I watch the color deepen in her cheeks. The blush—that involuntary betrayal that she despises because it undermines the Emotionless Queen facade—spreads from pink to rose, coloring her porcelain skin with the kind of warmth that her body can’t produce on its own but apparently manufactures just fine when provoked by the right stimuli.
My precious Omega.
Doesn’t like to be told what to do.
But sure likes to order people around.
She mutters something.
Low, barely audible, directed at a point somewhere to the left of my shoulder rather than at my face because Victoria Sinclair can deliver a farewell address to her dying sister without wavering but apparently cannot look me in the eye while telling me where she wants to be taken.
“On the table.”
I smirk wider.
“Spread out all eagle, hmm?”
She huffs—the aggressive one, the one with the full nostril flare—and looks away. The motion exposes the long line of her neck, the column of pale skin interrupted by the faintest tracery of old scars and the new tendons standing taut with the effort of maintaining composure while her body is actively conspiring against her.
I catch her chin.
My fingers are firm but measured, guiding her face back to mine with a pressure that sayslook at mewithout saying it. Her storm-gray eyes meet mine, and the defiance in them is undercut by the heat—by the dilated pupils and the parted lips and the elevated pulse I can see hammering in the hollow of her throat.
“Is that why you put up with me?” I tilt my head, studying her the way she hates being studied—like something transparent, something readable. “Your infatuation with various birds?”
She grumbles.
“No.” A pause. Then, with the particular petulance of a woman who is currently aroused and annoyed about it in equal measure: “I don’t even like hawks.”
I chuckle—low, rough, the sound vibrating through my chest and into hers through the points of contact between us. The lie is so transparent it’s almost endearing, and the fact that she delivers it with a straight face only makes it better.
“Oh.” I lean in, my lips brushing the heated skin of her cheek, tracking a path toward her ear. “So you like eagles.”
She doesn’t answer.
Doesn’t need to. The way her breath catches—a sharp, involuntary hitch that she’ll deny until the day she dies—tells me everything her silence is working very hard to withhold.
I press my lips to the spot just below her ear, where her pulse is hammering with an urgency that makes my own blood run hotter, and I let my voice drop to the register that I know—from extensive, meticulous experimentation—bypasses her defenses entirely.
“You say you hate hawks.” My breath ghosts across her skin, and I feel the shiver that runs through her like a current through water—full-body, involuntary, devastating. “But you’d be moaning that very word when I hit the right spots, hmm?”
Her cheeks ignite.
The blush escalates from rose to crimson with a rapidity that would be comical if it weren’t so viscerally satisfying. She tries to act like it’s not a big deal—arranges her expression into something approaching indifference, schools her breathing back toward normal, deploys every tool in her emotional suppression arsenal—but the color in her skin is beyond her control, and we both know it.
I chuckle again, softer this time, and press a kiss to the hinge of her jaw that’s gentler than either of us probably expects.
Enough taunting.
She had a rough night.
A knife between her ribs, blood on the floor, unconscious at 3 a.m.
She deserves to feel something other than pain today.
I scoop her up.
One arm beneath her thighs, the other supporting her back, lifting her against my chest in a motion so practiced it’sbecome second nature. She’s light—lighter than she should be, the product of irregular meals and chronic physical expenditure and the particular kind of thinness that comes from a body that burns fuel faster than its owner remembers to replace it. Her arms wrap around my neck automatically, fingers lacing behind my head, and the contact sends a fresh surge of heat through me that has nothing to do with the stove still warming at our backs.
