“Come inside,” he murmured, low enough that only I could hear.
I nodded, my pulse unsteady for reasons I refused to examine.
Then I turned with him toward the tent, his hand finding my hip. He drew me close, his touch protective.
Behind us, the camp watched.
And believed every second of our little act.
The tent flap fell closed.
The camp’s soft evening noise dulled slightly, but the privacy felt like a hush. Fear’s arm was still around my waist.
In the dim light his eyes were very gold, and there was something faintly smiling about his lips that I wasn’t sure if I scorned or not. The morning in the queen’s castle felt as if it had been approximately four years ago. Deciding to stab him, and the reasons why, felt even further distant.
“Now you are free for the night. They’ll assume we are busy. You can rest.” He started to pull away.
His mission was complete. There was some mercy in it, even if it was just to preserve his plots.
I still hated him. I still distrusted him.
But I still desired him, as always.
I caught the collar of his shirt to keep him from pulling away. He turned back, his lips parting slightly in confusion, a furrow dimpling the space between his brows.
It was almost a lunge. Graceless. My hands closed on his shoulders, and he should have pulled back—it should have read as an attack, after everything I had done to him—but he always read me so well. My lips were on his, a wild plunging kiss, my body pushing against his and knowing he would catch me.
Then his hands were in my hair, and he kissed me back with nothing careful in it at all.
I barely saw the room around us as we moved through it, catching it in fractured glimpses between our kisses: a bed, a fire glowing in a brazier, the post at the center of the tent?—
Ah fuck, the post.
We stumbled into it, and the whole tent rocked.
Then the back of my knees found the bed.
All between these glimpses, his lips on mine, the two of us trading fierce, urgent kisses, the tip of his tongue teasing between the seam of my lips, my hand on his cheek, and my own tongue slipping needily against his.
His hands tightened in my hair, not gently, as if he weren’t quite managing to control either of us anymore. I made a sound against his mouth that I had not planned and felt his answering groan of need.
The two of us stumbled onto the soft quilts. He pulled me over his lap, straddling him.
His thumb traced the line of my jaw, my throat, his knuckle dragging slow and deliberate, and I was aware of my own pulse under it, too fast, embarrassingly fast.
My anger still burned bright. It existed alongside this: the heat he carried, the weight of his hands, the specific devastating unfairness of how well he kissed, the fact that he kissed me with complete unhurried attention, as if there were nothing else in the world that mattered besides me in this moment.
I was furious at him, and I was pulling him closer.
Then I bit his lip. Hard.
He drew back. His eyes were dark. His breathing was not steady. He did not look at me as if being bitten had hurt his feelings one bit, and something in me clenched and wanted to keep going.
“Right.” His voice was not his usual voice, but the roughened version I had heard a handful of times. It made me feel like I was already a queen without having to fight that Fae bitch for her throne.
I put my hand on his chest, on the warm, hard muscle, and I wanted to pull him closer even as I held him deliberately at adistance. I was still thinking of Maris and Corbyn and how he had caused her pain.
“Tell me everything.”
