This time, there were no small children to interrupt, no ailing father to worry about, no one to see, as a small knoll hid us from the village’s main thoroughfare.
And this time I was kissing her, claiming her sweet mouth the way I’d been dying to do for weeks now.
Obviously, I should never have started that foolish blind-feeding game. It was flirting with disaster.
Watching Raewyn’s pretty lips taking in and tasting the various foods, I felt like I would literally perish on the spot if I didn’t tasteher.
And so I had. After that first delicious slip-up, I’d managed to stop myself and reel it back in, but that restraint must have used up the final vestiges of my self control.
It was almost gone now, slipping farther and farther out of reach, like the end of a rope trailing behind a runaway stallion.
If Raewyn wanted this to stop, she was going to have to be the one to do it.
Something had been set loose inside me. I could barely manage to break away from her for even a second to take in oxygen.
When I did, I looked down at her flushed face, mussed hair—impossibly beautiful.
“Gods, what are youdoingto me?” I asked and kissed her again before she could answer.
This had to have been why the matchmaker’s glamour had told me Raewyn was my perfect match.
Being with her in this way felt like placing the final piece into one of those intricate puzzles Mareth sometimes persuaded me to do with her.
Suddenly all the myriad moments of my life when I’d been overlooked and overshadowed and pushed aside no longer mattered. Because they were more than made up for bythis, something—someone—who was uniquelymine, made just for me.
It felt like being immersed in one of the frequent dreams I had about her, except much, much better because this was real.
It was happening. At last.
And it was wrong.
No matter how right it felt, IknewI should not be kissing the woman my brother loved.
I should not be falling this hard. But I couldn’t help myself.
I couldstopmyself though. With great difficulty, I broke the kiss and pulled back.
“Are you okay?” Raewyn whispered, apparently reading the guilt on my face.
“Better than okay.” A lie, followed by a truth. “You taste as amazing as I always knew you would.”
“Always knew?” she asked and gave me a shy smile. “When did you start thinking about it?”
“When did you?”
“I asked you first,” she said.
“Honestly, I’ve wanted to taste those heart-shaped lips from the moment I saw you outside the ballroom entrance. But Stellon slapped my hand away from the candy jar, so to speak.”
“And you let him,” she said. “That doesn’t seem like you.”
“He’s the Crown Prince,” I said, giving the justification I’d accepted all my life whenever Stellon had received preferential treatment.
“But honestly… I wouldn’t have let that stop me if I’d believed you had even the slightest interest in me,” I admitted. “You rejected me so thoroughly though that when he insisted on monopolizing your attention, it felt like I had no other choice but to allow it. It was like receiving the best birthday gift of my life—then having it snatched away and given to someone else.”
“I wasn’t rejecting you, Pharis. I was scared of you,” Raewyn said.
My head snapped back. “Scared? Of me? I was being nice—at first anyway.”
