Chapter 907: Ashford Madam in Black
Chapter 907: Ashford Madam in Black
There had never once been a day Phei wasn’t robbedof speech and breath the instant his eyes found the goddess — no matter how little she’d troubled herself over the outfit, or how small or unremarkable the thing she happened to be doing, she had never failed, not a single time, to stop him cold in his tracks.
The world simply hushed around her, the way a room holds its breath on a sustained note, waiting to be told it may exhale.
And gods — gods — if she didn’t feel like the only thing in all his world more breathtaking than everything else his world contained, combined and set on fire.
He paused now in the open doorway and simply looked as if she was proof of something he hadn’t fully let himself believe was real — and her beauty alone seemed to coax his very soul up and out through his ribs, leaving behind a lovely, gratified husk whose only remaining purpose in this or any life was to stand here.
She never tired of that look he gave her:
The awed, undone, breath-stolen wreckage of him whenever he found her like this. She lived a little for it as she anticipated it and that, precisely that, was why she’d been waiting at the open door the moment she’d sensed him coming to get her, rather than letting him wait.
She wanted the full unguarded force of his reaction.
She wanted to watch the most dangerous creature in Paradise forget how to operate his own lungs as he looks at her.
Today the goddess was draped in black.
A long gown of dark, gossamer tulle, so fine it seemed less woven than exhaled — falling from two whisper-thin straps that lay across the moonlit alabaster of her shoulders like a thought she hadn’t quite committed to.
The bodice gathered close and reverent at her midriff, but the sheer black fabric clung like a second skin to the slow, devastating curves beneath it — the elegant swell of her breasts, the narrow dip of her waist, the subtle flare of her hips — before the skirt surrendered entirely into layered, weightless shadow that drifted and sighed around the long, toned lines of her legs.
With every small shift of her weight the front parted just enough to reveal the smooth, luminous skin of her thighs all the way down to where her feet were cradled in glossy heels.
The dark chiffon drank the distant fireworks and dying sun both, so that the whole of her seemed lit faintly from within, her silhouette blurring at the edges into the gathering dusk like something only half-belonging to the mortal plane.
The gown accentuated her figure with sinful restraint; it kept her elegance sealed inside her like a sovereign secret concealed beneath the shadow.
Her chest — that graceful, medium swell that rose and fell with the unhurried rhythm entirely at peace with her own divinity — was covered with sensual discipline, revealing only the most minimal whisper of cleavage, just enough to make a man feel the urge to lower his eyes and then immediately raise them again because the temptation was too exquisite to ignore.
At the elegant column of her throat, a deep sapphire burned cold and luminous against her skin, a single drop of frozen blue fire, and her dark waves spilled loose and lavish past her shoulders, framing a face for which Phei had genuinely exhausted the entire human vocabulary somewhere around the hour of their very first meeting.
Phei eventually clawed back a fraction of himself, he cleared his throat but it came back rougher and lower than he’d intended.
"You," he managed, "are the single most beautiful thing I have seen all day."
And the irony was not lost on him because this was a remarkable confession from a man who had woken that very morning half-buried in the warm, drowsy tangle of his women, surfeited and adored, and had then given an entire harrowing session of pleasure to Catrina and her merciless lookbook besides.
If a single one of them had been standing in this corridor to overhear it, and had they only laid eyes on the Ashford Madam first — on his goddess, lit by dying fireworks in funeral-black tulle — not one of them would have suffered the faintest sting of offence.
Some things were not a contest and existed in a category of their own and asked the rest of creation, politely, to step aside.
She smiled and a faint rose hue rose beneath the porcelain of her cheeks — a blush — and she glanced away, lashes lowering, as though to spare him the full devastating wattage of it.
’She acts cute too?’
It made her more breathtaking, otherworldly; a divine being caught in the act of being charmed by a mortal and, scandalously, not minding in the least.
She lifted one slender hand toward him, palm turning gently, gracefully upward, an offering.
"You came late," she said, and beneath the composure there was something softer, something that had been waiting. "I missed you, Little Dragon. Last night, and this morning, and every dull hour between." she paused before she said but lower, almost confessional:
"More than a woman of my standing to admit out loud."
He took her offered hand and folded it into his, and shook his head, slow and certain.
"There’s no word in any tongue I’ve ever learned," he murmured, "that would come within a mile of being enough for how beautiful you’re my Goddess. I’d empty the dictionary trying and still be insulting you with how little it managed to say."
"Flatterer."
"Your man," he corrected gently. "A flatterer lies to be liked. I’m, as your man, simply describing what’s in front of me and despairing at the inadequacy of the language."
Her breath caught just barely, just at the edges.
"You shouldn’t have had to miss me at all," he went on, his thumb moving in a slow arc over the back of her hand. "You said no to my penthouse last night. I let you and know now I shouldn’t have. A whole night and a whole grey morning, and the entire stupid distance of this hotel between us — for what? For propriety? For appearances?"
He huffed something that was half a laugh and half a complaint. "We are far too powerful, and far too fond of each other, to keep agreeing to miss each other on purpose."
"It was one night, Phei."
"One night too many. I’ve started keeping a ledger of the hours I’m made to spend not holding you. It’s getting embarrassingly long. My accountant has concerns."
She laughed — and her lips had only just parted to fashion some elegant reply, some sharp and graceful little rejoinder —
— when he simply could not bear it for another half-heartbeat longer.
He drew her in by that captured hand, his arm folding around the small of her back, and Phei gathered his goddess clean against the breadth of his chest.