23. She Was Obviously Enjoying It
twenty-three
She Was Obviously Enjoying It
T he hallway was cool, quiet, and dark. I was the complete opposite as Wrenlock slowly peeled the dress off my body and replaced the fabric with his hands.
My skin was burning, my breath came in heavy gasps, and I was sure there was a light blazing within me brighter than anything I’d ever felt before.
Wrenlock stepped back to let the dress fall away from me. The fabric scarcely had time to pool around my feet before he reclaimed his place against my body. Wedging his arm between us, his hand slid down to my clit, and his mouth claimed mine in an overwhelmingly needy kiss.
My back bowed as his fingers dipped inside of me, but it only lasted for a moment. Wrenlock removed his hand and brought his fingers to my mouth, coated in my arousal.
“Open,” he instructed. My eyes flared with shock, but I did as he asked, and his own narrowed with determination as he pushed his fingers into my mouth. Instinctively, I closed my lips around them. “Good girl. Now suck .”
A small moan built in the back of my throat as I sucked the taste of myself off his fingers.
“You taste that?” he crooned, tilting his head to the side to examine my profile as I swallowed and continued gently sucking.
“That’s the taste I’ve had in my mouth for weeks now.
Fuck food and drink, Aura. The only thing I’ve been able to think about since that day on the dining room table in the House has been the way it felt to bury my face between your legs and make you come against my mouth. ”
He slipped his fingers out from between my lips, and I fell back against the wall, panting wildly. Faeries couldn’t lie outwardly, and I couldn’t find a loophole in his declaration.
“And the day in the bedroom upstairs?” Wrenlock continued, unbuttoning his shirt. He shrugged it off and cracked his neck. “Fuck. I want you to make a mess all over me, Aura. I want your pussy to make my cock glisten.” His hands went to the waistband of his pants, but he paused. “You are sure?”
Biting my lower lip, I nodded eagerly. I was more certain about that than I had been about anything in a long time. It was inevitable—like I had no choice in the matter.
“Words, Aura.” He frowned. “I need to hear you say it.”
I swallowed. “I’m sure that I want you to fuck me up against this wall, Wrenlock.”
He groaned and freed his cock from his pants, pumping it twice in his fist before closing the distance between us with a single step and bending to capture one of my nipples between his lips.
Wrenlock’s mouth was warm, his tongue soft as it traced circles around the aching peak, and an orgasm started to build in my core from that singular brush of his mouth alone.
I moaned, the sound raw and unrestrained.
Reaching down, he secured one hand around my thigh and hitched my leg around his hip. I felt the tip of his cock nudge me, and I wasn’t sure if the wetness I felt slipping between us was from him or from me—
“You might want to pick up that dress,” Lucais suggested.
“Since you’ve started killing the servants, it’s become increasingly difficult to convince any of the remaining staff to service your bedroom.
I think it’s unlikely they would be eager to help you wash Wrenlock’s ejaculation out of Faerie’s finest mulberry silk. ”
If I wasn’t so shocked, I might have screamed, but as it was, I could barely catch my breath.
Wrenlock’s shoulders tensed. He looked in the direction of the High King’s voice and said, “Lucais—”
“Your presence is requested at the party,” the High King interrupted.
“You are dismissed. And if you’re going to apologise for trying to fuck my mate against a wall in one of my hallways, please don’t bother.
I’ve been here the whole time, so I’m aware that it’s exactly what she asked you to do, and she was obviously enjoying it. ”
Wrenlock inhaled sharply through his nose.
He bent down to gather up my dress, but the fabric disappeared before his fingers could grasp it.
It was back in its place on my body, and Wrenlock’s clothing appeared on the floor a few paces further away than where he’d discarded it, beside a broken picture frame that we’d knocked down from the wall.
He looked up at me from beneath furrowed brows, an apology and a warning in his gaze.
“It’s okay,” I whispered.
“Tick-tock,” the High King sang from the shadows.
“I’ll find you later,” Wrenlock promised.
And then he was dressed and striding for the closest doorway. He brushed shoulders with the High King, who emerged from the shadows dressed in black formal attire trimmed with golden thread that sparkled in the moonlight like the stars in his eyes.
Lucais began to walk towards me, but I wasn’t in the mood for a discussion. He had no right to be jealous—not after everything he had said and done—and I didn’t like thinking about it.
I’d lost count of how many times he had wound me up only for Wrenlock to make me come undone.
