Page 80 of Ruling the Green

Serin

Hands shook me awake, making me gasp as the nightmare fell away, and I found myself face-to-face with Jet in a room lit only by the glow of a nearly full moon through the windows.

His face was cast in shadows, but those gray eyes of his seemed to glow even in the dark.

“It’s okay. You’re here with me,” he reminded me.

The first night, I’d been too exhausted by the events at the lake and then trying to think of ways to help Jet with his plan to do anything but fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.

As it turned out, I was even less worldly than I realized as I sat in Jet’s study and listened to the three of them punt around ideas and plans for hours without seeming to get tired or find themselves as mixed up as I felt.

I sat there cross-legged, gaze sliding between them, feeling an inadequacy I’d never experienced before. I didn’t understand the politics, the players, the backhanded deals and backroom schemes. And I couldn’t even study the notes they were all taking.

I was happy to be included but unsure why Jet even wanted me there.

Maybe all those anxieties were what created the perfect breeding ground for the nightmares.

“You’re safe,” Jet murmured, pulling me until I was resting on his chest, his steady heartbeat under my ear.

I knew, given the situation in the Dark Court, that safety wasn’t exactly something he could promise me. But right in that moment, in his arms, I’d never felt safer.

“Want to talk about it?”

“No,” I said as my hand slid over his chest, down his stomach, feeling the muscles tensing underneath my touch.

Any time he wasn’t plotting with the guards or meeting with allies, he was training. Mostly with Nira, since Vishen’s hands were still healing. I hadn’t realized until I witnessed it that he got all his delicious muscles by wielding a sword or doing hand-to-hand combat.

After she was done practicing with him, Nira—an endless source of energy, it seemed—demanded that I work with her too. And while she claimed I was getting stronger and faster and honing my instincts, I was painfully aware that it would take me years to get to their level, that no amount of training would allow me to be of any help should their plans fail and an actual uprising break out.

I was, as much as I hated to admit it, more of a liability to their plan than an asset. I hated it. I wanted to find my place, be of some use.

“I can hear your gears turning,” Jet said as his fingers drifted through my hair, making little shivers course through my insides.

“I know,” I said, sighing. “I can’t stop thinking. And all I want to do is stop.”

There was the briefest of pauses, Jet’s body tensing, then relaxing.

“I know of a way to make you stop thinking,” he said as his hand slipped down my back, then slid under his shirt I was wearing, then whispered up my thigh and grazed over my bare backside.

The pool of heat in my core was instantaneous.

Suddenly, he was right. There wasn’t a single thought in my head but more.

“I like your idea,” I said, sliding my leg up over his, then feeling his fingers slip down to tease my cleft.

A rumbling sound moved through Jet at that, and the feel of my desire as his fingers slipped inside me, thrusting lazily, then harder and faster as I started to whimper and writhe.

My own hand slid down, tracing the line of his sleep pants before finding the nerve to slip lower and close my hand around the hard length pressing against the fabric.

His whole body jerked at the sensation, emboldening me to keep exploring the firm shape of him. His breath went quick and shallow as his fingers got more demanding inside me.

It wasn’t long before I was slipping the material of his pants down, exposing him.

A strange, needy little sound I didn’t quite understand escaped me at the sight of him, making my sex clench hard around his fingers.

“Touch me or I’m going to lose my fucking mind.”

I didn’t need to be told twice.