27. Deserving of Nothing Less Than a Golden Crown to Celebrate its Glory
27. DESERVING OF NOTHING LESS THAN A GOLDEN CROWN TO CELEbrATE ITS GLORY
~ ELOWYN ~
Perhaps an hour later, I emerged from the bath infinitely cleaner but not much calmer. Apparently lovely hot water and some quiet reflection could only do so much soothing when a psychotic queen had a stranglehold on my life.
The moment I opened the door, Saffron bounded out, claws scrabbling across the floor, heavy tail whipping every which way, eager to escape the water’s proximity. I hadn’t bothered trying to wash him, not up for the fight it would require.
Without Pru there, no one waited for me with a pretty robe, so I hastily dried myself and didn’t care that water continued to slide down my skin as I entered my bedchamber.
My bed loomed large, soft, and welcoming. After the innumerable discomforts of the Wilds, it alone was like a dream. Regardless, I doubted I’d find the stillness required for sleep, not with everything that had happened. Not with so many worries dragging down my thoughts.
Not with Rush somewhere in this blasted palace, his sexy face and body fogging up my thoughts despite the agitation he also brought with him.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice so gentle that for a moment I wondered if I was once more imagining him.
But no, there he stood, leaning against the open threshold to the antechamber where he’d slept before, when the queen had ordered him to guard me.
What a joke. Guard me from what? She was the only threat to me within this horrid place. I was only too late realizing how very much of all she did was an act. I doubted she was fully genuine with anyone, not even her precious pets, Ivar and Braque.
Rush had washed up too. His hair was wet, hanging in thick, loose waves around his shoulders and down his back. He wore sleep shorts and nothing else. I guessed his blades were within reach, even if we’d proven time and again they were little more than an illusion of a defense.
Was I all right? By sunshine, no, I most definitely was not.
So I nudged Saffron to curl up on a chaise, grabbed a heaping bunch of juicy grapes for him from a platter Rush must have fetched, and stalked into the center of the room.
After a diet that had consisted largely of armacoon for the last weeks, I was hungry. Famished, really.
Even so, I wasn’t ready for food. Not yet.
Rush’s eyes were back to glowing like full moons. As if he were a sleek, powerful predator, and I an intriguing curiosity, they tracked each of my movements. I felt as graceful as the large, elusive cats that prowled the Nightguard Mountains as I glided across the floor, every one of my steps silent.
I dropped the towel, my wet tresses sticking to my back in long, untamed tangles.
In the moments it took the towel to slide along the damp curves of my body to pool at my feet, Rush somehow managed to traverse the room. Never had I seen him move so fast, not even in the Gladius Probatio, when his very life had been at risk.
But then he stopped an arm’s length away, his eyes glowing brighter yet as they dragged along every inch of my exposed flesh, cataloging every swell and dip, and—by the sudden enraged flaring of his nostrils and the clenching of his jaw—every healing cut I’d endured from the umbracs’ barbed tentacles.
His gaze especially roamed the puckered kiss of death in the center of my chest.
At least, until it settled on my breasts and seemed to get stuck admiring the way my skin tightened in response, how my nipples formed perfect rosebuds begging silently for his thorough attention.
Just the heat of his stare had my core turning molten, my insides softening. The air thickened with the tantalizing scents of our combined arousal.
His tattoos climbed from his shoulders and arms to creep across his neck and up his jawline, down the length of his corded forearms and his strong hands. They snaked down along the hard planes and dips of his abdomen, creeping lower still, until they wound around the V that dipped beneath the waistband of his sleep shorts to disappear beneath them.
I licked my lips, caught myself doing it, and decided I didn’t care.
The time for abandon had well and surely arrived. If I had anything to thank the queen for, it was that she’d taught me tomorrow wasn’t guaranteed. Hell, with her lurking around in the shadows, even the next moment wasn’t secured.
With my future so incredibly dubious, all I wanted to think about was the present, and even then, thinking wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.
I stepped closer so that I had to raise my chin to take in his face. Such a fucking gorgeous, beautiful face. I could scarcely look away from it. From his body.
My fingers actually twitched with the need to drag themselves across every patch of his skin. To lick him all over too.
To devour him.
My thoughts surely reflected on my face, growing more flushed with every passing fantasy.
“Are you sure?” he grumbled in what was part growl, part breathless pant, as if he were as much man as he was his animalistic desires. Right then, I wanted both. I wanted it all.
“Am I sure?” I repeated, my own voice rough with my need. The flesh where my thighs joined was already hot and wet, and—by dragonfire—he hadn’t even touched me yet. I’d probably self-combust once he finally did.
“I’m not sure of much right now, Rush. And certainly not of us, how we move forward from this.” Gingerly, I caressed the kiss-like scar, still so tender and sore.
His eyes swirled as if clouds swept in front of twin moons, a swift breeze whipping them along.
“But here I stand.”
“I don’t know what that means,” he said.
Truly, neither did I. My entire being was a constant whorl of fear and hope, of anguish and desire.
“I need to be certain you’re okay with this. With me ... touching you.”
Flippantly, I arched my brows, though what I felt was so far from casual, it wasn’t even in the same mirror world. “Oh, is that all you plan on doing to me? Just touching? Or are you more in the mood to look and not touch at all? With how fast you got over here, I figured by now you’d be buried deep?—”
Mostly animal, he growled. The rumble dragged out until I felt it vibrate against my skin, which pebbled all over.
