No food. No rest. Working to get this garden started becomes the only sustenance I require over the next few hours.
And I’m so caught up in my mission, I don’t realize a shadow has fallen over me until a braying voice demands: “What are you doing out here before the moons rise, Eryx Bride? Why aren’t you in our sovereign’s chambers?”
I turn my head to look up.
And find the mean, triple-horned brown goat from last night glaring down at me.
Audacity
VEYRION
HadI thought the human princess quelled?
Apparently, the suns that puts all Stone Fae to sleep only served to reawaken her audacity.
“Well, hello again, King Super Villain.”
Her voice awakened me behind my stone cast. Then came those hands—those incredibly soft hands, setting my chest alight with sensation. She touched me with curiosity, not the terror I was told to expect.
Traced every groove of my stomach, as if she were memorizing me.
And I—trapped as I was inside my cast of sleeping stone before the rise of the moons—could do nothing.
Nothing to stop her soft, wicked hands.
Nothing to quell the feelings they stirred in me.
Heat.
Ache.
And a maddening awareness of my emotions that I had not felt since my unexpected ascension to the Stone Fae King’s Blood Throne.
Each stroke of her palm awakened phantom sensations beneath the shell. My core responded in kind—an eruption of pressure and need inside a body meant to be unfeeling at this hour.
Then her touch roamed lower.
When she ran that soft hand over the stone sheathing my shaft, it was as if my very spirit flinched. I would have gasped if my lungs weren’t dormant. Would have grabbed her wrist. Would have pushed her against the wall and demanded—no, not demanded.Punished. Everything inside of me wanted to punish her for this teasing torture.
But I was paralyzed. And so I could only endure it. The agony of powerlessness. The helpless shock of pleasure. The forbidden thrill of awakened desire.
Inside the shell, the organic flesh of me swelled—so hard, I feared I might crack through the cast that shielded me from all enemies.
But enemy was not the right word for this brazen human.
She wasdanger. Of a different kind.
And that was before she kissed me, letting her warm tongue slip over the seam between my lips.
I knew then that she had lied about being a virgin. What virgin would dare to torture a male thus, touching and teasing him when he could not touch her back?
Or even better, slam her into the window to reimburse her for the sweet torture she was visiting upon my body.
How had she managed to get out of her shackle, anyway? I’d had it specially made in a rush job from our armorer and had ordered the cook to put a sleeping drug in her food. To keep her docile while I secured her, I had told myself—not to bring an endto her tears. Though I was happy for both when I chained her to the wall.
Yet here she was, touching me everywhere. Pressing her soft chest into my torso as she kissed my stone lips.
“Not bad for a first and last kiss. But now it’s time for me to go. See ya later, Your Stone-Cold Majesty.”
