25. Florian

Chapter 25

Florian

I’d just told him I thought maybe Soz wouldn’t want to bond with anyone in my family, and Cove’s reaction was to affirm that he had agreed to help me.

And then he’d kissed me.

Maybe I was just an incurable pessimist at this point, but it seemed impossible that anyone would do that. Like a strange dream that didn’t make any sense at all, and any moment the cat who used to live in the lavender field would saunter into the office and ask me to take him shopping for a new wardrobe.

“You’re not angry?” I asked, breathless even though Cove had barely given me a peck on the lips, and not the all-consuming passionate clench I was longing for.

“Angry?” He looked bemused at the very thought. “What would I be angry about? You being honest? You caring about the feelings of beings other than yourself? And if I were, for some incomprehensible reason, bothered by those things, what would be the purpose of anger?”

The purpose of anger.

Did anger need a purpose? Father had always just covered himself in it like it was the water in his favorite swimming pool, immersing his whole being inside of anger at every opportunity. I’d found it all too easy to follow suit sometimes, because that simmering fury passed from one person to the next so very easily. And after that, it was addictive. When anger was the best thing you had going on in your life, it was always tempting to find another thing to be furious about, and another and another.

It was far easier to continue being angry than it was to shake it off and turn one’s mind to better things. The only reason I’d ever managed at all was Fawn. Because I couldn’t take care of my sister properly while being angry.

Maybe that was Cove’s secret, too. Maybe because he was head of a family he had shaken off his anger and held himself in that cool, serene, glacial place. I’d never thought of it that way before, but it made sense. At least, it did in Cove.

Instead of answering him, I shook my head and leaned in, hoping for another kiss. He obliged me, but it was just another soft, chaste press of lips. “Isn’t there something we’re supposed to be discussing? Something important happening?”

“Just the thing in my head,” I whispered back. “But if it is Soz, then what they do is up to them, not me. So all I can do is leave them be and let them decide what they want.”

For some reason, that made him smile. Thankfully, he also finally pulled me into his arms and pressed our lips together like he meant it. Like he needed me as much as I needed him. I climbed out of Father’s old office chair and into his lap in the one he was using, straddling him so that I was above him, looking down at his beautiful face.

I kissed him, sweeping my tongue into his mouth, claiming and demanding and pleading for more, all without a single word. And he gave. He leaned back, opening to me and letting me take all I wanted, wrapping his arms around my waist and letting me taste him at my leisure.

It would have been easy to kiss him forever. Forget all about my responsibilities and Father and even Fawn and just kiss Cove Moonstriker for the rest of my life. But when I pulled back, panting, he was smiling up at me, as breathless as I was.

“Maybe Frost will have to do without us at dinner,” he whispered, sliding a hand up my side, along my neck, to finally rest his knuckles against my cheek. “We can make plans to visit Ivy’s house tomorrow. For now, I think I need to show you how not angry I am.”

I couldn’t help a laugh at that. “Are there levels of not-angriness? I had no idea. I knew you could be more or less angry, but this is new.”

“There definitely are,” he agreed, standing and somehow pulling me up with him. I yelped and wrapped my legs around his waist, and it barely took him a second to recenter himself and start walking. He wasn’t even slow—he simply strode forward, out of the office and toward the stairs with me clinging to him like a monkey. Like I barely weighed a thing.

With my legs wrapped around him, I could feel his cock, a rigid line trapped between our bodies. Mine was as well, sure, but it was a revelation nonetheless. He wanted me that much. So much he was carrying me up the stairs. So much that he’d gotten me last night and still wanted me again.

I couldn’t lie, there’d been some concern in me that maybe he’d gotten what he wanted, and he would be done in the cold light of day.

But it turned out that this day wasn’t so cold after all.

“Your room is at that end, right?”

I blinked in shock, turning to look around as though I’d never been on the second floor of the manor in my entire life. My room? We weren’t going to his room? I managed to get my head together, nodding and pointing to my bedroom door, almost at the far end of the hallway from his.

