[Vivien’s POV]
He kisses me. Not the crash I braced for—his hands frame my face with a gentleness so deliberate my knees dissolve, and he presses his mouth to mine like I am something sacred he's terrified of breaking. Every nerve in my body catches fire.
I gasp against his lips and my fingers fist in his shirt. He tastes like wine and salt, and when his tongue traces the seam of my mouth I open for him and the world outside this room ceases to exist.
"Vivien." Forehead against mine, voice wrecked. "If we do this—" I grab the strap of his armor before he can finish. "Don't. Don't think about tomorrow. I need tonight to be ours."
His jaw works. His hands shake where they hold my face—this man who doesn't flinch in battle, trembling because my mouth was on his. Something possessive and fierce rears up in my chest at the sight.
"Turn around," he whispers. His fingers find my laces, trembling worse. I turn, palms flat against the cool stone, and feel each tug like a pulse, his knuckles brushing my spine. "I've imagined this," he murmurs against the back of my neck. "Every night for five years."
The gown loosens, slides. Cool air on my shoulders. His hands span my waist through the shift, callused palms burning through linen, and he turns me back. His eyes track over me and his lips part. "I spent five years terrified of forgetting what you look like. But you turned out to be even more beautiful than when I left."
"Good." My fingers find his buckles. "Take this off." He helps me, guiding my hands, and piece by piece the armor clangs to stone. When I pull his shirt over his head, candlelight maps his scars—the jagged line below his collarbone, the starburst on his ribs, the vicious slash across his stomach.
"Blackmere." His voice roughens as I press my palm over the worst of it. "Thought of you while the surgeon stitched it." I press my lips to the scar and his whole body shudders. My mouth moves to the next one, tracing the map of every moment I almost lost him.
He lifts me and lays me on the bed with a reverence that makes my eyes sting. Kneels between my legs and draws the shift up slowly—callused palms skating up my calves, the insides of my knees, higher. The fabric gathers at my waist and his gaze moves over the bare skin like a physical touch.
"Tell me if I should stop." His thumbs trace slow circles on my inner thighs, and even that light touch makes my breath stutter. "At any point. I mean it."
"You could never hurt me." I pull him down by the neck. "You're the only person in this castle who couldn't."
He kisses my throat. My collarbone. The valley between my breasts. When his hand cups me through the linen, thumb dragging across the peak, the sensation jolts and I gasp loud enough to make him groan.
He pulls the shift over my head and I'm bare beneath him. His breath catches. He goes still. "You are every dream I talked myself out of believing." His voice cracks. "Every prayer on that battlefield."
He lowers his mouth to my breast and I stop thinking. His tongue circles the peak, slow and wet, and when he takes it between his lips the pull sends a sweet ache straight between my thighs. My back arches. He moves to the other, and his hand slides down my stomach—deliberate, giving me time.
I don't stop him. My hips lift toward his touch before my mind catches up. His fingers trace along the crease of my thigh first, teasing, circling. When he slides between the slick folds, the sound I make is raw and desperate and nothing like a lady. He groans against my breast.
"So wet." He breathes it like a prayer, stroking through the heat of me until he finds the spot that makes my hips jerk. He circles it—slow, firm—and pleasure sparks so hard my vision whites.
"There—don't stop—" He builds a rhythm that makes my thighs shake, his mouth still on my breast, and when he slides one finger inside me I gasp at the stretch. Tight. Uncomfortably so. He stills, forehead pressed to my sternum.
"Breathe." Rough and tender at once. "Breathe for me." I exhale and the tightness eases. He moves that finger slowly, curling, searching, and when he finds the place that bows my spine off the mattress he stays there. Patient. Stroking.
He adds a second finger only when I'm rocking against his hand and the stretch has become a deep, rolling ache that demands more. Two fingers and his thumb working above, and I am falling apart—the careful way he opens me, stretching, retreating when I tense, pressing deeper when I soften.
"I need—" My voice shatters. I reach for his waistband. "Jasper, please—" He strips the rest and my mouth goes dry. The hard, thick length of him straining toward his stomach. He's bigger than I imagined, and I've imagined more than I will ever confess.
He settles between my legs and I feel him press where his fingers were—hot, blunt, impossibly wide. But his fingers did their work. I am slick and aching and stretched enough that when he pushes forward, the burn is a slow deep slide rather than tearing.
"Look at me." I hold his face. His eyes are red-rimmed, so full of want my chest splits. "I chose you. Because there was never anyone else."
He sinks the rest of the way and I shudder around him—the fullness overwhelming, body clenching, adjusting. He freezes, jaw locked, every muscle trembling with the effort of holding still.
"Don't stop." I tilt my hips and take him deeper, and the sound he makes is so wrecked it borders on worship. "Move. Please." My nails find his shoulders and dig in.
He moves with painstaking slowness. Each thrust a question I answer with my body—hips rising, nails down his spine, breath hitching in his rhythm. The burn fades to something deeper, hotter, pressure coiling tight behind my navel.
"Mine." Pressed into the hollow of his throat, against his hammering pulse. "You're mine. Say it."
"Yours." Broken, immediate—the word torn from him like something that predates language. His mouth finds my throat, my jaw, the corner of my lips. "Before I had a name. After they put me in the ground."
I pull his face down and kiss him through it—through pleasure cresting in waves, through five years of silence, through the knowledge that in hours I will walk toward an altar and he will watch me go.
His hand slides between us, finds the swollen spot his thumb already knows, and I shatter—crying out against his mouth, body arching, clenching around him in rhythmic pulses. He follows with a shudder that runs through his entire body, my name breaking in his throat like something holy.
We collapse tangled. His arm curls around me, face in my hair, both trembling. I trace his scars while the candles burn low.
Dawn will come. The gown will close around me and I will walk toward a king carrying the proof of this night hidden beneath silk. The thought should terrify me. It doesn't—because tonight I am his, and some choices burn too bright to regret.
________________