26. Chapter 26
ELLIE
His palm was warm against my cheek, and I didn't flinch, and that small impossible fact undid something in me that two years of careful frost had been holding shut.
We sat like that a long moment at his fire, his hand against my face and my hand resting light over his, and I felt the last wall I'd kept between us all summer come quietly down, the one underneath all the others, the one I'd never had a name for until Daska put it in my hands weeks ago and told me it wasn't greed, it was only the size my heart had grown to.
I'd crossed the fire and sat down beside a golden king who'd just shown me the frightened hungry boy under all his gold, and I found, to my genuine astonishment, that I wanted to stay.
"You're thinking very loudly," Tau said, low, his thumb moving once against my cheekbone. "I can hear the whole council of you arguing in there. Which side is winning?"
And there it was, the thing that had been quietly ruining me about him since the comb, since a man, and not a mane; he read me clean through.
Where Nathan read me hunting for the soft place to press, Tau read me for the opposite reason, the same reason Daska read a wound or Rivik read the ground, wanting only to know where I was so he could meet me there.
Three men who saw me now, each in his own language, and here was the third of them with his hand on my face and his heart laid open in the cold, waiting to see what I'd do with it.
"The frightened side's losing," I said, and heard my own voice come out steadier than I'd expected. "For the first time in years, it's losing."
Something moved through his face at that, quick and unguarded, gone before he could arrange it into a king's expression.
And I understood, watching it, that I'd just handed this man the one thing he'd told me not an hour ago he'd never truly had, to be chosen for himself, past the gold, by someone who'd seen exactly what he was and stayed.
The wanting he'd carried all summer wasn't the easy thing his charm made it look.
It was the same terrible hope I knew from the inside, the hope of a person who'd learned to expect the catch.
There wasn't going to be a catch, not from me, not tonight, not ever if I had any say in it.
I leaned in and kissed him.
* * *
He went still under my mouth for a heartbeat, that particular stillness of a man braced so long for a blow that a kindness lands harder, and then his hand slid from my cheek into my hair, and he kissed me back, and every scrap of the practised golden charm burned clean off him at once.
I'd half-expected a performance. Some part of me, the wary part that had spent all summer waiting for the angle, had assumed the king would make love as he did everything else in public, lavishly, beautifully, with one eye on the effect; that wasn't what I got.
What I got was a man who kissed me like he couldn't believe he was allowed to, slow and searching and undone by it, his breath unsteady against my mouth, his hand trembling faintly where it cradled the back of my head.
The showman was gone; what was left was startlingly, nakedly sincere, and it reached straight past every defence I owned.
"Tell me to stop and I'll stop," he murmured against my lips, drawing back just far enough to find my eyes, and the old reflex to check, the thing all three of them did now, the thing I'd never once been given before this strange journey, went through me warm and steadying.
"Say the word and we simply sit here at my fire and I count myself the luckiest king who ever lived just for the kissing.
I mean every syllable of that. I've wanted you all summer and I'd sooner have nothing than have you unsure. "
"There's nothing unsure in me tonight." I fisted my hand in the tawny mantle at his shoulder and pulled, and felt him come, felt the leashed strength of him move at the smallest tug from me like a thing that wanted only my permission to be set loose.
"Two years I've been unsure of everything, and I'm sure of exactly this.
Take me somewhere warmer than a cooling fire and show me the man under the gold. "
He made a sound I felt more than heard, low in his chest, and then he was on his feet and drawing me up with him.
The grin he gave me had nothing of the practised dazzle in it, it was younger than that, and more frightened, and more real, the grin of a boy who'd been handed the one thing he'd stopped believing he'd get to have.
* * *
His shelter was the grandest in the settlement and I'd never once been inside it, and I'd expected it to feel like a throne room.
It felt like nothing of the sort. It was warm inside and close, piled deep with furs, lamps of rendered fat burning low in pools of gold.
