If the Frost King will not listen to me, then I must entice him into sleep. A body too fired with adrenaline, a mind circling without end? I understand what he needs.
“You’re too tense,” I whisper, brushing my fingertips across the slope of his shoulders. He is watchful as I reposition the stool against the side of the tub so I’m given a view of his front. “Might I offer a suggestion?”
As though sensing a shift in the air, his eyelids droop lower, slitting the blue gaze beneath, a blaze of color despite the fatigue. “Go on.”
“The body, after release, tends to relax.”
His lips part in surprise. “Sex?”
The deep rasp tugs on something low in my pelvis. As my attention drops to the murky water where his legs are spread, I spy the faint outline of his erection lying against his abdomen, its slight upward curve.
“Not sex.” The words are coarse. Gods, I need a drink. “I would focus on your pleasure only.” Because if I am to burn in whatever hell exists, then I want Boreas to burn with me.
The silence drags on. We stare at each other, and I wonder if he recognizes that this suggestion is born of my own selfish desire. I want to touch him, to feel his body come alive, to watch him sunder, damn the consequences.
Carefully, he replies, “How would this work?”
He’s not saying no. That’s something. “You don’t have to do anything. Just sit there while I touch you.”
Boreas searches my face as though anticipating a trap. If it is a trap, it is one of my own making.
“What of your pleasure? Do you expect me not to reciprocate?” He frowns. I daresay it is endearing. “I would pleasure you, if you would allow me.”
My throat tightens, for I remember our coupling at camp, its premature end. “I appreciate that,” I croak, “but I wish to pleasure you in this way, if you will consent to it.”
Eventually, he leans back, wary in his surrender. A glint of tension rises in him and is stymied.
Trailing the fingers of one hand through the surface of the water, I let him settle. Knees bent and legs spread, he is a king in every battle-honed edge and every unexpected curve.
My fingertips brush his abdomen, and bumps scatter across his flesh in the wake of my touch. My mouth is painfully dry as I continue the trailing path, up the ridged abdomen, across his sculpted chest, down, ending with my hand wrapped around his hard, jutting shaft.
Boreas groans, and his body curves helplessly around my hand.
Every thought trickles through the sieve of my mind. The feel of him is exactly as I remember. A throbbing, compact heat beneath the give of flesh. I give a slow, experimental stroke from root to crown and back. The king’s hips twitch even as he swells in my grip, and his arousal ripens the air, stealing the last of my sanity.
I watch my hand work him over beneath the surface of the soapy water. He, in turn, watches my face, a hiss escaping whenever I give additional attention to the head.
“Good?” I ask, catching his eye.
No. Slower.
Shadows have lengthened his fingers into claws. When my strokes aren’t enough, his hips begin to rock, easy and deliberate, pushing his shaft through the opening my hand makes. Water splashes, a distant sound. My body feels scorched. When I reach the very base of his cock, Boreas breaks off with a panting curse.
“Like this?” I repeat the motion.
One of his hands pries free of the tub’s edge to wrap around my wrist, shadows tickling my brown skin. He guides my hand, widens his legs, tilts his pelvis, throws back his head. A slow, rolling motion. And again, faster now. His hand falls away to rest on his thigh, fist clenched. “Yes,” he breathes, eyes fluttering shut.
Red colors the rise of his cheeks, deepens his lips to blush. A bead of water, or maybe sweat, wends down the side of his jaw. I lean forward to lick it clean.
There is something highly erotic about bringing Boreas to that knife’s edge. To watch compulsion—sex—overrule all reason. He is the indomitable force reigning over so many lives, a hammer to shape molten metal, but tonight, I might watch him break.
Water sloshes from the rapid motion of my hand. My grip tightens on the upward drag, fingers loosening around the wide head. I trace the slit and push in gently, and his body arches beautifully, the hard set of his jaw revealing how rapidly his control frays.
The closer he is to completion, the more I fight my own urges. To climb into the tub and spread my legs across his lap. To grind against his length until my body shatters. I could do it. He would likely not stop me. But I meant what I said before: this is for his pleasure only, and sleep, tenuous sleep, awaits at its end.
Feeling bolder, I gently play with his balls. Boreas jerks with a vicious curse. “Wren.” Mouth partially open, lips red, red, red.
My hand quickens. He rocks against me, his cock pushing free of the water as he releases a drawn-out groan, rough and guttural. One of his hands clings white-knuckled to the tub’s edge, the other on my upper arm.