His smile was radiant, and I melted against him as he carried me down the hall to my bedroom.

He wasn’t a glacier at all. There was nothing cold in Cove Moonstriker, shocking as that was.

He managed to open the door with one hand, without so much as letting me slip downward, and then we were in my room. As gently as humanly possible, Cove set me on the end of my bed, leaning forward as he did, so that he could press our lips together in a long, desperate kiss. He was breathing a bit raggedly when he pulled away, after carrying me all the way up the stairs hadn’t affected him at all. “This is ridiculous,” he muttered. “I told myself...I told myself that maybe if I stayed, eventually, there would be something real between us. But here I am, like a fucking teenager again, and I...I love you, Florian.”

Love.

He loved me ?

No one but Fawn had ever loved me. If not for her, I’d have wondered if love was a fairy tale instead of a fact.

My eyes stung with emotion, almost brimming over, and I surged forward to shove our lips together again, standing up and almost pushing him back with the force of my whole body against his.

“I love you,” I whispered, the words hot, almost burning me as they escaped.

Even though he’d said it first, they felt dangerous. Like maybe in a moment he’d laugh and say he was only joking, and I shouldn’t have taken it all so seriously.

Still, I couldn’t seem to stop them from pouring out of me. “I want you to stay. Not just to teach me how to run the family. Not just to help me get this mess in order. I want you to stay with me. For me. Forever.”

He stepped in closer, though we weren’t even a foot apart, pressing our bodies together tight, and curled his head and shoulders down. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? It’s been days, but it feels like forever. Like I know you as well as I know myself.” He wrapped his hands around the back of my neck, tilting my head back and kissing me again. “That’s what I want too, Florian. I want forever with you. Delta’s going to be furious, but...that’s not my problem anymore. I’ve given her enough of myself. I’ve put off my own life for long enough.”

It was a sad thought, Cove putting off his own life in favor of his family. Selfishly, though, I couldn’t help but be glad for it. Glad that he’d put off his own life for long enough to find me first, because I wanted to live it with him.

Told you , Navia whispered in my head. Lucky .

For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like she was being overly optimistic. Maybe I really was just that lucky.

“You should move in here, then. No reason for us to have different rooms. I mean, unless you want?—”

“No. Moving in here is perfect.” His smile was sweet, but then he shook his head. “But tomorrow. We’ll worry about all that tomorrow. For now, I want you.”

“Oh fuck, me too. I’ve wanted to be back in bed since we got up this morning. Aeryn and Poppy are great, but I couldn’t focus on them for anything when you were right there.” I started wrenching my clothes off, starting with my shoes and shirt at the same time, tossing them all over as I freed myself from their confines.

He was too slow about doing the same, so once I was done, I started on his clothes. It was odd, how he watched me with a twinkle in his eye. Like he enjoyed me stripping him out of his clothes. I slowed, watching him with confusion, and his smile only grew.

“You have very...nimble fingers. I quite enjoy watching you work with them.” He paused, raising an eyebrow. “You don’t play piano, do you?”

As it happened, I’d taken lessons for years. “Want me to play for you?”

He gave a little shiver, his eyes going even darker, like the thought of me playing the piano was sexy. But I had way more important things to be doing with my fingers right then. Like getting them anywhere and everywhere on his body. So I grabbed him and turned him around as I continued stripping off his clothes. I was a little more careful with his things than I’d been with mine, since his clothing included a long black coat with a deep gray forest in wintertime embroidered onto it, skeletal trees so beautifully recreated in thread that I could almost hear a winter wind blowing through them. That went over the back of a chair, to preserve it as well as possible.

Then, I pushed him back onto the bed and headed for my nightstand, where I kept my lube. I paused there, hands hovering over the condoms. “I haven’t had sex with anyone but you in almost a year. I’ve been tested since then. I have it, if you want to see.”

He rolled to his side, watching me. “I’ve had one sexual encounter in my life that didn’t include a condom, and it’s been a moment since then.”

