40. Isla
40
ISLA
T he Ice King explores every hill and dale on my body.
With his hands.
With his tongue.
With his teeth.
With his air-magic.
By the time he’s done playing, the string of pearls on my thong, which he insisted on leaving in place, are dripping from my multiple orgasms. It probably helps that my body responds to him like his most loyal soldier.
I swear that sometimes, all he needs to do to send me soaring over the edge is press his stare—yes, his stare —against my clit.
I grip the bedsheets as he toys with the soaked pearls while lavishing open-mouthed kisses on my nipples. When yet another orgasm detonates through me, and I scream his name, his lips curve with immodesty. One that makes my beating heart swell to such proportions I think it will burst right through my kiss-slickened chest.
As he unfurls to his full height, he molds the sides of my body with his palms from rib to knee.
For a full minute, I just lay there, a waste of limbs and heartbeats. I feel inebriated, drunk on the sensations he’s conjured beneath my skin but also inside my heart.
I have never felt this way before. Granted, I don’t possess the most extensive sexual experience, but this cannot be a typical reaction, can it?
I finally pare my spine from the bed, then climb to my knees and snare his jaw in a kiss that is borderline violent. Though he’s shed his jacket, the rest of his clothes are still on. I make quick work of his shirt buttons and his trouser fastenings.
He doesn’t break the kiss as he kicks off his boots, and I roll his shirt down his toned arms. They get caught on his cufflinks. He punches them out of their button-holes. Soon, he presents me with his entirely unfettered body.
I splay my hands on his pecs and give him a little shove that quirks one of his eyebrows.
“You’ve seen every inch of me. I want to see every inch of you.” My gaze surfs down the trench of his abs and scattering of black hair that thickens around his engorged shaft.
“All of me, you say?” His tone is light, amused. “Yet you’re staring at very specific inches of my anatomy.”
A smile digs into my cheeks while a swallow digs into my throat.
“Turn.” I lick my lips. “I want to see my birthday present from all angles.”
He shakes his head but indulges me, rigid cock bobbing as he rotates just as slowly as he licked my pussy earlier. Just the memory coils heat low in my belly.
His back is sculpted, a work of art as enthralling as his front, packed full of fine muscles that jump as I drink him in. I never gave men’s asses much thought, even though I’ve seen my fair share in the Baths. I can say, with unwavering certainty, that the Ice King is in possession of a mighty fine backside.
Once he’s come full circle, I reach around him and palm his ass cheeks. The muscles contract.
“Are you flexing for me?”
His lips bend, and he gives his head another shake, as though he cannot believe I’d ask such a thing. “Is your birthday present to your satisfaction, Miss Ríhbiadh?”
“Visually, yes. But I’ll need a taste before formulating my official position.”
I have never, ever witnessed someone’s eyes go from shiny-white to pitch-black as quickly as Konstantin’s in that moment. Or perhaps I have, but in battle. Never in a bedroom.
Just when I think he couldn’t possibly look at me with more hunger, I take him inside my mouth, and he proves me wrong.
I squeeze his ass and guide him deeper. When his tip hits the back of my throat, his fingers sink into my hair, and he releases a sound that is so primal and husky that my pussy clenches, lapping it right up.
I glide him in and out just as torturously as he worked me, adding swirls of my tongue that has his teeth gritting and a sheen of sweat forming on his brow, and then I quicken my pace, kneading the muscles of his backside.
He chokes on a breath, then on my name, then yanks on my hair to force my mouth off his spasming cock. His seed splashes my chin and collarbone.
I blink up at him in surprise. “Why did you pull out?”
“Because—I was—coming.”
“And?” I ask provocatively, sitting back on my heels and gathering the white drips of his pleasure on my finger.
He says nothing as I feed myself his cum, just watches in absolute rapture. Two sucks of my finger later, his cock is hard again.
He snatches one of my pillows and wipes me, then tosses the rose-hued cushion aside and hinges at the waist. “I’ve changed my mind.”
“About?”
“If I’m not your mate, and you don’t reject the male who is, I will do it for you.”
“I don’t think saying no to him will?—”
“Not with words.” His violence should frighten me, but it does the exact opposite. All of me heats and beats in anticipation of what he’d do to keep me. “Even if you loathed me for the remainder of my existence, I’d do it.”
“So we could be miserable together?”
He flinches, as though I’d slapped him, then angles his gaze toward the discarded pillow and glowers at it.
“Konstantin,” I say with a sigh, “there’s something you should know about my great-grandmother.”
“I’m listening.”
“She’s the craftiest person to ever come out of the Cauldron. The probability that she lied to you about the necklace not snuffing out shifter bonds is high.”
“Why in the world would she do such a thing?”
“To keep us both from the temptation of stripping you of her shield.”
