His arms slide beneath me, strong and sure, tucking beneath my backside as he raises me with infuriating ease until our eyes meet. The crowd gasps, but Luceran pays them no mind. He turns slowly, far too slowly for the frantic beat of the music.
The world slows.
The music stretches thin, distorts, then disappears entirely, until it feels as though there is nothing left but the two of us, my heart hammering so violently I swear he must feel it.
He leans in.
So close that his lips hover a breath from mine.
“It’s time to go,” he says.
The room crashes back into existence all at once. The stares, the silence, the sudden awareness of myself. Of how my dress has ridden up where he holds me. Of the heat flooding my skin, my cheeks flushed crimson. Of the buttons at my bodice that have somehow come undone, the swell of my breast visible beneath the loosened fabric.
“Put me down,” I hiss, tucking my hair back with trembling fingers. “Now.”
“As you wish,” he replies.
He lowers me slowly. Excruciatingly so. I feel every solid plane of him beneath his shirt as my body slides down, every hard ridge and line, until my boots finally touch the floor.
I might as well still be airborne.
My knees threaten to give way as he looks down at me, and in that moment I feel painfully small, because he knows. He knows exactly what he has done to me.
It was deliberate.
But why?
Why would he do this? Why would he make me feel like this?
“I will pay the innkeeper,” he says calmly, “and wait for you in the carriage, should you wish to… freshen up.”
The way he says it.
The way his gaze drags over me, dishevelled, flushed, undone, leaves no doubt that he sees every detail.
Then he turns his back on me.
He does exactly as he says, coins clinking softly as he settles the bill, before ducking beneath the doorway and stepping back into the cold night, leaving me rooted to the floor.
Unable to move.
Unable to breathe.
The ghost of his touch still lingering on my skin.
19
The tension in the carriage is palpable.
It presses in on me with every mile we put between ourselves and the inn, thick and suffocating, filling the narrow space until there is scarcely room to breathe. With each jolt of the road, our knees brush—once, twice—and every accidental touch sends a low, traitorous warmth stirring inside me, nudging nerves that refuse to settle.
I cannot stop thinking about the way he held me.
About how confident his grip was, how utterly unashamed. No human man has ever made me feel so claimed, so thoroughly possessed, and that unsettles me most of all. Because I do not know where it came from or why.
Why now?
I am infuriating. Disobedient. He has told me as much more than once. You do not hold someone like that, do not touch them like that, if all you feel is disdain.
