Cassian turned her onto her back in one swift motion.

Cixi lay beneath him, dishevelled and wrecked. Her hair spilled across the pillow. Few golden strands of her hair were clinging to her flushed cheeks and the damp corners of her mouth. Her skin were painted with crimson hue from her jaw to her collarbones. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, unfocused, as if someone had pulled her halfway out of a dream and left her stranded between consciousness and surrender.

She looked up at him. Her gaze drifted from his eyes to his mouth, and it stayed there.

That mouth.

The memory of Terrace resurfaced before she could find a way to stop it. The night on the terrace. His blood on her hands and his lips on hers and the terrifying realisation that her heart had just been rearranged by a man who was taking his last breath.

He had kissed her like a man who had nothing left to lose, possessive and consuming, pulling her closer with whatever strong strength despite his life poured out of the wound in his chest. He had held her so tight she could feel his heartbeat slowing against her ribs, although she was in her ghost form.

That kiss had imprinted itself into her brain. It had branded her. She carried it around like a mark she touched without meaning to, replaying it in the dark, remembering the taste of his blood on her tongue and the heat of his mouth and the way her heart had fluttered for the first time in her life as if someone had reached into her chest and squeezed it awake.

And he did not remember any of it.

The thought still made her furious while knowing it wasn’t his fault but still it rubbed her in a very wrong way.

She had walked around for months with that kiss tattooed on the inside of her skull while he carried on with his unbothered, imperious existence, as though it had never happened. How dare he not remember their first kiss?

Cixi pushed herself up.

Her hands gripped his shoulders, and she pulled herself upright, her body rising from the sheets until she was kneeling in front of him. The height difference swallowed her even on her knees. She had to tilt her chin up and stretch her neck to reach him, and even then, his face hovered above hers, and she had to drag him downward by the collar of his shirt.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her lips against his.

The kiss was not careful. It was not the nervous, trembling contact of a woman testing boundaries. She kissed him with everything she had been carrying — the frustration until today. She kissed him with her teeth and her tongue and the reckless, burning need to prove that he wouldn’t forget the kiss anytime sooner.

Cassian’s arms locked around her waist.

He pulled her flush against his chest so hard the air left her lungs. His hands spread across the small of her back, his fingers pressing into her spine, and he kissed her back with a hunger that matched hers and then exceeded it. His mouth moved against hers, bruising and consuming, his tongue sweeping past her parted lips with the same territorial authority he brought to every room he entered. He tasted of mint and something darker beneath it, and she tasted something smoky and complex that was permanently Cassian Crown.

She gripped the back of his neck. Her fingers tangled in his hair at the base of his skull, pulling him closer, deeper, as though she could climb inside the kiss and stay there. A sound left her throat against his mouth, and Cassian swallowed it greedily and pulled her tighter.

Then he pressed her backward.

It was not a push. It was a shift, a slow, controlled tilt of her body guided by the hand on the small of her back and the weight of his chest against hers. Cixi followed his lead. Her spine curved. Her shoulders touched the sheets first, then her head settled against the pillow, and Cassian came down over her, his body covering hers, his forearm bracing beside her head.

His mouth never left hers.

One hand cradled the back of her neck, his fingers threading into her hair, holding her head at the exact angle he wanted. His other hand slid down her side. She felt his palm drag along her ribs, her waist, her hip, and then his fingers found the hem of her dress and pushed it upward. The fabric climbed over her thighs, past her hips, gathering around her stomach, and the cool air hit her bare skin while his warm hand traced its way back down.

The kiss grew rougher. His teeth caught her lower lip and tugged, and she gasped into his mouth, and he used the opening to kiss her deeper, his tongue sliding against hers with a force that made her fingers tighten in his hair and her toes curl against the sheets.

His thumb found the line of her underwear.

He traced the elastic along her hip bone. Slowly. Following the edge from one side to the other, his thumb dragging against the border of fabric and skin with a deliberateness that made her stomach muscles clench. Her breathing fractured against his lips.

Then his thumb slid lower. Over the thin fabric. And pressed gently against the sensitive bundle of nerves beneath it.

Cixi’s entire body jolted.

A moan ripped from her throat directly into his mouth, raw and loud and completely involuntary. Her back arched off the mattress, pressing her chest into his, and her teeth sank into his lower lip hard enough to draw blood. She tasted copper on her tongue, and Cassian made a sound against her mouth, low and guttural, a groan that vibrated through his chest and into hers.

He did not pull away. His thumb pressed again, rubbing in a slow, firm circle over the fabric, and Cixi’s hips bucked upward into his hand. Her thighs shook. Her fingers clawed at the back of his neck, nails scraping against his skin, leaving marks she was too far gone to care about.

Cassian’s thumb hooked beneath the edge of her underwear and slid it aside.

His finger touched her bare, slick flesh, and pleasure shot through Cixi’s body so hard her vision blanked. Her spine curved off the sheets. Her mouth broke from his just long enough for a cry to tear from her throat, sharp and high and nothing like her own voice, before his lips crashed back onto hers and swallowed the sound.

He did not stop.

His finger moved against her with devastating patience, circling, pressing, stroking the spot that turned her body into something she no longer controlled. His mouth stayed on hers, his tongue moving against hers in a rhythm that matched the rhythm of his hand, and Cixi drowned in it. Both sensations at once, his mouth and his fingers, crashed through her nervous system and left nothing standing.

She folded her legs. Her knees drew upward on either side of his hips, her toes curling so hard the muscles in her calves cramped. One hand stayed buried in the back of his hair, her fingers gripping the dark strands, pulling him closer. Her other hand slid down his back, and her nails dug into the hard muscle between his shoulder blades, dragging downward, pressing into his skin hard enough to leave red lines she could see later in the mirror above.

She felt it travel through his entire body, from his shoulders through his spine to his hips, and his arm around the back of her neck tightened, pulling her deeper into the kiss, and his finger circling faster, and Cixi’s body climbed higher and higher toward something enormous and inevitable.

Her moans came faster now, swallowed by his mouth, each one sharper than the last. Her hips rocked against his hand. Her nails carved lines down his back. Her legs tightened around his waist. And Cassian kissed her through all of it, his mouth hot and bruising and unrelenting, his breathing ragged against her face, his heart slamming against her chest so hard she could feel it in her own ribs.

Before Cassian could do more to her body, their intimate moment was abruptly interrupted by the shrill sound of a phone ringing.