The oxygen in the room hasn’t thinned, yet my lungs cramp and my tongue feels like scorched earth. “Since when do you evenlikeme?”
“Since you flocked into my bathing chamber.” His confession skips through the torrid air and sinks into my chest, causing much rippling.
“Huh.” I lick my lips. “You have a really odd way of showing it.”
“Like I mentioned earlier, I’m completely out of my depth in matters of the heart.”
I give my quivering lips another tongue lash.
“I was hoping”—his focus is so fierce that I feel like I’ve just flown into one of the giant fire orbs dotting his hallway—“that it was reciprocal.”
I’m about to make a quip abouthoping and what notbut think better of making light of his declaration. The last thing I want is to destabilize this man who’s been celibate since my birth, almost as though he’s been waiting for me. Skies, what an odd contemplation that is…
When his throat bobs and uncertainty creases the skin around his lips, I say, “It’s very reciprocal.”
The breath he releases is so deep that it whooshes against me.Actually… When I spot my ponytail fluttering in a breeze of Konstantin’s making, I surmise it isn’t his sigh that I felt but his magic. I shuffle my feet in order to facilitate his mission of reeling me in.
When I’m finally situated between his thighs, he leans forward and ropes my waist, then perches me on his lap. “Did you need to make me wait quite so long on your reply?”
“You deserved it after you made that poor sprite fetch me blood.”
He winces.
“Relax. In hindsight, it was quite funny. The sort of humor that’s right up my family’s alley.”
Although he blanches and gives his head a little shake, his grimace gentles into a smile. “Surely not when directed at one of theirs.”
I tap the part of the chain that peeks out from his shirt. “Hmm… perhaps don’t walk around too often without your nifty medallion.”
His fingers dance along the edge of my thigh, generating a delicious tingling.
“Tell me, Vizosh, do you still remember how to kiss, or will you need a refresher course?” I ask, fully aware that my comment will rankle him since there’s nothing a proud man loathes more than his faculties being questioned.
As predicted, his eyebrows slam low. Not as predicted though, his smile deepens, darkens.
“Did you think I’d inadvertently stick my tongue inside your ear instead of your mouth, Miss Ríhbiadh?”
I shrug a shoulder. “I hear that most of your people enjoy ear-play.” I stroke over his long ears with only my gaze, yet itmakes the muscles in the Ice King’s leg harden beneath my ass. “But you didn’t seem like a fan.”
“I am.” He gently lays claim to my neck with one hand and grips the outside of my thigh with the other, tucking me infinitesimally closer. “Which is the reason I tried to keep you from touching them in public earlier.”
My skin breaks out in gooseflesh. “Am I permitted to touch them behind closed doors?”
“Yes, but…” He swallows. “But preferably not tonight. I’m coiled so tight that I…” Another swallow. “Safer not to.”
“For your trousers’ sake?”
“For your body’s sake.”
I inhale slow and deep. He must sense my twittering nerves, because his fingers begin to knead my neck like earlier at supper. I realize that his objective was conceivably not strangulation.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he rasps.
“About?”
“About that refresher course. I’d love some guidance.”
Like a murder of crows, my heartbeats careen against the walls of my throat, pooling beneath the roaming pads of his fingers.
