feeding me from his own body, out of selfless love, and my heart—so shredded and lonely—flowered in his nourishing heat. My sex swelled, growing slick, and Con’s cock hardened against my belly. Aroused and needy, I shifted, parting my legs to straddle one muscular thigh, my sleeping gown riding up so the leather of his pants provided delightful friction against my naked sex.

I rubbed against him as I fed, in a slow rhythm that echoed our heartbeats. I sucked harder on his throat, a parody and deepening of the love bites that came with sex, and he shuddered under me. Groaning, the sound thrumming through me like distant thunder, Con murmured my name, his arms vising to hold me tighter against him. He flexed his hips, moving beneath me, a sensual undulation that rocked us both. I reached with my intact hand for his cock to free it, but he caught my wrist, stopping me.

“You need to feed and rest.”

I needed this, needed even more of him inside me. But I couldn’t say so with my mouth full of his blood. So I cheated, using the magic of Calanthe to reverse his intention so his hand released its grip on my wrist and fell away. He uttered an oath of surprise as I tugged at the laces of his pants. The pressure of his erection and the slide of our bodies had him springing free of the confining leather. I wrapped his shaft in my hand, working him hard, and his head fell back in abandonment. “Lia,” he moaned. “How I love you. Have me then. Have everything.”

I slid up his body—my mouth still fixed on his throat—and impaled myself on him. The convulsion took us both, twin cries of need climbing from our bodies. Pressing down, I sheathed him in the glove of my body, releasing the pressure of my mouth. Then I rose up, slowly, titillating us both, and I sucked hard, fresh blood filling me. He moved with me, flexing and filling, giving me everything.

And I reversed the flow to give back to him. All the verdant, fertile daylight pleasures of Calanthe as I remembered them. The sounds of bees in the blossoms so heavy with pollen and nectar their heads drooped with it. The scent of sea air and sunshine-heated leaves. The blue of the sky and the soil-dark richness below. The song of birds and the caress of petals on naked skin, the bite of thorns and the pain of birth. I rolled over him like gentle thunder before the downpour lets loose. His hand cupped my head against him, the other bracing my hip, helping me to work the plunging rhythm as old as the tides that surged onto land.

He stiffened as I did, the impending climax seizing us both in a grip as relentless as time. Tighter the tension coiled, our hearts racing in tandem, the magic of life and death pounding in cycle of blood and sex and love. A keening sound filled my ears and I realized it was me, the cry building to unbearable heights, and he thrust into me chanting my name like a prayer to his own personal goddess.

And we came together. The climax rent and sealed us, bound together by my mouth drawing his blood from his heart, my sex drinking the seed from his balls, and all of my skin sending life, and gratitude, and love back into him.

We rode that point of impossible ecstasy together, then crashed, falling into a long spiral of light and darkness, the dense fertile soil of Calanthe catching us, salt and sea, blood and flowers.

* * *

Lia went lax against me, lissome and fragrant. The sweet scent of blossoms rose from her skin, softly new, like springtime in Oriel when the snows first began to melt, withdrawing in patches to reveal those white and purple star-shaped flowers my mother had loved.

Lia nuzzled my neck, making a sleepy sound, and I stroked her head and back, soothing her. It seemed the fuzz on her scalp had grown, which surely was a good sign. I cradled that hope tenderly, unsure how to properly coax it into being.

Instead of succumbing to sleep, however, Lia shifted, giving my neck a last kiss that both stung