“We’re on a hill,” I point out, though my voice has already gone thinner than I’d like. “In broad daylight. Anyone could?—”
“The nearest farmstead is a mile south.” His lips drag along the tendon of my throat, and I feel his smile against my pulse. “And I’m told the queen owns this land. Every blade of grass. Every inconveniently placed hill.”
“That’s not how land owner—” The protest dissolves into a sharp inhale as his teeth graze my collarbone. His hand slides from my waist to my hip, pulling me toward him across the blanket until my back is flush against his chest.
“I’m dizzy,” I murmur.
“Dizzy bad?” he rasps, pressing a kiss to the hinge of my jaw. “Or dizzy good?”
“The verdict is not yet in.”
“Then let me shift it toward good.” His fingers finish with the laces, and the bodice loosens, letting the spring air slip against my skin. “I want—no, need you.”
He takes his time peeling the fabric from my shoulders, his mouth following the path of each reveal—the curve of my shoulder, the ridge of my spine, the dip at the small of my back—with a patience that would be infuriating if it weren’t so devastating.
I twist in his arms, finding his mouth with mine. The kiss is slow, tasting of bread and wine and the warm, unhurried ease of a man with nowhere to be. My fingers reach back to thread through his hair while his hands gather my skirts from behind, the linen rising in slow bunches until his palms find bare skin and the groan that leaves him vibrates against the nape of my neck.
He doesn’t reposition me. Doesn’t flip or pull or rearrange. He simply presses closer, his chest flush against my back, one arm sliding beneath me to band across my ribs while the other hooks my thigh, hitching it just enough. When he pushes inside from behind, the sound I make is swallowed by the open sky.
No damp walls to echo it back. No ceiling to contain it. Just the endless blue above and the steady, rolling rhythm of him filling me while the wind combs through the grass on every side.
He moves slowly. Each stroke is long and deliberate, a lazy, deep rocking of his hips that I feel all the way to my navel. The angle is different like this—tighter, fuller, the drag of him hitting places that make my fingers claw at the blanket beneath us. His mouth stays on my neck, my shoulder, the shell of my ear, breathing me in with each thrust as though I’m something he needs more than air.
“I keep worrying,” he says between breaths, his lips grazing my ear, “that I’ll wake up from all this sleeping I get to do nowand find that this is just a dream. That I don’t have a wife to do the most mundane, mortal things. Moment by moment.”
“You’re inside me,” I pant, pressing back against him to meet his next stroke. “If this is a dream, then it’s a good one.”
He chuckles, a sincere sound that breaks his rhythm and buries itself warm and shaking against the curve of my neck. His grin curves against my skin, and something about that—Death laughing while fucking me on a sunlit hill—strikes me as so profoundly absurd that I laugh, too, breathless and bright, and for a moment, we’re just two idiots tangled on a blanket, shaking with a joy that has no business existing, yet refuses to leave.
He finds his rhythm again, deeper now, his hand sliding from my thigh to my front. His fingers find the swollen heat between my legs, circling with the same unhurried patience he’s brought to everything this afternoon, while his hips roll in long, devastating strokes that push the air from my lungs one thrust at a time.
The pressure builds in slow, cresting waves. His mouth on my neck. His fingers between my thighs. The thick fullness of him rocking into me from behind.
The orgasm doesn’t crash so much as bloom. A long, shuddering unfurling that starts at his touch and radiates outward until my spine bows against his chest and his name leaves my mouth in a sound the fields can keep.
He follows with a low, guttural groan, his arm tightening around my ribs, pulling me flush against him as his hips stutter and press deep. I feel him pulse inside me, each throb heavy and warm, his forehead dropping to the curve of my shoulder while his breath comes apart in ragged, shaking pieces. We lie there after, breathing hard, the blanket twisted beneath us, the sun painting warmth across our tangled limbs.
A breeze passes over us, carrying the green smell of young grain and turned earth, and for a long, perfect moment there’s nothing in the world but this.
“Well?” His lips move against my temple, lazy and smug. “How was that, hmm?”
My stomach flips.
Not the slow, unsettled queasiness from before. This is sharp. Sudden. A violent lurch that sends acid climbing my throat with no warning.
I shove him off me, roll sideways, and barely clear the edge of the blanket before my stomach empties itself into the wildflowers—half an apple included.
“That’s…” Vale props himself on one elbow, watching me retch into a patch of crocuses. “Harsh judgment.”
I spit, wiping my mouth on my sleeve, my eyes streaming. “It’s not—” Another heave. I grip the grass until the wave passes, panting. “It’s not you. Idiot.”
He sits up, the smugness gone, replaced by genuine concern. His hand finds my back, rubbing slow circles between my shoulder blades. “Are you ill? Something you ate?”
“No, I don’t think so.” I sit back on my heels, dragging a shaky breath through my nose. The dizziness is receding, leaving behind a hollow, rinsed-out feeling and a strange, metallic taste on my tongue. “I was a little nauseous this morning. Fine on the ride here. Just now, only when I?—”
I stop.
My hand has drifted to my belly without my permission, pressing flat against the soft plane beneath the rumpled linen. I look at Vale.