It held the particular scent of him I'd come to know from a summer of sitting at fires, sun and smoke and some warm spice I'd never quite placed.
He drew the heavy hide across the entrance, and the cold and the settlement and the whole watching world fell away behind it, leaving just the two of us in the gold-lit dark.
He undressed me slowly, and he did it generously, as though every layer of hide he eased away revealed something worth a small astonished pause, his gold-brown eyes moving over each new stretch of bared skin as if he'd been handed a gift he hadn't earned and couldn't quite believe in.
Daska had undressed me like a healer uncovering something precious he'd feared to lose.
Rivik had done it like a starving man too long denied.
Tau undressed me like a boy let at last into a room he'd been told all his life he wasn't allowed to touch.
"Look at you," he breathed, and there was no line in it, no practised flattery, only a wonder that made my breath catch.
His hands skimmed my bared shoulders, my arms, my ribs, and came to rest warm at my waist. "I have been imagining this for months and I got it wholly wrong.
You're better than the imagining. Do you know how rare that is?
Nothing is ever better than I imagine it. I've a very good imagination."
I laughed, surprising myself, the sound breaking out of me in the gold-lit warmth. "Are you honestly flirting with me now, with your hands halfway up my ribs?"
"Always, and especially now." He drew me in against him, skin to skin, and I felt the heat of him and the hard golden strength and, running under it, a fine tremor that gave the lie to all his easy words.
"It's the only language I'm truly fluent in.
And I'm nervous, if you must know, which I'll deny to my dying day.
A king is never nervous." His mouth found the curve of my throat, and I felt him smile against my pulse.
"But I've never once done this with someone who actually saw me.
It turns out that changes everything. I've no idea what I'm doing. I feel like I’m a youth again. "
The honesty of it, the great golden king admitting he was frightened with his mouth against my throat, undid me more thoroughly than any amount of practised skill could have.
I turned my face into his hair, held on, and let myself for once simply want something without counting what it would cost me later.
He drew me down into the deep furs and came over me, careful of his weight, blocking out the low gold light, and there was the check again, that pause, his eyes finding mine. "Still with me, love?"
"Still right here with you." I reached up and traced the line of his jaw, this beautiful, frightened man who'd dropped every mask he owned for me. "Stop asking permission to have what I've already given you."
"Never in this life." He caught my fingers and pressed a kiss to them, and the grin came back, warmer now, steadier. "I'll ask every time, all night, and you'll thank me for it before I'm done. I intend to be extremely thorough."
His mouth came down on mine, and the last of my caution went with it.
He kissed like he had nowhere to be for a year, slow and unhurried, learning what made my breath change and going back to it.
His hand skimmed down from my waist to cup my breast, his thumb finding my nipple and rolling it until it stood hard and aching.
When I gasped into his mouth he made a low pleased sound and did it again.
He kissed a path down my throat, my collarbone, and closed his mouth over the nipple his thumb had been teasing, sucking hard enough to arch me off the furs.
"There it is," he murmured against my skin, delighted, and I felt him grin. "That sound. I'm going to spend the whole night collecting those, I've decided. Consider it a royal project."
"You're impossible," I managed, and it came out breathless, my fingers already fisted in his tawny hair.
"I'm thorough. We established this." He kissed lower, down the centre of me, pausing to learn the dip of my waist and the jut of my hip, and everywhere his mouth went he noticed, a shiver, a hitch of breath, the sound I made when he scraped his teeth lightly over my hipbone, and each discovery seemed to delight him fresh, pulling some low murmur of wonder out of him that I felt travel all through me.
He settled between my thighs and pushed them wider with his broad hands, and looked up the length of me with open greed.
"Now. Let's see what else I got wrong about you. "
He put his mouth on my pussy without any more warning than that, one long slow drag of his tongue through me that had me crying out and my hips coming off the furs, and he pinned them back down with a forearm across my belly and settled in like a man at a feast.
"God, Tau—"