Book 4: Together

Xandra

I don’t intend anything when I kiss Finn, other than to steal his words away. They taste like my first sip of sourplum brandy, warm as the covers on a cool night but burning all the way down. Safe and terrifying in a single breath.

So I try to swallow them with the ginger-and-moss taste of his mouth, but that’s the very same. Warm, soft and sharp. My impossible mate.

He is right. In my life, I have always come last. Perhaps someone telling me I should feels an awful lot like control. The line between that and freedom is far thinner than I thought.

I kiss him again, drinking down the pain-pleasure of his mouth alone. He grabs my hips, hard fingers softening at the last moment as he realizes I am something he wants to be careful with.

“No.” The word garbles against his lips, and painfully, I pull back. “No. Do not treat me like that.”

“Like I,”—he swallows—“care about you?”

His unfinished sentence bursts in my chest. “L