39. You Didn’t Ask for This
Chapter thirty-nine
You Didn’t Ask for This
I nstead of returning to my bedroom or finding somewhere else to hide, I walked through the House in search of Lucais. He was my antidote to the poison Wren spat on me at every opportunity.
We hadn’t talked about what happened in the dining room, but we made up on the beach—and it felt like that was for everything, sealed by the kiss he placed on the top of my head before he left me in my bedroom. Though, I was so preoccupied trying to figure out the mystery of Wren that I hadn’t even paused for a moment to consider why Lucais remained so distant. To figure out why he had kissed my hair instead of my mouth.
It felt forced, yes, but at the same time, the pull between us was pure nature. Instinct. Like he and I were made from the same cut of cloth, the same threads tidying our edges, the same stitching joining us at the seams. I wanted to explore that with him, to learn more about him and discover what made him tick, if only he was willing—
“Aura?”
Halfway down another seemingly endless and stock standard hallway, I started and spun around. Lucais was poking his head out from one of the many doorways, his dark hair a tangled snare draping over his brow. I blushed, feeling suddenly coy. He knew I was meant to be in the training room with Wren.
“Are you—” As he stepped over the threshold, his breath hitched. I don’t know if it was the look on my face or the feelings spilling into my scent that tipped him off. “Aura,” he murmured, the sound so rich and deep that I experienced it almost like a physical caress. There was a hint of hesitation, though, and I bristled at it.
“I don’t understand,” I told him, using my annoyance as fuel for my brazen confidence. I wasn’t completely sure if the heat in my blood was stoked by Wren or Lucais, but I was determined to use it on the latter. I stepped towards him, and his feline gaze swept along my body, from the top of my head right down to my toes, as if he wanted to commit my figure to memory before he pounced.
“Go on, then,” he urged, eyes darkening.
“You learn about me but send your right-hand man into my world to retrieve me. Okay, fine, you’re the High King and maybe you can’t leave. But then you shove me into one of these gazillion bedrooms and disappear for hours as soon as I arrive. You send him back up, later that night, to bring me down to dinner. If it was anyone else, I would understand—but for your intended High Queen? You can be informal with Wren in the dining room and allow him to stuff his face before you pick up so much as a piece of bread, but you wouldn’t come back to check on me yourself?”
Lucais’s throat worked. “I regret the way I handled that.”
Nodding my head in support of that sentiment, I went on, “Enough to change your behaviour from that point on? I don’t understand the way you look at me. Half the time, I feel like I’ve offended you somehow. The other half, I feel like you’re so turned on by my presence that you’re sitting there and picturing me naked.”
His full lips twitched, and he ran his tongue over them, shifting his position so that he was leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded over his chest. “Would it upset you if I was?”
My lower belly clenched, heat blooming between my legs. I took a measured, equal breath in an attempt to steady my cantankerous heart. “It upsets me that you can’t seem to decide on one,” I answered quietly. “We kissed, and it was pure warmth…and then you went cold. You left me to my own devices for almost a month, forgetting about me—”
“I never forgot about you,” he cut in, glaring at me. “Yes, I had some rather pressing matters to attend to that arose with little notice, but I was never far from you. I watched you in the garden twice a day to make sure that you always returned to the House safely when you were finished scattering your scent along the boundary line. I made sure that Delia was here on the days when the power feeding into the House’s enchantment had to be temporarily redeployed. And I waited, every night, to make sure that you were sleeping soundly before I left to attend to other matters, in case you needed me—”
“I do need you,” I insisted, practically falling a step forward. Another. “I need more than small talk over dinner and a kiss on the top of my head, Lucais. I don’t know why you keep taking back everything that you give me—”
His irises flared with sudden rage. “Because you didn’t ask for this ,” he snarled, and the sound sent chills racing across my skin.
I shook them off and closed the distance between us. I had to tilt my head almost all the way back to glare up at him. “Neither did you .”
