Chapter 729: She Kissed Him Like Home

Fin stood at the edge of the meadow and watched a dead man carry a laughing woman through waist-high grass.

He had watched Lucian love this woman patiently, silently, without asking for a single thing in return. Now he was watching the patience pay off, and the paying off looked like a woman laughing in a meadow who had forgotten she was allowed to laugh at all.

The falling was not mutual. Lucian had loved her since the beginning.

"Lucian!"

"You said the sun was everywhere," he informed her, walking her out into the meadow with her held high against him. "I’m testing the theory. Thoroughly. For accuracy."

"Put me down."

"That’s not what your face is saying."

Her face was, in fact, caught somewhere between outrage and a smile she was losing the fight against, and he spun once in the long grass with her in his arms, slow and ridiculous. A laugh broke out of her again, fuller this time, the kind that comes up from somewhere a person had stopped using.

He stopped spinning but he didn’t set her down.

He held her there against his chest with the sea wind moving her white hair and the sun catching the gold at the tips of it, and the laughter faded out of her slowly and left something in its place that was warmer and quieter and far more dangerous.

Her pink eyes moved across his face the way they’d been learning to move across it for days, and found, this time, that she had no desire left to look anywhere else.

Through the matebond, her heartbeat climbed, and Lucian felt every beat of it hammering against the thin calm of her expression, and his arms tightened around her.

"You’re looking at me like that again," he said, grinning.

"I know."

???

The sea air came through the open window of the training ground annex warm and salted, and River stood at its center with a practice sword in her hand and no earthly idea why she had agreed to this, except that Lucian had asked her over breakfast with an expression of innocent scholarly curiosity, and she was learning that his innocent scholarly curiosity was the single most dangerous weather pattern in the kingdom.

"Your grip is wrong," Lucian observed from across the sand floor, circling her with the lazy patience a predator reserves for prey it has no intention of frightening off too quickly.

"My grip is exactly where you put it a decade ago."

"A decade ago your hands were smaller and your instincts were worse." He stopped behind her, close enough that she could feel the heat coming off him before she felt anything else. "May I?"

She should have handed him the sword. That would have been the sane arrangement, the two of them several feet apart, a weapon between them doing the useful work of occupying a line of defense, but she heard herself say yes before the sane version finished forming, and then his hands were on hers.

They came in over her own, warm and certain, repositioning her fingers on the hilt one at a time, three around the base and the thumb riding the top, and his chest settled against her back the way a wall settles into the ground it was built on, solid and unhurried and entirely too present, and River’s breath did something she chose not to examine.

"Your elbow flares," Lucian murmured, and his voice had dropped into a register pitched for the back of her hair, "and the swing follows your shoulder instead of your core."

His hand slid from her wrist up the line of her forearm, correcting the angle of her elbow with a pressure that was slower than it needed to be and lighter than it had any right to be.

River turned her head a fraction and found his face much nearer than she had calculated, the gold of his eyes gone molten in the sea light, his attention fixed not on her elbow at all but on the curve of her mouth.

Neither of them moved.

The sword hung forgotten in their joined grip, the sand lay quiet, and the whole of the distance between them collapsed down to the handful of inches where his breath warmed her cheek and her pulse hammered somewhere he could almost certainly feel it, and the moment stretched past the length that instruction could reasonably justify and kept stretching, taut and humming, into territory that had nothing to do with grips.

Through the matebond, River’s heartbeat hit Lucian like a drum played too close to the ear, fast and uneven and betraying every calm thing her face was attempting, and the signal of it ran down his spine and pooled low and dangerous, and his hands tightened on hers before he caught them doing it.

"Lucian," she started, and his name came out lower than she’d aimed for.

His forehead dropped to hers.

He held it there, the two of them breathing the same handful of air, his hand still cradling her face.

Then he kissed her.

She gasped against his mouth, jolting at the sensation of electricity.

Lucian laughed mid-kiss, knowing exactly what she had just felt because she could feel him now too.

The laugh was brief, bright, escaping his chest before composure could catch it, and the warmth of it landed against her lips and her cheek and somewhere inside her chest where a second heartbeat had just taken up residence without asking permission.

His forehead pressed against hers and his shoulders shook once with the kind of joy that ambushes a man who has been waiting for something so long the waiting became the identity and the arrival dismantled it.

His laugh dissolved into something quieter.

Then he kissed her again, and the again was different from every kiss before it because every kiss before it had been one-sided, his heart open and hers closed, and now hers was open too, and the open was flooding him at a volume that made his hands shake against her face.

Her hand found his chest. His heartbeat was there, under her palm, where it had always been, except now it was also in her own chest, doubled, layered, running alongside hers with the permanent rhythm of something that had been waiting in the walls of her body for permission to be heard.

His arms tightened around her. Her forehead dropped to his collarbone.

He pulled back just far enough to see her face.

"I love you, River."

"I love you too, Lucian."