Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 132625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132625 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 663(@200wpm)___ 531(@250wpm)___ 442(@300wpm)
“That’s why you left? Because you found out who I am?”
It hurts—being erased like this, knowing that in so many ways this ring took my life before the date I agreed to. “I don’t want to have this conversation again. I just want . . .” I close my eyes and breathe in the scent of him. Leather. Soap. Fresh air.
“Tell me.” His fingers are so gentle as he tilts my face to look at his. “Tell me what you want and I will bend the world to give it to you.”
I want to kiss you. I want to stay here in your arms and forget everything that’s broken—everything I’ve broken. I want to lose myself in this moment. In you. To feel like I did during our night together—to give you the same feelings you gave me. “I want to touch you.”
His nostrils flare and his lips part. “Jas . . .”
I slide my hand down his bare chest, relishing the heat of his skin, the tickle of his chest hair beneath my fingertips. “You don’t remember, but we spent the night together before I left.” I find the waistband of his soft sleep pants and skim a knuckle across that spot where skin meets cotton.
His eyes float closed and he shivers subtly beneath my touch. “I don’t remember”—his voice is the rasp of desire brushing against need—“but I have my journal. I know . . .” He swallows. “I would trade a hundred useless memories for the one from that night.”
“You don’t need to trade anything.” I slip my hand beneath his waistband and watch his eyes darken as I find him. I don’t know what I’m doing, not exactly, but my cousins whispered about this enough to give me an idea. And it’s easier than I would’ve guessed to know what he likes—what makes his lips part and his breath hitch, what makes his hips lift just slightly from the bed. “This?”
He releases an unintelligible sound that makes want and heat curl together low in my belly. “Gods.” He holds my gaze and traces my lips with the pad of his thumb. “I must be dreaming.”
I explore the warm skin tentatively at first, but then with more confidence. He fights to keep his eyes locked on mine, but when he loses himself to pleasure, head pressed into his pillow, neck arching, something like pride flows through me. I feel like I’m glowing.
He pulls my hand away and before I can wonder why, he’s wrapping an arm around my waist and rolling us so I’m on my back and he’s above me. He scrapes his teeth down the column of my neck, then kisses his way across my collarbone and down to my chest, pressing his open mouth to my breast and licking me through my shirt.
He draws back, throat bobbing. “You’re bleeding.” He searches with eyes and hands across my belly, over my chest, and down my arms before reaching my wrist and finding the bleeding punctures from the wolpertinger’s spikes.
I didn’t even notice I got blood on his pants. “It doesn’t hurt anymore,” I promise.
He brings my wrist to his lips and kisses the tender spot. “Let me get a bandage for this.”
If he leaves, he’ll forget this. I’m not ready for that yet. “I’m fine. I just want you to stay with me. To hold me.”
He scans my face like he’s looking for answers, like he might remember this if he just tries hard enough. “I’ll hold you as long as you’ll let me.”
I skim my fingers across the stubble of his short beard, making my own efforts to remember this moment, though there’s no chance I’ll forget.
He lies on his side and pulls me against him, my back to his front. I let myself stay in the warmth of his embrace until the candle beside the bed flickers in the last of its wax, until his breath falls into the shallow rhythm of sleep.
“You won’t remember this,” I whisper, and the truth of it is like the worst of the darkness on the loneliest night. I thought I knew loneliness in the depths of my despair, during those years before I got the ring, but that can’t compare to the loneliness of knowing nothing I say or do now will be remembered. I will walk away and be erased. “I love you,” I say softly. I slide off his bed, not letting myself hesitate, even when he reaches for me in his sleep.
Chapter Twelve
Felicity
“You see the male to my right who keeps creeping closer?” the shadow queen asks me. The ball is tonight. After having just two days to prepare, I am here as the princess—here to prove all is well at the Midnight Palace, here to prove that no one but the queen and the princess herself control Jasalyn. “Gray hair and yellow tunic?”