34. Don’t Ask Such Infuriating Questions #2
Tears burned at the backs of my eyes, but they didn’t spring to life.
I was choking on emotion, utterly devastated by the look on his face.
My bottom lip wobbled as my mouth opened to speak, heart flipping while I watched Lucais tracking the movement, concern and desire flaring in the golden oasis of his eyes.
He was giving up the charade, letting the game play out to a deadlock, and I couldn’t stand it.
It would destroy me, and that would then ultimately destroy him. If I had any sense at all—
When he moved to close the last sliver of distance between us, I jumped backwards, ripping myself out of his touch as though I were a frightened animal. Irritation crossed over his face like a cloud chased by resolve, and I tripped over my voice as I hastened to interrupt him.
“I need you to be mean again,” I blurted, holding a hand up between us for pause. If he reached me, the game was over, and the both of us would surely lose.
He faltered a step. “I’m sorry?”
“Tell me…” I glanced around hopelessly for support, but we were alone in the courtyard. “Tell me I’m not your type,” I implored. “I have too much meat on my bones. Say that I’m stupid, and half-brained, and…”
The tears that wouldn’t fall burned like a house fire inside of my skull, the smoke clouding my mind and strangling my throat.
I wracked my brain for all of the horrible, vicious insults he had hurled at me since we met, but none of them stood a chance against the way he was looking at me inside the cocoon of that moment.
“Why?”
My knees trembled. “Because,” I whined, my voice cracking.
“That was all I had, Lucais. In the bookstore. That cabin in the Court of Light. At the House.” I swept my tongue against the roof of my mouth, throat clenching as I forced down the lump in it.
The truth truly caned . “That was all there was between us, and without it, I’m—” I broke off.
His head twitched ever so slightly to one side. “You’re what?”
“Tell me you hate me,” I demanded, taking another step back.
“I hate you.”
For a moment, surprise overtook my desire to drive a wedge between us because I hadn’t really expected him to be capable of fulfilling my request. And he had done it so easily.
My grasp on the nuances in the High Fae’s take on language was dangerously weak even after all of the time I’d spent dancing around it with them.
“How can you say that?” I asked, curiosity purifying my tone.
The High King took another step, twice the length of mine. He gazed down at me, the scent of home rushing over me in waves tall enough to drown the mountains. “You just asked me to.”
“I know, but you’re so close to me, and you can’t lie. That means it’s true.”
“I hate a lot of things about you, little beast,” Lucais replied, snatching my hand and placing it on his heart.
It beat rapidly inside his firm chest—a hummingbird trapped inside a cage of marble.
“I hate what you’ve done to me.” He moved my hand down his chest, trailing it over his stomach with painstaking slowness.
“I hate what you’re doing to me.” With his hand over mine, I grazed the buckle of his belt, and then he pushed my palm onto the thick, granite-hard erection straining against his pants.
A flood of heat coursed through my body from my mouth straight down to my core, and I gasped at the way Lucais’s cock flexed in my hand.
I itched to feel it bare, to press my palm into the heat of his soft, sensitive skin, and curl my fingers around his girth as far as they would go.
Without breaking eye contact, I pushed the heel of my palm against him once, twice, until his hips rocked into me, trapping my hand between our bodies as he banished all of the unnecessary space to damnation.
My heartbeat pulsed twice as strong between my legs, and the scent of sex permeated the air around us.
The mating bond.
Lucais gently freed my arm, bringing the hand that had just been grinding against his erection up to his face. He placed a delicate kiss on my knuckles, eyes fluttering closed.
“I hate that you take so much from me and give me nothing in return,” he went on, and my heart dipped.
The High King brushed his mouth against my wrist. “My mind is yours. My body is yours. You could slit my throat and I’d beg you to use my corpse as a shield or keep me for spare parts.
” His bright eyes opened to mine, sunlight dancing with the waves on the ocean.
“My soul is woven together with auburn-coloured thread, Aura. My kingdom is yours. My crown is yours. And if you want more than that? I’ll break the treaty with the Underworld and steal the crown from the grave of the last known Dragon Master who had it.
” Lucais bent his head, lavishing a kiss on the sensitive skin in the crease of my elbow.
“Even if it means I have to hold my breath for a hundred years or patch up my broken wings with steel bars,” he vowed, carefully lowering my arm back to my side.
His voice was sombre, velvet-smooth, and as familiar as my own.
“I hate that—all of that—about you, but not because it’s you . It’s never been because of you.”
Lifting a hand, Lucais caressed the side of my face, and I leaned into the touch. Tingles spread down my spine like the brush of a fern frond and a warm, midsummer breeze on my bare skin.
Threading his hands through my hair, he tugged gently to fasten his grip and stared firmly into my eyes as he said, “I am, and always have been, the problem. I am the High King of Faerie, and I am fully prepared to enforce the most ridiculous laws upon the people of this kingdom to make them dance like puppets purely for your entertainment.”
I forced myself to swallow.
His eyes darkened, shadows creeping in from the edges, and the distance between us—distance that was anything but physical, and therefore took an extreme amount of work to close—reared up again to rejoice.
“And I don’t know what that makes me. A bad High King, that’s certain.
Unseelie, even?” He sighed in resignation. “Perhaps.”
I felt like I was drifting through the clouds, as light as a feather and free as a bird—and headed right towards a storm, too enamoured with the sky to care.
“I hate that I love you, Aura. Because I hate that my love for you is going to hurt people. That it could hurt you .”
My heart was on fire, and I’d only ever kissed him.
My soul was uncovered, and I’d never even bared it to him.
He simply knew it, like I knew his.
From the day in Dante’s Bookstore where he’d saved my life and told me to run—spoken straight into my mind, his thoughts taking their rightful place beside my own—I’d come back to him despite all rhyme and reason.
I’d walked into the bookstore and landed face-first in the ironclad gaze of my soulmate, and he hadn’t let me out of it for a moment.
A touch that could burn through the veil of reality was our first hello, and I’d been on fire with it ever since.
The knowledge that he was everything. Everything I’d been reading about and waiting for my whole life.
My anomalously short human life.
The truth was a coin worth the price of the universe, and it had two very important sides.
The first side was that I loved him with all of the broken, brittle parts of me—loved him enough to want to heal them so they would never cut him, loved him enough that I could let it go if he said he wanted to see those parts of me, too.
But the second side…
“Lucais.”
“Yes, bookworm?”
“I’m going to break your heart.”
“Auralie?”
“Yes, Your Highness?”
“I’m going to let you.”