30. Rain

Chapter 30

Rain

I walked in the front door, not sure what to expect.

Was anyone going to be angry with me? The Gloombringers—maybe even Adair—for helping Aubrey leave? Tempest, for leaving her at the castle? Oberon, just because he was an enormous asshole who disliked me on principle? Huxley because...same?

What I found was Tempest pacing the front room, and Adair sitting at the bottom of the stairs.

"I could kill you," she seethed at me.

Well, that answered one question.

I shrugged. "He needed my help. Seemed desperate to go, and I was afraid he'd walk if he didn't get it."

Adair stood, and I half expected to get slapped. Or yelled at. Something. Instead, he walked over to stand in front of me, looking up.

That was when I noticed..."What the hells happened to your face?" I demanded, mouth falling open. Heat flashed through me. Aubrey hadn't done this. Not possible. Not just because he hadn't seemed the type, but because I'd sat there looking at his hands. I'd put my own hand over them. He hadn't so much as blinked, so there was no way he'd been throwing punches that morning.

Adair smiled at me. Smiled. My blood was heating, and I needed to go hit someone in recompense, and he was smiling.

"Told you it'd be the first thing he'd bother with when he got back," Tempest said, her voice still betraying annoyance, but apparently not ready to literally kick me in the ass.

"Who did this?" I demanded. "I'll . . . I'll . . ."

What the hells would I do? Get in a fight?

Yes, dammit. Someone had hit Adair. People didn't get to just go around hitting each other. It was monstrous. It was—damn it all, it was uncivilized.

"Oberon tried to hit Aubrey," he finally said. "I got in the way."

Oberon Gloombringer was a dead man. I'd destroy him entirely. I?—

"Which means," Adair went on, "that I'm going to need you to do something very important."

"Anything," I agreed instantly. "Just tell me. I'll do anything. Should I summon a doctor? End the summit and leave? Challenge Oberon to a duel?"

He blinked, staring at me, eyes wide.

"Do not challenge that twatwaffle to a duel," Tempest groaned. "Please? Your mother will kill me."

Adair, who'd been staring up at me, looking absolutely mystified, paused and turned to look at her. "Twatwaffle?"

She shrugged, crossing her arms over her chest and pouting, not interested in Adair's confusion, but her own skin. "If someone has to challenge him, let's make it Char. He's really good, and his mother won't skin me alive and leave my body for the crows."

Not that I could blame Tempest. Mother truly would be quite annoyed with all of us if I challenged Oberon. But he'd struck Adair. His cheek had a purpling bruise, and his eye was swollen half shut. I motioned to his face, looking at her. "We can't just let it be. He struck Adair!"

"He did," she agreed. "But I wouldn't worry about it. I'm pretty sure he's going to pay the highest price you can think of for that dumbass maneuver."

"He is?"

She nodded, but it was Adair who spoke. "Do you really think so?"

"Are you kidding?" she asked, incredulous. "He wants to challenge the guy for hitting you. Of course the worst thing he can think of is losing you. You're going to go home to Moonstriker lands and adopt a dozen little genius babies and live happily ever after. Obviously."

The moment froze in my mind, and I stared at first her, then Adair. "You're...you're coming home with us?"

His eyes turned back to me, earnest and hopeful. "If you want me to."

"I do."

"Me too," he whispered back as I wrapped my arms around his waist.

"Sweet," Tempest said. "You may now kiss the future husband. Or go to our rooms and fuck or something. Whatever it takes to calm Rain the hells down so he doesn't make what's already going to be an international incident even worse."

When Adair only smiled at her words, I swept him up into my arms and started up the stairs .

He laughed. "Rain, what are you doing?"

"I always do what Tempest tells me to," I insisted, ignoring her derisive snort behind us. "She's very clever and almost always right. So I'm taking you to our rooms. Unless you'd rather not?"

