It is not desperate, not a collision, not a moonlit fall. It is deliberate and sure, a kiss that tells you that he has said the truest thing he knows and is sealing it with his mouth. Casey’s lips are tender and familiar, a landscape I have been mapping for days, and the kiss deepens slowly, his tongue against my lower lip, my hands sliding up his chest to his neck, pulling him down to me, and his hands drop from my shoulders to my waist, to my hips, and the contact is electric and specific and I want more.
I want more.
I have spent my entire life controlling want. Categorizing it. Filing it. Sealing it in compartments with clinical labels and important justifications. And right now, in the dark garden with the stars and the adrenaline still buzzing in my blood and the taste of this man on my tongue, I do not want to control it. I want to let it consume me. I want to actively be consumed.
“Casey,” I say against his mouth, and my voice is low and urgent and nothing like the Dread Prince, nothing like the surgeon, nothing like any version of myself that anyone has ever seen. “Take me to bed.”
He pulls back. Just enough to look at me. His blue eyes are dark in the dim garden light, his pupils blown wide, and his breathing is uneven, and his hands on my hips are gripping hard enough that I will feel it tomorrow and I want to feel it tomorrow.
“Are you sure?” he asks, and the fact that he asks, the fact that this man, who has been wanting this for two years and who is holding me in the dark with his hands shaking and his eyes blazing, still stops and asks, is the reason I love him. It is one of a thousand reasons, but right now it is the reason.
“I am sure.” I press my forehead against his. “I am not panicking. I am not experiencing adrenaline-induced impairment. I am not going to blame the moonlight or the stars or the papers adjacent. I want you. I have wanted you for longer than I knew how to admit, and I am done waiting, and I am done being afraid, and I need you to take me to bed before I lose what is left of my composure and do something undignified against this garden wall.”
Casey makes a sound. It is a sound that I will remember for the rest of my life. It is half laugh and half groan and entirely undone, the sound of the last thread of his restraint just being cut.
“The garden wall,” he repeats. “You. Arjun Kapoor. Against a garden wall. At a family festival.”
“I am providing you with a range of options. The bed is the preferred option. The garden wall is the contingency.”
“You have a contingency plan for sex.”
“I have a contingency plan for everything. It is a professional requirement.”
He laughs. He laughs so hard he has to press his face into my hair, his whole body shaking with it, and I am laughing too, which is not something I do, which is not something the Dread Prince does, except I am not the Dread Prince right now. I am just Arjun, in the dark, laughing into the chest of the man I love, and the laughter feels like the last wall coming down.
We make it to the guest suite. We do not take the main corridor. We take the service passage, the one I used to sneak to the kitchen as a boy, because my sister has surveillance capabilities and my aunties have a WhatsApp network and there are still limits to the amount of family intelligence I am willing to generate in one evening.
The door closes behind us. The room is dark except for themoonlight through the balcony doors, silver and cool, and the bed is there, and Casey is there, standing in the moonlight, and he is looking at me with an expression that makes my medical training completely, comprehensively irrelevant.
I close the distance. My hands find the hem of his kurta, and I pull, and the fabric comes up and over his head, and Casey Welling is standing in the moonlight in the guest suite of the Kapoor estate with his chest bare and his blonde curls wild and his blue eyes fixed on mine, and I put my hands on him.
My surgeon's hands. The hands that have been steady inside operating theatres and unsteady everywhere else. The hands that tremble when I am stressed and stop trembling when he holds them. I put them flat against his chest, against the hot, broad, extraordinary expanse of him, and I feel his heartbeat under my palms, fast and hard and real, and my hands are steady.
Perfectly, completely, impossibly steady.
Casey reaches for my kurta. His fingers find the hem, and his breath catches audibly, a sharp, unsteady sound that I feel against my lips, and then the fabric comes up and over my head and his hands are on my skin, broad and warm and reverent, tracing the lines of my ribs with a focus so total it makes me shiver.
“You're beautiful,” he says, and his voice is rough with something that sounds like wonder. “I've wanted to say that without a cover story for two years. You're beautiful, Arjun.”
Nobody has ever called me beautiful without the word sounding like an observation. When Casey says it, it sounds like a prayer.
He kisses me. His hands slide up my sides, over my ribs, tracing the architecture of my body with focused, reverent attention as he learns a new landscape by touch. He is gentle. He is so gentle that it takes my breath away, his thumbs tracing the lines of my hips, his mouth moving down my jaw to my throat, and I tip my head back and close my eyes and let myself be mapped.
There is no clinical terminology for what happens next. Casey lowers me onto the silk sheets with one hand cradling the back ofmy head and the other sliding down my side, learning the topography of my ribs, the dip of my waist, the sharp angle of my hip bone. His weight settles over me, not crushing but encompassing, and I pull him closer because the distance between us, even this fractional, residual distance, is intolerable.
His mouth follows his hands. He kisses the hollow of my throat, the ridge of my collarbone, the flat plane of my sternum, and each kiss is a point on a map he is drawing with his lips, slow and deliberate. I am arching into him, my fingers in his hair, pulling him closer, my hips rising to meet his, and the friction when our bodies align sends a sound out of me that I will deny producing until the day I die.
I map him back. I trace the broad landscape of his shoulders with my surgeon’s hands, the dense muscle of his chest, the length of his spine. He is vast. He is a continent, and I explore him with the focused, consuming attention I bring to everything that matters. My mouth finds the juncture of his neck and shoulder and he groans, a low, shattered sound that vibrates through his chest and into mine, and his hips roll against me and the world reduces itself to this, to skin against skin and heat and the maddening, building, inescapable pressure of two bodies learning how to speak the same language.
His hands are everywhere, tracing the lines of my body with a reverence that makes me shiver. He cups my jaw, his thumbs brushing my cheekbones, before trailing down to my chest, his fingers circling my nipples until they harden into tight, sensitive peaks under his touch. I gasp, arching into him, and he takes the invitation, his mouth closing over one nipple, drawing it between his teeth. His tongue flicks over the nerve endings, pulling a hard shudder from my spine as I writhe beneath him.
He moves further down, his lips and tongue tracing a wet path down the centre of my stomach to the waistband of my trousers and boxers. He looks up at me, his blue eyes dark and completely dilated with desire, and slowly, deliberately, he pulls the fabric down, his broad hands dragging the material down thelength of my legs and tossing it aside. He kneels between my spread thighs, his broad shoulders eclipsing the moonlight.
He doesn't hesitate. He leans over and takes my aching erection fully into his mouth. The contrast is staggering—the cool silk of the sheets against my back and the sudden, consuming, wet heat of his mouth. I cry out, my hips involuntarily jerking upward, my fingers tangling deeply in his blonde curls. His lips slide down the shaft, his tongue swirling around the sensitive head, sucking with a firm, rhythmic pressure that draws a jagged, breathy sound from my throat. The sensation builds, a coiling, white-hot tension, but just as my vision begins to blur, he pulls back.
“Turn over.” His voice is a dark, rough command.
My medical training short-circuits, leaving only instinct. He grips my hips, his strong hands easily flipping me over and positioning me on my knees, my chest pressed to the mattress. He parts my glutes, exposing me entirely to the cool air, and then his mouth descends again. His tongue is broad and wet, tracing the tight ring of muscle before pressing firmly against my entrance. I bury my face in the pillows to muffle my cries as he laves and swirls his tongue directly into me, relentlessly tasting and teasing. He works me with a filthy, consuming skill that leaves me gasping, effectively keeping me suspended right on the edge of pleasure but refusing to let me fall.