Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
He tilts his head, and as he does, the beads at the end of the braids that frame his face make a chiming sound.
“Give me your mouth,” he growls.
With a surge, he comes at me, and his lips find my own without any searching, homing in even though surely the veil conceals most of my features—
Everything fades away. The tunnel, the dead balas, our situation. As something warm and soft brushes back and forth over my mouth, the world is reduced to him. To us. To what this leads to, surely as a landslide rakes down a mountain, taking all with it. I tremble with a sudden, clawing need, the core of me opening as if he’d finished the job with his britches, and was lifting my skirts to get at my sex with his own.
When Merc eases back, I’m not sure whether time has stood still or a thousand years have passed.
I want more. Yet he just stays where he is.
Until he backs off to his previous spot.
He’s brooding as he stares at the torch.
Oh, no. He didn’t like it.
With a curse, he eases to one side, and shoves a hand at his hips as if he’s rearranging something that’s been caught in a crease. When he resettles, he clears his throat.
“What’s wrong?” I ask roughly, my breath tight.
“I’ll still do the job.” His words are gruff. “As I told you, I’m heading to the Badlands anyway.”
I touch my mouth through the damp veil and can still feel his lips.
Before I can ask him what’s wrong, he leans back against the tunnel wall, extends his legs, and crosses his arms and his ankles. I know that he’s closed his eyes by the stillness of his body, and risk a glance at his face.
With his lids down, I can finally take my time studying him. His forehead is broad and his brows have no arch to them at all, just two straight lines from the frown that breaks across the bridge of his straight nose. His cheeks are well-defined, the hollows under them valleys before the cut of his heavy jaw. There is no shadow of a beard, and I dip down to the neckline of his shirt. It’s too high to see if there is dark hair on his muscled chest.
I refocus on his mouth, the lower lip so much fuller, the upper marred by a tiny scar at the bow on the top. It’s a scratch that healed into a barely noticeable line, something so much less than what injured his eye, and I wonder how many other wounds of varying severity have left their markings on his skin—
“Sleep if you can,” he orders me. “When the torch is almost out, dawn will be close by, and I’ll try again.”
I feel deserted in his silence, only the fiery chatter of our tethered flame and the drumbeat of the incessant dripping from the ceiling entering my ears.
But that isn’t all I hear. In my mind, his voice is on repeat: I’ll still do the job … I’m heading to the Badlands anyway.
One kiss and he’s released me from our arrangement.
Mirroring his pose, I shut my own eyes and resolve to rest with the same level of commitment and exertion that I would approach a cliff climb—
My eyes pop back open again. Without any kind of permission from me, they drop down to his sturdy boots and travel slowly up his leather-clad calves to his knees, and then his thighs. With his legs outstretched, I can see the front of his britches. He remains erect, and the finely worked hide is a second skin that once again obscures nothing of his anatomy.
The outline of the head and the thick straddle of his shaft are so clear, he might as well be naked.
His potency is no surprise. As if his arousal would be any less imposing than the rest of him—
“You keep staring at me like that,” he says with a hint of amusement, “I’m going to think I guessed wrong, and maybe you do want me, after all.”
Flushing bright as that torch, I look away. Then frown as meaning catches up with his words. “Is that why you stopped?” I clear my throat. “I mean—”
“I told you, I’m not a savage. Your lips never moved against my own and I’m not going to take what you aren’t willing to give me. Now do us both a favor and go to sleep.”
I lift my fingers back to my mouth. I want to tell him that I don’t know how to kiss, that he is the first and—given what we are about to face—the only for me.
And that I would like very much for him to teach me how to please his lips.
Instead, I close my lids and order sleep to take over.