"Not?" he asked, then shook his head just as quickly. "No, definitely yes. Tempest is good and wise, and I entirely agree with her. All the"—he glanced around and lowered his voice—"all the fucking."

That was fucking adorable. He was embarrassed by the word fucking. Or maybe the idea that people would hear I intended to fuck him right then. It was fair enough, since he'd spent years working with the people in the castle and had needed them to respect him. I could have told him that they very much did. They were going to be bereft to learn that he was leaving.

All of Gloombringer lands would be a tragedy without him.

And it was precisely the tragedy Oberon Gloombringer deserved.

I marched into the suite, where Char was sitting on the sofa reading.

"Might want to go for a walk in the gardens," I informed him as I passed on the way to my room. "This could be loud. And long."

"Done and done," Char agreed, snapping the book shut and jumping to his feet. "And may I also say, thank goodness? Any more tension was going to start literally killing people."

By the time we made it into the bedroom, he was locking the suite door on his way out. He and Tempest would amuse each other until...well, not until I was done with Adair. Done simply wasn't going to happen. Until we were too tired to go again today.

My mother's niggling voice reminded me that I was supposed to be going to the summit meeting for the day. Turn left, it said. You don't get a say. You're the heir. You turn left. You go to the meeting.

Iri and Sim were silent, offering no opinion.

I closed the door behind us with my foot and took Adair to the bed. Mother could fucking deal with it for a moment. Right now, I was going to be Rain. Not the Moonstriker.

I was turning right, because it was what I wanted.

I laid Adair on the bed, and while what I actually wanted was to see his golden skin against the deep blue of the sheets on my own bed back in Moonstriker Tower, this would do for now. This would hold me over until we got to forever.

My mother's voice wanted to pop in again, decrying the very concept of love, and pointing out that three days was an infatuation, nothing more, but if there was one thing I knew, it was myself. I knew more about Adair Courtwright than I knew about most people. And I knew that this wasn't going to change. I wasn't going to learn he was actually a terrible person—I knew him. More than that, with his stone, he knew me too.

For the first time in my life, all my hesitation, trained into me so dearly by my mother, was gone. There was only me and Adair and the rest of our lives. Mother? She'd have to deal with it.

I reached for his jacket, but he shook his head, sitting up and staring at me. "I want you to take that jacket off. I want...I want to watch you strip."

I lifted a brow. "Not just worried you won't know how to get all the buttons? "

He snorted but shrugged. "Fair enough, that too. I don't want to mess it up. It's art."

"You'll have to have some too, you know."

Again, the shrug. "Don't care. I just want to spend the rest of my life looking at you in them. Nothing else matters."

So I did what he'd demanded. A slow striptease, one button at a time, then the inner row of buttons that held the coat securely.

"I'd have missed those," Adair said as he tossed his own coat aside, pulling at the little white buttons on his shirt. "Might have damaged something."

"I don't care. You're worth any jacket."

He shook his head, finally giving up and yanking his shirt off over his head. "Shut up and come over here and fuck me. You're going to make me crazy with all that sweet talk."

"As long as you're willing to listen to more of it later," I agreed, making quicker work of my boots and pants, then joining him on the bed just as he managed to shimmy out of his last layer of clothing.

"Of course," he agreed. "Love to listen to you talk."

I leaned in and kissed him. Not hard and fast and done like on the battlements or demanding in the dark like in the garden. No, this was a claim. Adair Courtwright was mine, and I was his, and I wasn't easily going to let go of this.

I swept my tongue into his mouth, tasting every inch of it before kissing my way down his chin, to his neck, his chest, his belly with the light dusting of hair that pointed like an arrow downward at my goal.

"Rain?" he asked, breathless.

"You got to taste me the other night. My turn now." With that, I leaned down the rest of the way and took his cock into my mouth .

He gasped and didn't protest. Not too many men would protest, I supposed, with a tongue on their cock.

