He groaned. "I do not care about the grain stores."
"What do you care about?"
His hands flexed on her ass. "This."
"That's all?"
"No." He lifted his head. His face was very close. "I care that you are here. In this room. I care that you are naked and I am not inside you yet, which is a problem I intend to fix."
"You said we weren't going to miss supper."
"We're not." His hands slid down to the backs of her thighs and he pulled her up onto his lap, her knees settling on either side of his hips on the bed. The position put her above him, her belly soft against the hard planes of his stomach, her breasts at the level of his mouth. He looked up at her and his eyes were molten in the low light, the amber burning. "Tell me about the kitchen."
"You want me to talk about the kitchen right now?"
"I want to hear about your day." His mouth found her collarbone while his hands resettled on her thighs.
"You're not going to listen to a word I say."
"I will listen to every word." His mouth moved a fraction lower. "I am an excellent listener."
Mab put her hands on his shoulders to hold herself up. The muscle under her palms was absurd. "Fine. She gave me turnips."
"Turnips." His mouth traced the line of her collarbone to the hollow of her throat. His thumbs were drawing slow circles on the outsides of her thighs.
"Turnips," Mab repeated, her voice wavering a little. "A whole pile of them. To peel and quarter."
"And you peeled them."
"I peeled them. Thumb-sized pieces, like she asked." His mouth moved lower and Mab's fingers dug into his shoulders. "And then she—she asked me to taste the broth."
"Mm." The sound hummed against the upper swell of her breast. "What was wrong with it?"
"Undersalted. By a margin so small that—" His tongue touched the curve where her breast began and she lost the thread entirely. "That most people wouldn't catch it," she managed.
"But you caught it." His mouth was moving with terrible patience, tracing the curve without arriving anywhere, and his hands had slid higher on her thighs, thumbs pressing into the soft inner flesh where her legs met his hips.
"I caught it." She swallowed. "Three fingers of salt from the crock. Rubbed, not thrown."
"Rubbed." His mouth found the underside of her breast and stayed there, breath hot against skin that had never in her life been kissed before this week. "Not thrown."
"There's a difference."
"Tell me about the difference." His lips parted and she felt the edge of his tusks, and her spine arched before she could stop it.
"Salt dissolves— unevenly if you—"
His mouth closed over her nipple and she stopped talking.
He didn't rush. He held her there with one hand spread across her lower back and the other gripping her thigh, and he drew on her with a slow, deliberate pressure that sent heat straight down through the center of her body and into the place where she was pressed against the hard ridge of him through his trousers.
"If you what?" he said against her breast.
Mab stared at the ceiling. The ceiling was stone. The stone did not help.
"If you throw it," she said, with the careful enunciation of someone trying to recite a recipe while being taken apart, "itclumps. Sits on the surface. You get pockets of salt and pockets of nothing and the whole pot is uneven."
"Uneven," he repeated. His mouth moved to the other breast and his hand came up to cover the one he'd left, wet and aching in the cool air. "Terrible."
