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)
“And what do you think now?”
He’s quiet for a long time, his expression turning solemn. “I think you were a promise from the Mother. I think she wanted me to know my partner was coming. That with you I wouldn’t have the love I’d always hoped to find but something even better.”
I slide a hand behind his neck and pull his mouth down to mine, nipping at his lips and savoring the feel of his weight pressing into me.
While we kiss, his hands work their way down the front of me, loosening the laces at the front of my shirt, and I tug his tunic from his pants. He pulls back to let me lift it over his head and toss it to the side. I lift off the ground enough to pull my arms from my sleeves and let my shirt fall to the ground. When I lie back down, he doesn’t follow.
Maybe I would feel uncomfortable or insecure, maybe I would feel anything other than undiluted need, if it weren’t for the way he looks at me, his gaze sweeping across every dip and curve of my exposed flesh.
“I was wrong,” he says, gaze scraping over me with so much intensity I shiver. “I thought you framed by the sunset in my lands was the most beautiful thing, but this”—he cups my breast and sweeps his thumb across the sensitive peak—“you in the firelight, under my hands? Stunning.”
Something like bliss blossoms in my stomach, and I think I’m shaking. Not with nerves. With need. With joy. I want to pull him back to me, to kiss him again, but I don’t. I wait and let him look at me the way I never would’ve imagined wanting anyone to look at me. Not the real me.
When he finally lowers to me again, I thread my fingers through his hair. He skates his mouth along my jaw, down my neck, and back up, tongue flicking across my earlobe before he pulls it between his teeth, drawing a gasp from my chest. As if he needs his mouth to explore every inch his eyes just did, he travels down my body and across my chest, teasing my breasts with such skill I can’t focus on anything but how to breathe. He glides his lips across the softness of my abdomen and curls his fingers into the waistband of my riding pants.
He removes them, following his hands with his mouth. Every part of me gets different treatment. I get the scrape of his teeth across the swell of my hips, and the barely there skim of lips and warm breath down the sensitive skin of my inner thighs, a sweep of the bridge of his nose along my shin. When he’s kneeling between my feet, he tosses my pants to the side and pauses again. Looking.
Now I’m sure I’m trembling, but I’m no longer nervous about what he thinks of my body, not when the truth is so apparent in his eyes.
He shucks off his own pants before lowering back onto me, and his skin is so warm against mine I can’t believe I ever worried about the cold. It could be snowing, and I probably wouldn’t notice.
“Too fast?” But he says it like he’s asking permission to breathe.
I shake my head and hold his gaze. There’s nothing between us, and I’ve made myself so vulnerable by letting him look the way he did, speaking my truth feels simple in comparison. “I’ve wanted you for a long, long time,” I say. “But tonight, it’s different than wanting.” I search his patient face. “I need you. I need this.”
His kiss is so gentle, his movements so precise. It isn’t my first time, but I find myself wishing it were. Not because I think I lost something when I slept with the neighbor boy back home, but because my first time was nothing like this. The tenderness and the care. I’ve spent far too much of my life believing I was disposable, but in Misha’s arms, as he looks into my eyes and joins his body with mine, I feel nothing but precious.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Jasalyn
“We need to stop,” Kendrick says after a day of traveling through Fairscape on horseback. The sun is sinking toward the horizon and since there are no ley lines to the oracle, we’ve been traveling since sunrise. “You’re exhausted.”
“I can keep going.”
He absently strokes my stomach with his thumb. “I could use a full night’s sleep too, and I know a place ahead.”
My stomach knots at the idea of waiting until tomorrow to see the oracle when we only have three days left, but I know he’s as anxious as I am. “If we keep going, could we get there tonight?”
It’s just been the two of us all day. Kendrick sent the others back to the Midnight Palace with the Grimoricon so Brie could start combing it for the answers they need. They tried to object, to insist Remme stay with us, but when Kendrick pointed out that taking more than two people to the oracle at once is asking for trouble, they stopped arguing.