And I didn’t want to give any consideration to how much I liked the idea that he had been watching us, or whether he might have continued to watch us under different circumstances.
I brushed past him and veered for the door.
Lucais grabbed me by the arm and pulled me backwards. I felt his chest hit my back as a trickle of arousal spilled down my thigh, and my cheeks burned with self-inflicted mortification.
“You cannot be with him,” he hissed.
Oh, he has got to be joking.
“You cannot tell me what to do.” I tried to swallow down my ire discreetly, but I could feel Lucais’s eyes trained on me like a hawk.
“Yes,” he argued with force. “I can .”
Shaking my head, I pulled my arm free from his grip and spun around to face him. “I thought you didn’t care. You said no .”
“I don’t.”
“Then why are you wasting your breath?” I demanded, lowering my voice into a cutting whisper and pointing behind me at nothing in particular.
“You made me do this. At the House, you introduced me to him, knowing this could happen—knowing that it was more than likely, given the circumstances you designed for us—and even after it started, you never tried to stop it—”
He cut me off. “That was at the House, Aura. This is in my city. In your city, if you accept the bond—”
“You don’t even want me to accept it!” I shouted.
“Because I don’t want you to die!”
“Then why do you keep bringing it up all the time?”
“Because!” Lucais yelled, raking his hands through his hair.
His eyes flared, the tendons in his neck straining.
“It’s your choice, isn’t it? I won’t stop you if you decide that this is actually what you want!
” He threw his hand out to the side, panting wildly, and I wasn’t sure if he was gesturing to the whole of Faerie or to the cryptic fog.
It didn’t matter either way.
“How am I to decide when your fucking Oracle has already programmed you into the back of my mind?” I spat back at him.
“You’re my first and last thought, the figure in the corner of my eye, the creeping , crawling feeling underneath my skin , and that’s not a choice, Lucais.
Not when we were meticulously designed for each other by a couple of bored deities. They call that fate!”
He yanked at the roots of his hair. “Some people should be so fucking lucky, Auralie!”
“Luck is different!”
“Oh, fuck this.” He chuckled without a whisper of humour.
“It’s not some crystal ball sending the blood rushing to my cock when we fight like this, Aura.
It’s you. I want you—so bad I think it might actually break me—and I will defend your place at my side until my dying breath, but I’m not about to let you walk all over a fucking minefield of caenim with a massive target flashing on your back in order to get to me. ”
My mouth fell open, and I blinked at him, utterly gobsmacked. “You’re insane.”
“You make me insane.” His chest heaved in a despairing rhythm.
“Then we’re at an impasse, aren’t we?” I smacked the palms of my hands against my face and groaned, dragging my fingers through my hair. “Fuck! Lucais, please. I need you to let it go. This is bad. We are bad for each other.”
“No,” he shot back. “I will not let this go. If you’re happy, I don’t care what you do when there are not a thousand eyes upon us and the survival of my people doesn’t depend on it.
But here, that is not the case. We are in the public eye almost constantly, and you were in the middle of a very public event.
I’ll respect your free will when you’re not fucking using it against me. ”
I giggled bitterly, a bit like a maniac. “Oh, so what Wrenlock and I leave the party to do is too troublesome for you, but what you did with those Vampyr girls in front of both your Court and Enyd’s—and right up on top of a podium —is not?”
His shoulders trembled, and he waggled his finger in the air between us, swiping his tongue across his top teeth. “I was waiting for you to bring that up.”
“No, forget it.” I rolled my eyes and waved a hand at him dismissively. “Forget I mentioned it. I don’t care.”
His gaze zeroed in on my mouth, the gold flaring. “Oh, really?”
“Yes, really.”
“You don’t care.” Lucais folded his arms over his chest, a brow flicking up above narrowing eyes.
“No.”
“So I can do it again.”
I ground my teeth together. “You can do whatever you want, Lucais. And I can do Wrenlock whenever I want.” My hands curled into fists at my sides, and I exhaled sharply through my nose.
“You and I can’t be together. We so obviously cannot be together that we don’t even need to argue about deciding if we want to be, so it makes no difference if the attention I have for you ends up going to him instead.
This”—I gestured between us wildly—“is making us weak , Lucais. You’re haemorrhaging power all over the place because of me, and I’m becoming my fucking mother because of you.
Wrenlock fixes that, if you’d just let him—”