I bobbed up and down on him, taking him all the way to the root as he gasped and writhed beneath me, mumbling my name. I was grateful, in the moment, that my name was especially easy to say in the throes of passion. More than that, I liked the way it sounded coming from his lips in a wanton pant.

After a moment, though, he was tugging on my hair, whimpering and clearly wanting my attention. When I pulled back, he gave a full-body shiver as he watched me. I couldn't imagine the picture I made, bent between his legs, my lips swollen and red in front of his bobbing cock.

I licked them. "Problem?" Did he want a condom? I probably had one?—

"Fucking. You said fucking, not just sucking. Need your cock."

"Both is always an option."

He shook his head, tugging on my hair again, and I found that I rather liked the sensation, when it was accompanied by Adair telling me how best to get him off. "Fucking now. Sucking another time. I'll suck you in the car on the way home."

Home.

The word had never seemed so warm as when it fell from his lips.

On the other hand . . .

"Tempest and Char might have something to say about that."

He giggled at the idea but shook his head again. "Don't care. Fuck me now. Right now."

His gaze was so bright, his dark eyes even more intense than usual, and I couldn't stop the shiver as the gold sheen went over them, indicating he was using his magic. I went for my bag, for the lube I kept in it, my eyes never leaving his.

"What does it look like? Our bond?"

He glanced down, from where he'd been looking at my eyes and my cock, to a spot between us, as I returned to him, climbing between his legs once more as I snapped the cap open and lubed my fingers to open him up.

"Home," was what he finally whispered. "It looks like home. Purple-pink. The strongest bond I've ever seen. Rhodri calls it a Match. Says not everyone gets one, but the people who do only get one of them."

I smiled as I slipped the first lubed finger inside him. "I might not see bonds, but I knew that. There was no chance I was going to let you slip through my fingers. You're perfect, Adair Courtwright. Beautiful and clever and impossibly perfect."

He bucked under me as I added the second finger quickly after the first, but it was only a moment before he was urging me on. "More. Give me more. Want you inside me."

I grinned back, pushing the third finger in next to the first two and then stilling only for a second as he cried out and shoved into my hand. "I promise. I'll be inside you whenever you want. For the rest of our lives."

"Forever," he agreed, gritting his teeth and fucking himself against my fingers. "My Match."

"All yours," I agreed.

He leaned up, grabbing my hair again and almost snarling as he said, "Then give me your cock. Now."

And who was I to do anything but oblige?

I slid my fingers free and pushed my body into the vee of his legs, pulling his thighs up atop mine and pausing for only a second to position my cock at his entrance before shoving inside him.

He moaned again and it might have been my name, but that time even I couldn't tell. He didn't stop pushing toward me, though, demanding more and more of me, till I was all the way inside him.

I rocked my hips against him, gently for a second, but when he tugged at me, harder. And harder, until I was practically slamming my hips into him as he urged me on and on, alternately tugging at me and releasing a high whine that might have been my name.

I reached for his cock, worried about my stamina and not wanting to leave him unsatisfied in any way, but he smacked it away, teeth bared at me. "Going to come on your cock. Now fuck me with it. Like you mean it."

So I did. Holding his gaze, pounding into him as his own movements went jerkier and more irregular, his breaths bare pants as I shoved so deep inside him that it felt like we were a single body, moving entirely in concert.

One last particularly hard thrust, and he stiffened against me, letting out a helpless moan and then releasing, his body going lax as I continued to fuck him, and he spurted between us.

I kept fucking him through it, speeding my thrusts until he started to whimper at the overstimulation, but he didn't try to stop me. He just let me use his perfect body, pounding into him over and over again. The thought seized me as white hot pleasure raced through my veins, my body tensing as I came inside him, that this was the first time I'd ever done that. I'd never come inside someone without a condom before. Marking him up like some kind of primal beast. It almost made me want to bite him and mark him up some more, but I supposed...I supposed we had a lifetime to explore that sort of thing.

I was never going to agree to sleep without Adair at my side again. Of that, I was absolutely certain.