There’s something about his saliva that makes it hard to stop. I’ve never kissed anyone, so I have nothing to compare it to, but I don’t think a kiss should taste this sweet. I’ve never tasted anything sweeter, and I keep going back for it, pressing my mouth harder against his to get more. I don’t think the taste of him is natural.
I feel the shape of his body under my hands, I feel his cock, hard and heavy against my stomach through our clothes. He wants me as badly as I want him. There’s the proof, pressed into me, and it makes me bold.
Then Osric tears himself away.
The clicking in his throat is loud now. He can’t suppress it anymore, and I hear it clearly, rising out of him in waves. My pussy gushes and clenches around nothing. I want him so much, it scares me. This isn’t polite desire. It isn’t a girlish crush on a handsome stranger. It’s physical, deep, and humiliatingly honest.
He stumbles back, and I have to untangle myself from him. He gets to his feet. I stay on the floor, rattled, my hair loose and my dress twisted, looking up at him.
“This can’t happen,” he says.
“Osric…”
“If we do this and you die, I’ll never survive it.” His voice is low and wrecked. “I’m doomed either way. But you can still be saved.”
I know I must say something, convince him to get back down on the floor and into my arms. I open my mouth but nothing comes out.
He turns and walks out of the kitchen, through the back door, into the garden.
It takes me a minute to snap out of the weird trance I entered. Our first kiss turned my brain to mush. I get up and go after him, but I only make it to the porch before I slam right into Darina.
She’s sweaty, dusty, and furious, grit in her hair and a red flush of temper across her face.
“I can’t believe you left me there,” she yells.
I immediately feel terrible.
“I’m so sorry. Come inside. Come, let me get you water.”
She lets me pull her in, which tells me she’s more tired than angry. I pour her a cup from the pitcher, and she drains half of it in one go. Darina has never managed to stay angry at me for long, and I’ve never deserved her kindness less than today.
“Our bags are still in the car,” she says, wiping her mouth. “I can’t drive the thing. It’s just sitting out there, in the middle of the road, like a monument to everyone’s terrible decisions.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I meant it! Come upstairs. Let’s get you cleaned up. There’s a lot I have to tell you.”
“You need to wash too.”
“I know. It’s dire.”
We go up to my room and into the bathroom, where we fill the basin and work on each other with wet cloths. She scrubs the grit from the back of my neck. I work the dust out of the fine hairs at her temple. While our hands are busy, I tell her everything.
“I’m his mate, Darina. His fated mate. He’s known since the auction, and that sound he keeps making, the clicking he tries to hide by coughing or clearing his throat, is the proof. It’s the mating call we read about in the book. All this time, he struggled with it so I wouldn’t know.”
She wrings her cloth out into the basin.
“All right. The book made the whole thing sound almost civilized. So, why has he been trying to shove us out the door?”
“Because there’s more, and it’s bad. It turns out that when a Scorpius male never finds his mate, he enters a feral rut that makes him dangerous to everyone. His own people put him down.”
Darina stops moving.
“That’s what’s been happening to him,” I say. “That’s what the whole city knows and we didn’t. Nobody exiled him, but they were going to, so he sold his house in Haara and moved out here to the edge of it. What he told us about retiring because he needed a change…”
“Was a lie.”