The scowl that drapes over his face is nothing short of murderous. “I swear. The members of your family enjoy torturing me.”
I grin. “No one more than me, dearly beloved.”
With a punishing gust of magic, he flattens me against the bed. The smile that sculpts his scowl can only be described as wicked as he rids me of my underwear, working it around my boots, which he’s been intent on keeping on my person, and then he grips my ankles and hauls me to the edge of the bed. He lines himself up. Waits.
When I dip my head in silent assent, he sinks in. Fully.
He freezes, expression slack with horror. “Shit. I don’t know what possessed me to— Are you all right?”
“Happy birthday to me,” I singsong around a moan that slackens the remorse crimping his features. “Again, please.”
He seems to grow a foot as he slips out and thrusts back in, his gaze capering between my face, my breasts, and his shiny ridged shaft. Our fit is tight, but my walls are so slick that he eases in and out without difficulty. The liquid meeting of our bodies, this song that we are composing seems to echo everywhere.
Konstantin’s face contorts as he nears the precipice I’ve been gamboling through for the last hour. He stills, heaves in deep, calming breaths that don’t calm him one bit. I cover the hands he’s fastened to my thighs with my own, which makes him jump and subsequently hiss through his teeth. I take it the tiny amount of friction almost swept him over the edge.
“I take a birth control tonic. In case you care to finish inside me.” Granted, Faeries and Crows can’t reproduce, but since I’m not just a Crow…
The tendons stand erect in his neck. “You will be the death of me…” I’m about to chide him for reiterating the loathed phrase, when he adds, “… xhina .”
My protest withers as the term sinks deep and consumes me, making both my heart and stomach writhe. He comes; I don’t. Which annoys him immensely. He pulls out, sets down my legs, and starts rubbing my clit, but I quiet his determined strokes by apprehending his wrist.
“What?” he growls, tone as sharp as his probing stare. “Fuck, I said it again, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“It’s just an expression to me.” He smooths a lock of hair off my damp forehead. “I promise to do better and stop mentioning death and dying around you.”
“It’s not— Well, not this time. It’s what you called me.”
His brows gather.
“We’re not even truly betrothed,” I remind him gently.
He searches my stare. “Marry me. For real. I’ll get a priest. Or a Crow. Or a?—”
“You don’t have to marry me to have sex with me.”
“This has absolutely nothing to do with sex!”
“Your emotions are heightened at the moment, Konstantin. You aren’t thinking this through.”
His eyes narrow. Though he made his stance on my mating anyone but him crystal-clear, his hasty words were spoken in the heat of the moment.
“Once my novelty wears off, you’ll move on to the next woman. Or you’ll go back to being celibate. Trust me, you’ll regret this. Perhaps not in a month, or in a year, but over time, you’ll want your tidy life back.”
Anger restructures his face as he straightens and squares his shoulder.
“I’m chaos. I’m unpredictable. I’m loud and ill-mannered. In the long run, if we’re not true mates, our vastly different personalities and upbringing will drive you to insanity.”
“Stop putting the blame on me.” His nostrils flare. “If you don’t want to marry me because you believe you’ll grow bored, then just say that ,” he snaps, his tone vibrating with such hurt that heat shoots into my lids and blurs all the angles that make up this beautiful man.
How fast we went from devastating passion to passionate devastation…
“I’m not scared of growing bored,” I croak.
“Then what the fuck are you scared of?” He rams his hands through his mussed locks, springing strands that were still wrapped.
I sit up, feeling too exposed, sprawled as I am on the bed. “I’m twenty-five. You’re a century and a half older. You’ve seen things. You’ve experienced things. You’ve done things. You’ve…you’ve… lived .”
“Marriage isn’t a death sentence, Isla.” He sounds defeated now. “Instead of seeing and experiencing and doing things on your own, you’d just get to do them all with me.”
He crouches, then cradles my face between his hands.
“I realize you’re young and that my certainty must be daunting.” His thumbs arc underneath my eyes. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’m not scared.” My voice catches on an obstruction in my throat.
One that transforms into tears— actual tears. I never cry. I palm them away, in a rush to make them vanish.
“I’m not,” I croak.
“I won’t bring up marriage again. I won’t call you wife or fiancée. But please, don’t leave me.”
I throw my arms around his neck and bury my face there, in that place where his scent and pulse are strongest. He hugs me back, then stands, but only to take a seat on the edge of the bed. He rains kisses on the crown of my head, while I rain tears on his skin.
The magnitude of my reaction is absurd.
Utterly illogical.
He strokes my hunched spine, which only amplifies my heartache. What is wrong with me?
Neither of us speaks for a long, long while, even after my tears have abated. We just cling to one another until sharp knocks rattle my door, followed by a voice.
One that belongs to…
Impossible.