Lucais huffed a humourless laugh. “Whether or not that’s true, it is irrelevant. I have no interest in taking anything from you that I’m not entitled to take, Aura. And right now, that’s nothing. I am entitled to nothing. If you wish the situation between the two of us to be different, you’re not asking the right person.”
“You want my permission?” My brow creased. He already had it. “You want me to ask for it?”
His entire body went still. “Ask for what, exactly?” he murmured, eyes narrowing with heated suspicion.
“You,” I whispered.
Lucais groaned, throwing his head back as he moved to press my body against the wall, boxing me in between his arms. He bent down to press his forehead against mine, his breath warm and deliciously smoky as it fanned my face. “Be more specific,” he said, his voice tinged with desperation.
I pushed up on the tips of my toes until I could brush my lips against his ear. “I want to finish what we started in the dining room,” I whispered. He made a small noise in the back of his throat and wrapped one arm around my waist. “I want you to touch me like that again.” The other hand came down and gripped the back of my neck. “I want to know what you feel like—”
He closed the distance between our bodies, and we fell through the wall.
Gasping for breath as Lucais wrapped one hand beneath my leg and hitched it around his hips, I opened my eyes to see that we were in a bedroom. My heart was absolutely thrashing in my chest, like a fish out of water. He had evanesced with me through the wall.
The room doesn’t look occupied or even like it has been slept in—
My thoughts about the room tumbled away as he applied pressure between my legs, using his impressive erection. He was thick and hard, and I moved against him, searching for friction.
Lucais swore, the sound low and throaty. He twisted, and then we were in between one place and the next for a split second before we landed on the bed together, a tangle of limbs and tongues as he pulled me in for a kiss. He opened his mouth, drawing me in deeper, his tongue skating along the edge of my teeth and reaching back to caress the roof of my mouth. I moaned as he pushed one of his knees between my legs, sending a pulse of energy rolling through me. He had one hand beneath me, curled around my waist, and the other fisted in my hair, holding me against him like he was afraid I might vanish from his sight if he let go.
He broke away, bending his head to my neck. He took the fabric of my dress between his teeth and pulled until it tore straight down the middle. I shifted until it slid off my chest completely, gasping as cold air rushed to greet my skin. My nipples pebbled, then warmed as he took them into his mouth, one by one. They tightened to the point of pain when the air met them, wet from his tongue, as his mouth sought out mine once more.
“You want to finish what we started in the dining room,” he repeated against my lips, “but I still have the taste of you coming against my mouth all over my tongue.”
His words—his voice —made me throb against him, and he gently but firmly ground his knee into my centre in reply. I moaned against his mouth, and he swept his tongue across my bottom lip before grazing it with his teeth.
“You want me to touch you like that again,” he continued, pausing to kiss me, sliding his tongue against mine as my nails dug into his shoulders, silently begging for more. “But I’ve already imagined a thousand ways to take you, Auralie, and I don’t have the patience to wait much longer before I start.” He relaxed the hand gripping my hair and trailed it down the side of my face, over my chin, across my breasts. “So, I’m going to make you come on my hand this time, baby. But you have to tell me that’s what you want, that I’m understanding you correctly when you say that you want to know how I feel.”
Writhing against him, I struggled to form the words as he kissed the side of my neck, twisting one of my nipples between two of his fingers as he sucked and pulled at my skin with his mouth. He groaned as I reached for him, and the sensation ricocheted through me, shaking me to my very core. I felt a spill of warmth flood the space between my legs, and he moved his hand towards it in response.
“That’s what I want,” I managed to get out, gasping as he hiked the skirt of my dress up and slid his hand between my legs. His fingers slipped against the evidence of my arousal, soaking it up with long, lazy strokes.
“You want to do what?” he asked, teasing my entrance with two of his fingers. “Against what?”
I shot him a glare, and he laughed. The sound was full of pure ecstasy.
