“Okay, if this blows up in my face, know my intentions were good.”
Holding her hands over the cushion, Vivienne closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
As golden light began to gather between her fingertips, Rhys’s eyes widened. “Okay, Vivienne, maybe don’t—”
But then the pillow sort of shimmered, the family crest bleeding out to be replaced with a red dragon.
Specifically the red dragon of Wales, but one that was grinning, claws extended in the air and painted the same bright purple as Vivienne’s own nails.
Lifting the pillow triumphantly, she grinned. “Much better.”
And fuck.
Fuck.
She might as well have hit him with a hammer. It was like that summer evening all over again, and Rhys set his glass down on the coffee table with a decisive thunk before sliding across the sofa to her.
The pillow hit the floor, and she reached out for him just as his fingers brushed over her jaw, tilting her face so that he could look at her.
“You bloody gorgeous girl.” He sighed, and her own hands came up to his wrists, not to push him away, as she probably should have, but to pull him closer.
“I’ve run out of ways to say this is a bad idea,” Vivienne murmured against his lips, and Rhys smiled, nudging her nose with his.
“We’ve made a lot of mistakes,” he agreed. “But I don’t think this is one of them.”
And he didn’t. For whatever else had gone wrong with them—and Christ, he could fill up a ledger book at this point—this, her, here in his arms, was not one of them. He knew that as well as he knew anything.
She leaned in closer, her nails lightly scratching the backs of his hands, and if Rhys hadn’t already been so hard he ached, that would’ve done it. So would the way she just barely brushed her lips against his as she murmured, “Are you going to ask to kiss me?”
Rhys grinned. “I’m gonna ask to do a fuckload more than that if you’ll let me.”
Chapter 25
Mine, Rhys’s blood hummed as he kissed Vivi, pulling her up the stairs, her mouth warm and soft and wet, her body pliant beneath his hands. Finally, fucking finally mine.
They tripped and stumbled, laughed against each other’s mouths, until they were on the second floor.
Rhys stopped in front of the bedroom door, and Vivi, still twining around him like a vine, pushed even closer, her lips against his neck. “What is it?”
“Ah. Right.”
Gently reaching up to pull her hand from his hair, he looked down at her, at those swollen, damp lips and hazy eyes. “Before we go in here, there’s something you should know.”
Some of the haze faded. “Kind of an alarming thing to hear right before you get naked with someone.”
“It’s nothing serious, I promise,” he told her, leaning in to brush his lips against her forehead only to get distracted by how close her mouth was, and then he was kissing her again, turning so that she was up against the door, her thighs opening for his hips, a soft sound of need escaping her lips as he rocked against her.
“It’s the bedroom,” he murmured between kisses.
“What about it?”
“Well, you know how the rest of the house is—”
“A Gothic nightmare, yes.”
Rhys huffed out a laugh that quickly turned into a groan as she wrapped a leg around his, pulling him in even closer. “Right, well . . . the bedroom is probably the pinnacle of that aesthetic, as it were. And as impressive as your skills were downstairs, I have no intention of waiting for you to magically redecorate the entire room before I shag you, so . . .”