"Adequate! I'll show you ad?—"
She hits me again. Her grin is wicked and unguarded in a way I almost never get to see, and it short-circuits my brain.
I lunge forward and catch her around the waist. She yelps. An actual, undignified yelp that I will treasure for the rest of my life as I haul her down onto the blankets and pin her beneath me, one hand capturing both her wrists above her head in one hand while the other presses the pillow threateningly close to her face.
"Take it back," I say.
"I will not." Her scales are flushed dark, her chest heaving with laughter she's barely trying to suppress.
"Hmm." I release her wrists and shift downward, pressing a kiss to her collarbone. Then lower. "Then maybe I need more practice."
Her laugh falters. "What are you… Cody?—"
I slide between her legs and give her one slow, deliberate lick.
The sound she makes echoes off the cave walls.
Her hand flies to my hair, gripping hard, and whatever composure she had left evaporates. I grin and do it again.
"Cody." I love the way she says my name, wrecked and breathless and halfway to begging.
I pause long enough to look up at her. "Still adequate?"
Her eyes are dark, her chest heaving, her fingers twisted in my hair. She looks down at me, and the mask slips just enough to let the truth through.
"You are so much more than adequate," she says. "You are…" She swallows. "I have never felt so much. With anyone. I did not know I still could."
I go still for a moment. I press my forehead to her thigh and close my eyes against the ache in my chest.
"I'm glad," I say. "I'm so glad."
Then I press a kiss to the inside of herthigh. "Now I'm going to show you how much more thanadequateI really am."
"Do not let it go to your head."
"Wouldn't dream of it," I murmur.
The sounds that ring through the cavern afterward are the best I've ever heard.
Eventually, we drag ourselves out of our nest of blankets and back into our rumpled clothes. The storm still rumbles above us, but down here it feels like a distant afterthought. We've got nowhere to be, no schedule to keep, and an entire cave system we've barely scratched the surface of.
We spend the next few hours exploring.
The cave system is larger than I realized during our brief visit yesterday. The main cavern with its glowing pools is only the beginning. Tunnels branch off in several directions, carved by water and time into a labyrinth of passages and chambers.
A'Vanti leads the way. She said she spent a year living in Brishar, and while she never explored this deep previously, she knows the main passages well enough to navigate without hesitation. I follow her lead, mapping the turns in my head the way I'd chart a flight path, an old habit, but a useful one.
"These caves are amazing," she says, pausing in a narrow passage where the walls swirl with bands of copper and iron red. She touches a smooth, rippled surface that looks like frozen honey. "And still alive. The springs are still flowing, still shaping the stone."
I play my flashlight across the ceiling and stop dead. Crystals jut from the rock like inverted spires. The crystals are a milky white with an iridescent sheen. As my flashlight moves across them, colors ripple across their surfaces, shifting and chasing each other like oil on water. The whole ceiling shimmers with it, a thousand prisms throwing rainbows across the dark stone walls.
"Whoa. Look at those."
"Drenati crystals." She stands on her toes to get a closer look, her face lit with wonder. "I have never seen them this large."
I tilt the flashlight and watch the colors shift. "It looks like the cave is growing teeth."
A'Vanti wrinkles her nose. "That is a deeply unpleasant image."
