I wordlessly left her on the bed and pulled on my trousers.
“You don’t have to answer it, Callum.”
I walked out of the bedroom and crossed the sitting room until I made it to the front door. I opened it without checking the identity of the person on the other side, and no one was there. On the doorstep was a large basket of food. Wine bottles, fresh fruit, a couple of casseroles that someone had recently prepared because they were still warm.
I lifted it and brought it to the kitchen counter, and that was when I noticed the note.
The envelope had Lily’s name written in a woman’s handwriting.
I assumed it was her mother.
Lily eventually came out of the room, wearing the shirt I’d left behind. “What’s this?”
I handed her the envelope.
She looked at her name on the outside. “It’s from my mom.” She opened it and read the letter aloud. “Thought you might be hungry…Mom.” She returned the parchment to the envelope. “That was nice of her.”
“It was.”
She grabbed one of the packed casseroles and set it aside on the counter. “I’m starving too. Didn’t realize it until now.” She removed the lid to the dish, revealing a baked pasta in tomato sauce with cheese. “Want me to make you a plate?”
“Please.”
She grabbed two plates from the cabinet and served the pasta on both. Then she picked up a bottle of wine at random and uncorked it before she poured two glasses. She wordlessly set the table with linens and utensils and placed our food and wine on the surface. There was also a basket of fresh bread, so she set that in the center before she took a seat.
I stared at her for a moment, aware that I hadn’t sat down for a meal in…hundreds of years. Unless I counted the times Leviathan forced me to eat souls in the castle, a thought I immediately pushed away the second it came to me.
Lily sliced her fork into the pasta and took a bite. “She must have just made this.” She looked at me when I didn’t join her. “Everything alright?”
“Yes.” I fed more logs onto the fire so the room would remain warm and bright before I took the seat across from her. I stared at the feast before us and thought of the dinners I used to have with my family. The last time we’d sat together was before the storm that had infected Anya’s lungs. After that, she was too weak to sit at the table with us.
She continued to stare at me like she knew something was wrong.
“I haven’t sat down for dinner in a very long time.”
Her eyes softened once she understood how big this moment was for me.
“When I traveled with your father, we ate what the dragons hunted for us. That was the first time I ate something. But this is different.” I looked at her across from me, the two of us sharing a meal together like we were already a family, something so trivial for everyone else…but intimate and special for me. “I’m grateful I get to do this with you.”
3
LILY
Time had no meaning to us in our quiet bubble. The sun rose and set, the amount of light changing from behind the curtains, but we had no grasp of the time of day. We slept on and off at random times.
I’d fallen asleep in bed while he showered, and I woke up to the sound of his heavy body entering the room. My eyes peeled open to see him at the foot of the bed. His hair was damp from the way he dried it with a towel, but a couple drops were still on his skin after they fell out of his hair and splashed on him.
A behemoth of a man who still looked like a god even when he was stripped of his powers, he stared me down like we hadn’t been locked away for the last two days. My body was sore from taking his enormous girth nearly nonstop, but I didn’t dare complain.
He wore that intense expression, like the sight of my naked body under the sheets was enough to entice him again. Hislength was at full mast, ready to impale me and split me in two with his thrusts.
He grabbed the bottom of the sheets and slowly pulled them off me, exposing my naked body to the cold air. Then he moved over the bed, making it shift and creak because of his massive size, and he covered me like a storm cloud and blocked out the light.
He planted his lips on my stomach, and he kissed my belly button and the smooth skin around it before he shifted up and kissed the area between my breasts. Then his lips latched on to a nipple, and he licked and sucked them both before he smothered my hips in his kisses, hooking my thighs over his shoulder so he could kiss the delicate skin there.
I dug my fingers into his hair, and I watched this beautiful man worship my body with the same reverence that the witches had worshipped my powers.
He sprinkled kisses on the inside of my other thigh before his lips moved to my sex. The hair was still there because I hadn’t had time to shave, but he devoured me like he didn’t even notice. He sucked my clit into his mouth and applied pressure with his teeth before he swirled his tongue around over and over, and then he slipped his tongue into my slit.
