He reached down and grabbed my thighs, lifting me up so my legs were spread to either side of his hips. He carried me so easily, the two of us trading ever-more-fervent kisses as he carried me across the room.
He deposited me on the bed. He moved back to pull off his shirt, slowly, revealing the lean lines of his chiseled body, those broad shoulders.
I reached out and gripped him through his pants. “Let me return the favor.”
His breath gave. “I never thought a mortal girl would hold so much power over me.”
“Regrets?” I asked, but I was cheating, because I was working my way down the buttons of his trousers.
“Never.”
I drew out his warm, solid length. Fieran’s cock was a thing of beauty, at least as far as cocks went. I touched my tongue to his tip, and he jerked in my hand.
“Easy.” I raised my brows at him.
“I am at the moment. I’ve been thinking about this for…too long.” His hands squeezed into fists at his sides, as if he were holding himself back. “Since before you liked me.”
“I still don’t like you.”
“Liar,” he said, sounding somewhere between desperate and fond, and I loved that tone, and so I licked my way around his cock.
He groaned and started to say something, and then I enveloped him with my mouth, and he cut himself off with a sharp groan.
I’d finally discovered how to shut his sweet, lying mouth, and I smiled around his cock.
I went on working his cock, running my tongue around his length as I took in as much of him as I could. He fought it, tensing his stomach and clenching his jaw, but his hips jerked as if he could barely hold himself back from fucking my mouth wildly. Another day, maybe I’d let him use my mouth.
I would marry this man, for the sake of our schemes, and sleep in his bed and savor his body and feel safe in his arms. He was looking down at me as if he loved me, but every man had that soft-eyed look in my experience during this kind of moment.
I flicked my tongue across the tip in a lazy spiral, then took him back in. This time I used my hand, twisting in time with my mouth, and he lost control. He bucked, once, twice, spilling the taste of seawater down my throat. I swallowed without breaking eye contact, savoring the way his thighs trembled.
He threw himself onto the bed beside me before wrapping his arm around my waist. He was already somehow erect again. “You are entirely too dressed,” he murmured.
I stretched languidly. I wanted more of him but I also wanted to sleep.
He buried his face in my throat. “What do you want when all this is over?”
I thought of his accusation that I’d live my life on the farm, fading away while the fields bloomed.
“I want Tay well and Lidi’s magic restored and both ofthem safe,” I said. “And then I suppose I’ll figure out the rest. Right now, I can’t see the shape of my dreams through the darkness.”
“Well,” he told me, “I think you’ll light the way.
Fifty-Three
Ipulled my tunic off over my head, then caught a glow of luminescence streaked across the fabric. Instantly, I was back at the edge of that cave, being dragged by that Fae toward my death.
Fieran seemed to register the flash of horror across my face. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “I just realized I’m lying in your bed, and I’m filthy—I had to crouch on the ground in that garden—I should go.”
“You should run away?” Fieran teased gently. He rose and walked across the room, his waist leanly tapered under those broad shoulders, and his ass and thighs lean but rounded with muscle. “I do have a bathtub.”
He was a work of art, and it seemed surreal he was going to be my husband. Even just for a scheme.
He stepped through the door of the bathroom, and in the distance, there was the rush of a tub filling.
I clambered to my feet in that moment when he wasn’t present to hypnotize me with his dick, then hesitated. My clothes were streaked with that luminescence, and I didn’t want to put them on again; most of all, I didn’t want to leave him.
