Page 38 of Ruling the Green

“Just up there,” he said, nodding his chin toward a rock formation ahead.

At the foot, he deftly ran upward, feet finding footholds that he must have known from memory as I struggled to grab hold and pull myself up.

“Take my hand,” he demanded from the top as the redcaps closed in around me, their bodies pressing close, their sounds buzzing around me until I felt dizzy from it.

When I didn’t extend my hand, Jet’s strong hand closed around my wrist and pulled. There was one moment of stomach-dropping nothingness as the ground fell away and I was dangling in the air, before I felt my feet meet the smooth rock, my body pressed tightly against a slightly breathless Jet.

There it was again, that little tightening in my core, the flutter in my chest.

“We’re safe up here,” he told me, his arm still tightly around me as he glanced down at the redcaps.

My gaze followed his, finding the creatures attempting to scale the rocks, but each falling with loud grunts back to the ground, over and over.

“Persistent, they might be. Agile, they are not,” Jet said, making my gaze find his again.

For reasons I couldn’t name, my gaze moved from his eyes to his lips and back again as the shivery sensations inside intensified.

“Keep looking at me like that and I’m going to forget this is a sham of a marriage.”

He released me as abruptly as he’d grabbed me, leaving me stumbling back a step without his steady frame, a cold wave washing over me, making a hard tremble course through me.

Seeing it, Jet reached for the flask. “You should have more before it gets worse.”

I took the flask, warm in my hand from his body heat, but I didn’t take a drink.

Because I was pretty sure it wasn’t the lack of the lake that had me feeling that way.

I might not understand it, but I was relatively sure it had nothing to do with the separation from my life source… and everything to do with my husband.

CHAPTER TEN

Jet

I’d been half-hard since I’d lifted her up the rock formation and felt her body melting into mine, and saw the heavy-lidded softness of desire in her eyes.

It didn’t help that once she was able to settle down and ignore the sounds of the idiotic redcaps still trying—and failing—to scale the rock formation, and had me rip off a piece of bread for her to try that a low, throaty moan escaped her.

That was not a sound I needed to know.

But now I could think of little else.

Even as the rot-scented redcaps followed us all the way back to the castle a few hours later, I saw Vishen returning to the castle with several flasks in his arm.

Hope fizzled out and died, though, when Serin tried each and gave him a sad shake of her head.

It was nearly nightfall, and Serin was stubbornly refusing even another drop from her flask, even as the aches and shivers slowly started to return.

I figured if Nira didn’t return soon with the cure, I could wait until Serin was in that delirious, barely-conscious state and force some into her mouth.

But as I was stacking wood in the fireplace, the door burst open, and there was a pink-cheeked Nira with not only several flasks, but one large gallon jug of water.

“He failed, didn’t he?” she asked with a little smile, like she enjoyed besting Vishen. If she, in fact, had the right lake water at all.

“Nothing worked, no. And she won’t use any more of the flask water.”

“I’m going to jump right to this one,” Nira declared, grabbing the gallon jug and pouring some of the contents into a glass to hand to Serin.

“She’s too weak to hold it,” I said, getting to my feet and striding over to take it.