I squirmed. He caught the slight movement, his stare yanking down to the apex of my thighs.
His attention remained there for so long, I prompted him: “So? What’s it gonna be, big boy? Are you gonna give in to the craving and whip out your sacred, bejeweled wand? Or are you?—?”
“After what I did to you, I need to hear you say it.” The words were jumbled and mushed together, as if his tongue were already a single breath away from slipping between my parted lips. “I need to be sure. I can never risk hurting you again.”
“So you keep saying.”
I shuffled a few inches closer, and the man—the fierce warrior and drake, who was head of an entire clan—actually whimpered.
With a grunt of effort, he pulled his depthless eyes up my body, till they met my own, and held. “Are. You. Sure? Sure you want me, sure you want me to make love to you, sure you still want me as your mate, sure you?—?”
“Just shut the fuck up, already.”
I slid forward, splayed my breasts against his bare chest, and tangled my hands in his hair, tugging his face down to mine.
His response was instantaneous. When my mouth touched his, his lips were already parted, his tongue sweeping along the seam of mine to seek entry.
He immediately set to devour me while his hands swept up and down my arms, my back, my behind, attempting to touch and squeeze me everywhere at once.
My own fingers ran across his shoulders, chest, stomach, sides. For the first time in my entire life, I wished for an extra set of arms. The man was beyond stunning, beyond lovely. He was fucking amazing .
As his lips and tongue feasted on me, he groaned, and when they finally pulled away from my mouth to drag over my neck and down across my collarbones, I whined. I wasn’t sure why, really, only that I wanted him inside me now, now, fucking now — even as I also wanted to draw out his frenzied exploration that had me panting as if I’d sprinted the entire distance from the Wilds.
His strong fingers tugged on my hair, better exposing the column of my neck to him. He sucked, licked, and nipped.
This time, it was I who growled.
“Easy, tigress,” he said, a playful tease riding his words when all I could think about was him riding me.
I blamed Zako. All that maidenhood this, maidenhood that had left me starved. I could have behaved like a normal woman in the presence of a veritable god. But no, instead desperation made every one of my reaches insufficient, feverish.
“My tigress,” he breathed along the swell of a breast, a moment before he latched on to my nipple and sucked, drawing a cry from me that had the spying ear zooming down to hover a few feet from our combined heads.
When I growled again, it was with that fervent desire to ride Rush like he was my personal steed, yes, most fucking definitely—but also to set everything tainted by the queen on fire until it blazed. Until she was the one to vanish in a cloud of ashes from this world and any other forever.
Rush dragged his tongue in a hot line below my scar, on his way to my other breast, and the queen might as well have disappeared already. At once, I was back there with him, and when he sucked my other nipple into his mouth, I squirmed and arched my spine like a rutting animal—like the tigress he’d accused me of being.
When he curled his fingers into soft claws and trailed them down my back to cup my ass, I hopped up into his arms. I was wrapping my legs around his hips when I tsked in loud annoyance.
Instantly, he pulled back to study my face. “What is it? Are you okay?”
“Seriously, Rush, I love that you asked me that, but now stop fucking asking me that. And no, I’m not okay. I won’t be okay till you’re out of those stupid, ridiculous shorts and so far inside me that?—”
I stopped to giggle, a carefree sound that shocked me as much as my wanton behavior. This was so not what Zako had trained me to be. And yet I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt more freely myself.
Rush managed to juggle my weight and step smoothly out of his shorts in three seconds flat.
He was now all hot, hard flesh beneath me. I felt my eyes glaze over.
He arched his hips upward so that his very stiff—and extremely impressive—shaft slid along my soaked folds.
I let my head hang, drawing out a moan loud enough to reach through the walls into neighboring rooms.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” he said on a huff. “If you’d told me to pull back, I would have of course. But by the Ethers, I probably would’ve cried.”
Again, I laughed. The weight of my purpose and his, of our heavy responsibilities, rolled off me like rainwater. I heard Saffron’s soft snores from the other side of the room, and another concern fell from me.
Locking my ankles together more securely around his waist, I pulled his erection toward my center.
But he shook his head and murmured against my lips, “No, love. I need to be gentle. You’re still new to?—”
I knew damn well all I was new to—and how much lost time and opportunity I had to make up for.
Without so much as allowing him to finish his concerns, I tensed my thighs, rose up a few inches, and impaled myself on him in one single, slick glide.
Together, we groaned ... long and guttural.
In that moment, I believed everything I’d endured was worth it just for this. To feel him so fully within me we were nearly one whole.
With him supporting all my weight, I used the strength of my legs to slide up and down the length of him, up and down, up and down.
My endless hours of grueling training, at least, were damn well good for this.
Realizing I’d closed my eyes, I opened them to find him already staring at me. I allowed myself to get lost in his magical moonlight while he filled me so completely.
Fuck , if he hadn’t been right all those many weeks ago when we’d first met... His sacred, bejeweled wand was everything he talked it up to be and then some.
I was going to find a golden crown for its fucking beautiful head to celebrate its glory.
When Rush led me over to the bed, buried to the hilt inside me, I refused to look away. I bared myself to those eyes that seemed to notice so much. Too much, perhaps.
But there was no point in holding back now. Tomorrow was certain to arrive too soon.
I revealed myself entirely to him even as my battered heart pulsed with the scary assertion:
Mate .
He lowered me to my back and plowed inside me, stealing away my breath all over again.