I snorted at his flippant tone, but didn’t move. This was mostly up to him, in my opinion. I wasn’t the one whose cousins had given the other reason to be paranoid about condoms, after all, let alone the other repercussions of Afton’s behavior.

“Bring the lube and get over here,” he finally said, his voice a sexy, throaty growl. “I need one of us to be inside the other, five minutes ago.”

My hand was closing around the lube, but at that, I turned to stare at him. “One of us? You mean you don’t...you’re not...You’d be okay?—”

“Yes,” he answered simply as I crawled onto the bed, lube in one hand. He must have seen something in my expression, because his softened, and he reached up to cup my cheek. “We’re allowed to do whatever we like here, Florian. If you want to try it another way, all you have to do is say so.”

It hadn’t even occurred to me, honestly. I was young and twinky enough that no one I’d been with had ever thought I might want to top. Not even me. On the other hand, I really fucking liked having Cove inside me.

Shaking my head, I pressed the lube into his free hand. “Okay. Then I’ll think about that. Right now, I want you to fuck me.”

He grinned in answer. “As you wish.”

Tugging my legs until I was sprawled out beneath him, he spread me wide open, laying my thighs atop his and running his hand over my cock, my balls, and farther down, until he was pressing against my entrance with two fingers. With his other hand, he squeezed lube onto the spot where his fingers met my skin and slid both of them inside me at once. I gasped at the sensation, pressing up toward him. He pressed them deeper and deeper, meeting my eye, taking in every gasp as though he could eat me alive. As though he lived for how fucking much he turned me on.

He worked me open on first two, then three fingers, until I was writhing under his ministrations, bucking against his hand and whining for more. For his cock. “Cove,” I finally growled in frustration. “Want you on top of me. Now.”

“Your wish is my command,” he said, sliding his fingers out and leaving me, for a moment, empty and bereft. He only took a moment to slick his cock, though, before pressing the head inside me. Fuck, he was so perfect, and without the condom, the feel of his velvety smooth skin was almost maddening.

As he slid home, he took hold of my hips, pulling them flush against his groin, and then using them to hold me in place as he pulled out and fucking drilled back into me. Like he was a goddamned machine and he’d been made for this, he fucked into me. It only took a handful of strokes for me to fucking lose it, bucking wildly beneath him as he fucked me.

That was when he wrapped his thumb and forefinger around the base of my cock, like an impromptu cock ring, not allowing me to get off, holding me in that state of desperate abandon as he fucked me. It was...it was incredible, the pressure, the need to come right that second, and just...holding. I felt like I might explode, and I thought maybe the high keening sound that was filling the room, almost like a siren, was coming from my own mouth.

I certainly couldn’t do anything as complicated as forming words right then.

He fucked me hard and fast, our skin smacking together with the gathering sweat of exertion, leaning down to whisper filthy things in my ear at the same time. “Good? Is that what you need? Are you going to come the second I let go of you?”

I tried to say yes or call his name or anything at all, but all that came out of me was a desperate whine. Since I couldn’t give him any fucking indication of how I was feeling, I leaned up and planted my mouth on his shoulder, biting down.

He shoved forward hard, pushing his cock deep inside me, and lost his iron grip on mine. The world around me disappeared in a golden haze as my orgasm shot through me, lighting me up from the inside, making me buck uncontrollably against him.

When I came back to myself moments later, panting harsh breaths into Cove’s neck, he’d rolled us onto our sides, still entwined. His cock still buried deep inside me, where he’d come. Leaving a part of himself in me.

Something he’d never willingly done with another person.

I blinked down at his neck, which...was welling with blood where two of my teeth had actually punctured skin, like I was some kind of werewolf from a romance novel, and I’d needed to leave my claim on his body. “I’m so sorry,” I managed to pant out. “I didn’t...didn’t mean to?—”

Before I could touch his shoulder, he grabbed my hand with his own, smiling wide at me. “That was...incredible. Perfect.”

He leaned in and kissed me again, and I had to agree.