Page 56 of Laced in Longing

My reflection stares back at me from the mirror, and my lip twitches. I look… different. Not beautiful, exactly, but alive in a way I haven’t been before. My eyes seem brighter, my skin flushed. There’s an anticipation in my posture, surrounded by a readiness in my aura.

I move to the center of the room, heart pounding. My mouth dries as I struggle to swallow around thick saliva.

What if I’m wrong? What if I’m about to proposition a hallucination?

Does it matter? Real or not, he’s the only thing that’s made me feel anything beyond the dull ache of existence in years. The only one who looks at me and sees something worth wanting. Worth loving.

My eyes drift closed as I draw in a deep breath and speak his name into the quiet of my apartment.

“Ash.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

MAVEN

The air shifts the moment I speak his name. My skin tightens with goosebumps despite the lingering warmth from my shower. The silk nightgown clings to damp patches I missed with the towel, cool against my heated skin.

One heartbeat. Two. Three.

And then he’s there.

He sucks in a breath as if to speak, but whatever he’d planned to say dies somewhere in his throat.

Because he’s looking at me.

All of me.

I feel every inch of that white-shrouded gaze move down my body like a physical thing, tracking over the silk, the bare skin of my thighs, the collarbones I never thought twice about until this exact second.

Oh, no. What am I doing?

The confidence I’d scraped together in the shower evaporates like the steam it came from, and suddenly I’m just a woman standing in a cheap apartment in a nightgown I bought during a two a.m. spiral, trying to seduce a god. This is humiliating. This will be a moment I’ll replay in my nightmares for the next decade, cringing so hard my teeth ache.

I couldn’t spell sexy if the word was blinking at me in blazing letters over a strip club. What in the actual hell made me think I could be it?

My arms twitch, itching to cross over my chest. Is it too late to undo this whole disaster and pretend I called him here to talk about the weather in the realm he calls home⁠—

Ash’s throat clears.

It’s a low, rough sound that rolls straight down my spine and pools much lower. His head tilts, that slow, deliberate movement I’ve come to know, and I feel his attention crawl back up my legs, over my hips, catching on the neckline of the gown before rising to my face. There’s a weight to it. A hunger I can practically taste, thick and electric.

Heat crawls up my neck and spreads through my cheeks, but this time it isn’t shame.

It’s want.

Every self-deprecating thought scatters, and I forget about the flimsy gown, about the scars I’ve displayed. I don’t think about the fact that I’ve never been the kind of person anyone chose. Because he’s watching me like I’m the only thing that’s ever existed in any world. Like I’m something to be devoured slowly. Savored and ruined.

Nobody has ever looked at me like that…and I cannot even see his eyes. I imagine the intensity of his actual gaze would disintegrate me in a second.

“Maven.” His voice is wrecked, dragged over gravel. “What are you doing?”

I know what I’m doing. I know it’s selfish. He deserves better than a stolen night with someone who’s spent centuries rejecting him. I know that giving in like this means I’m taking something for myself when I do not deserve it.

But I’m so tired of not wanting things.

Just once, I want to be the kind of person who reaches for what she craves instead of standing at the edge of it, calculating all the ways it’ll eventually leave.

So I close the distance.