The feel of his hands against my bare skin set every cell in my body on fire. James tore his mouth away from mine, but he used his teeth as much as his lips to trail down my neck. I groaned and leaned into his touch as he cupped my breast.
We stripped each other of our clothes in a desperate frenzy, our motions peppered with kisses and possessive bites. Our mate bond was fully open between us, and I couldn’t tell where I stopped, and he began. At this moment in time, we were one, our souls bound together.
James nudged my legs apart, making me gasp as I was spread open in front of him. He looked down at my bare flesh almost reverently, a feverish light in his eyes.
“I want you,” I whispered to him, my voice hoarse from desire. “I’m yours.”
James met my eyes, and tenderly rubbed his thumb against my lower lip. “And I’m yours.”
With those words, James slid himself inside me completely. My hands twisted in the sheets, the pleasure of finally having him inside me almost too much to handle at once.
When James started moving inside of me, stroking every inch of my needy core, I was lost in the sensation. He moved faster, deeper, harder as I moaned. With each stroke, the muscles in his back flexed against my hands before he slammed back into me.
I gripped James tight as he murmured my name as if praying to a goddess. I was unable to form words of any kind, my breath gasping as I moved my hips in time to his. I lost control completely as release tore through me, lost in the bond between us.
Pleasure pounded through my veins, making my limbs boneless, my mind floating in a sea of light, my heart tightly bound to James. Our bond was everything in that moment, and I was lost in the golden light.
It felt like an eternity before the glow faded away and left us back in the real world. My body was wrapped around his, his thumb tracing lazy circles on my shoulder. There were no words needed between us because we were beyond all of that.
I closed my eyes, my body completely relaxed. Tonight, I would lay here with James wrapped around me, but tomorrow… Who knew what tomorrow would hold?
Chapter 15
Anna
I forced my tired eyes to stay open as I marched forward, my three bodyguards not far behind. Making a gateway here had been the easy part. We’d been walking randomly around the countryside for hours now without any sign we were headed in the right direction.
The information Arminius had given us was almost two thousand years old. Who’s to say that the magic we were looking for still existed?
“How will we know when we’re close?” Jason called to me.
“Hush,” I murmured as I held up a hand to stop him.
I tilted my head back and closed my eyes, gripping the coin Arminius had given me tightly. I projected all of my desperate need onto that coin. My hope for the future, my determination to make the world right again, I concentrated all of that into the coin. This had to work.
A faint pulse of magic, so faint that I would have missed it if I weren’t concentrating so hard, emitted from the coin and shot off into the distance. My heart pounded with excitement. Arminius told me that the coin would bring Insula Avallonis to me, but there was no reason we couldn’t meet in the middle.
“This way,” I said as I turned to the east and strode forward through the thick mist. My feet squelched into the mud, and I grimaced as I struggled to pull each foot out of the muddy ground.
“Uh, Anna,” Mason interrupted. “We aren’t going to make it far through this marshland without appropriate equipment.”
I sighed in frustration, but acknowledged he was right.
“We can return to town,” Jason suggested. “Speak with some of the locals who might be familiar with an easy way to navigate through this.”
“The mist may dissipate by tomorrow,” James grumbled in agreement.
“The mist isn’t natural,” I told him absentmindedly. “It’s part of the magical defenses to keep humans away. That’s probably why you have the urge to leave right now.”
“Huh,” James grunted in reply. “Similar to the mist that the Northern Pack uses to hide their village?”
“Davis mentioned that the Jaguars have something like this, too,” Jason added helpfully. “But Sam didn’t know how it was made, only that it was