“Fuck, you’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” he remarked quietly, shaking his head as his gazed down at me. His fingers continued their indulgent movements over my clit, adding to the building tension in my core. “When you’re angry, and sad, and confused, and determined—you’re always the most beautiful, Aura. Always the place that my eyes most want to land. You think that I was expecting you, but you’re so wrong. No one could have expected the way you make me feel.”
I sighed, a warmth spreading from my chest that had nothing to do with his hands, and lifted my head to meet his mouth.
“And when you’re ecstatic,” he purred, scraping his teeth against the corner of my lips, “you’re beyond beautiful. When you fall apart for me, all over me, because of me, I think that’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. I want you to do it again. And again.”
“ Please ,” I begged.
“What are you going to do?” he prompted.
My eyes rolled back in my head as he dipped two fingers inside me, pulling them straight back out. “I’m going to come,” I said, my voice sounding like it belonged to somebody else—someone up high, strung out, beyond reason.
Lucais pushed his fingers inside of me again, and I groaned, bucking my hips against his hand. He curled his fingers until they hit that perfect spot, but then he pulled back a fraction, using his other hand to hold me still. “Where?” he demanded, voice rough.
“On your hand,” I bit out, sighing.
“Good girl,” he crooned, beginning to move his fingers inside of me again.
Each time he hit that spot, I couldn’t help the noise I made. It almost didn’t sound human. Lucais was an expert, working at the perfect pace, finding exactly the right rhythm, and commanding my body with his knee and other arm to remain in the correct position for the ideal angle. He watched me, his eyes burning with deep-rooted desire, and responded as if he could read my mind.
If I moved to bring him in deeper, he held me in place and found a way to go deeper. When I gasped, wishing he would move faster, he swallowed the sound I made with his mouth as he started to work his hand faster. And when I gripped his wrist, gently rocking up and down with every movement as I held on to him, he began to fuck me with his fingers harder until the breast that was not pressed into his chest bounced with so much force that it nearly touched my chin, and my climax built and built to completion within seconds. He looked down at my body and moaned a string of filthy and flattering curse words, the sound of his voice almost a growl, and I was undone.
An orgasm like nothing I had ever felt before crashed into me, and if Lucais’s arms hadn’t been so firmly secured around my body, I could have sworn that the force of it would have sent me flying across the room.
The sound that left my throat, deep and raw, was almost a scream. Tears sprang to my eyes as my body pulsated around Lucais’s fingers, the sounds of contact wet and fulfilling as he gradually began to slow down until my body allowed him to leave it and reclaim his hand. He rested it against me, palm sealing in the heat as I relaxed, and leaned his head against mine, both of us panting into the silent chasm the sounds of my orgasm seemed to have opened.
Finally, he removed his hand and covered our bodies with a blanket, pulling me tightly against him and tucking my head beneath his chin. “I haven’t forgotten that you were supposed to be training in the armoury right now,” he muttered into my hair.
My eyes flew open and I tensed. “I didn’t—I wasn’t coming here to get out of it. That’s not why I was looking for you—”
“Shhh, baby,” he crooned, his chest trembling with quiet laughter against me. “Right now, I am so lovesick and selfish that I couldn’t care less about anything you’re meant to be doing that doesn’t involve me and the sounds you make for me when I touch you.”
I shivered and felt his cock twitch in reply, but when I went to turn around to face him, he tightened his hold on me with his arms.
“The Court of Wind will start to arrive soon,” he reminded me. “And I have no intention of rushing it when I do make you come with my cock—or the begging you’ll be doing before we get to that part,” he added, his voice taking on a rougher edge. He cleared his throat, then sighed. “So, would you like a drink or something to eat? I can have a bath running if you’d prefer to rest in there—”
“No.” I shook my head and pressed myself closer to him. “I just want you to stay with me like this.”
He went to press a kiss to the top of my head, but then he moved his hand under my chin and tilted my face back to his. Lucais pressed his lips over mine, warm and soft, and whispered, “As you wish, my Queen.”