“There.” I skim my finger over the puffed, purple tip. “Little leg is swollen.” My fingertip comes back wet with something transparent and sticky. “And ooze.” I carry my finger to my nose, then dart my tongue over the spot of wetness. It does not taste bad like his blood. It tastes like the ocean.
He asks Mórrígan for strength. Is the pain so great that he has trouble standing?
“If you weak, you need sit or you fall.”
“I do not feel weak.” He chafes the growth on his jaw. “And to set your mind at ease, I did not stab myself in the cock.”
“Cock?”
He grumbles in Crow, then addresses Mórrígan once more. “That is the word for my ‘little leg.’ Didn’t Priya teach you about this yet?”
“Cock,” I repeat, moving my head back a little because his cock is growing very long, like my horn. Is he about to shift into his other form? I sweep my gaze over his legs, but neither smoke nor feathers obscure his skin. “Why get bigger?”
“Because it’s sensitive,” he mumbles.
“So it swell? Like when I bump head?”
“When did you bump your head?”
“No important this, Cathal. What important is?—”
One of his hand settles on the back of my head, then combs through the thick mass of pink. His touch sends a shiver down my spine…many shivers. Although I rattle, it’s Cathal’s breathing that seems to intensify. Because his fingers are distracting, I seize his wrist and carry it away from my head.
“It gone. It was small lump.” I jut my chin toward his cock. “Youhave big lump.”
“It’s not a—I didn’t run into anything.” The muscles along his stomach clench. “I can’t believe I’m about to offer to have this conversation with you.” He purses his lips, which deepens the hollows beneath his cheekbones. “It’s probably retribution for being a block of stone when Fallon needed to learn about how bodies worked.”
I sit back on my heels, head tilted sideways.
“I need a drink. Or ten.” He pulls his pants back up and then walks toward the tufted chair, his strides so long and rushed they make every flame on the way shiver.
I stand and follow at a slower pace, the bare soles of my feet whispering over the heated stone. “After you drink and talk, I heal. We bargain.”
I take a seat on the sofa cushions across from him and tuck my legs underneath me. The date wine he brought to mychambers last night is already tipped to his lips. The ball in his throat bobs many times before he lowers the bottle and plants his elbows on his wide knees. “All right.” He rolls the slender glass neck between his palms. “So…”
“So?”
“So males have cocks, and females do not.”
“I know.”
“The same way females have breasts and males do not.”
“Phoebus has little beads on breasts too.”
Cathal coughs, then rakes his throat. Is it possible he swallowed an insect? “Those are called nipples.”
I touch mine, and their points sharpen. “Why males flat undernipples?”
“Because it’s the females who store the milk for babes.”
I glance down at my breasts. “I have milk in body?”
“Not yet. But if you ever grow a babe, then yes, chances are you will produce milk.”
“Sybille grow babe. Mattia plant seed inside.”
His gaze flips off the neck of the bottle. “You know about the male seed?”
