Chapter 5 #2
I opened the book and started reading, ignoring my urge to tease him for that.
It was about a woman named Kethara who fell in love with a fae prince who was absolutely off-limits.
He was on a diplomatic mission to broker peace between the fae courts and the troll clans, and she was the general assigned to escort him through hostile territory.
Neither of them was supposed to look at the other with anything other than professional courtesy.
Naturally, by page forty, the professional courtesy had developed a serious crack.
Made me wonder what it would take to crack Moerrven.
It was so good I forgot I was sitting on a wagon crawling toward distant mountains, because the sentences pulled me forward like a current. Moerrven wrote tension with an effortless grace, the space between two characters humming with everything they wouldn’t say.
The sex scene arrived and it had a level of enthusiasm for women’s bodies that I respected but did not share.
I skimmed. Kethara’s body was lovingly described and I’m sure she was having a great time, but my attention drifted through the passage like a student scanning a textbook for the highlighted parts.
“You don’t like sensual scenes? I thought you were excited to find those,” Moerrven said, watching me flip a few pages in rapid succession. He almost looked relieved.
“I don’t like women. I mean, I like women as people, but I don’t feel attraction to them. Next time, I’ll find one where two men fuck.”
He stared at me for a long moment. “Interesting.”
“Are you bisexual?” I asked, and when he tilted his head, looking a little confused, I said, “You like men and women both equally?”
He nodded. “Most trolls do. For us, attachment is about companionship and friendship, not about the types of body parts a person has.”
I grinned at him. “I like both. The body parts and the companionship.”
The next hundred pages were a slow burn of political maneuvering, stolen glances, and one devastating scene where Kethara told the prince about her dead brother.
His reaction made me set the book down and stare at the sky for a minute because my chest hurt.
I missed my brother, too. Connor wasn’t dead, of course, but I had no idea when I’d ever see him again.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Moerrven said from beside me, not turning his head.
I looked at his profile, the strong jaw, the careful set of his mouth, those gray eyes that never rested. “You’re really good at writing people who can’t say what they mean.”
“One writes what one knows,” he said.
I was laughing as I went back to reading.
The mountains did, eventually, get closer. Moerrven pointed out landmarks along the way: a waterfall where he’d once gotten his boot stuck, a cave system where Stonedeep children dared each other to explore, a boulder shaped like a sleeping bear that he’d used in one of his novels.
He was a good tour guide when he forgot to be grumpy about it.
We stopped for lunch by a stream. He’d packed a feast of bread, cheese, dried fruit, and a small jar of pickled something that I wasn’t ready to attempt yet, plus two cups and a tin of his tea blend.
He boiled water over a small fire with quiet efficiency.
Poppy got her own little dish of shredded meat, served on a square of cloth that Moerrven smoothed flat before setting down.
“She has a placemat,” I said.
“She has standards.”
“Either way, it’s adorable.” I ate my cheese and tried not to think about the fact that I should be moving faster. I should be more frantic. Instead I was sitting by a stream in the spring light, eating good cheese and reading romance novels.
Was I a terrible friend? Or was this fast and frantic by Qoksmere standards? Moerrven certainly didn’t seem to have any faster speed settings.
After lunch, the road followed the border between Stonedeep and Clovermere as we headed north, the Mill-Reach River to our right. I didn’t know what any of that meant, but I was keeping track in case I had to fend for myself later.
To our right, everything was so aggressively pastoral that I half expected a milkmaid to appear with a song. To our left, the big mountains loomed larger, though still not moving nearly as much as a person in a hurry might hope.
Poppy had migrated back to Moerrven’s shoulder for the afternoon leg and was kneading his shirt with her claws, purring so loudly it carried over the wagon wheels.
I picked up The Stonewall Bride again, turned the page, and kept reading, looking for the next scene between Kethara and the prince, because those scenes were the ones that made my pulse pick up.
I especially liked the ones from her point of view, where I could pretend she was a boy, and didn’t have bosoms at all, but very much liked sucking her prince’s big fae cock.
By chapter twenty-two, the diplomatic summit had collapsed.
The prince had been accused of treason by his own court, Kethara had broken protocol to defend him, and they’d ended up alone in her quarters, adrenaline-sick, furious, and wanting.
She’d backed him against the wall and said, “I am going to take you apart.”
The scene was written in Kethara’s first-person POV. She was in control, and it was nothing like the earlier sex scene I’d skimmed. It was entirely focused on the worship of the male character.
She pinned his wrists above his head and kissed him as she tore at his clothing, skimming her hands over his firm muscles.
She told him not to move, and then she dropped to her knees and took his cock in her mouth.
The way Moerrven described sucking cock, the weight, the heat, the way a man tasted, had me so hard I was leaking pre-cum inside my elegant elven trousers.
And she wouldn’t let him come. He trembled and tried to hold still because she’d told him to hold still, begged for her to allow his release as he writhed under her hands.
My mouth went dry. The scene was kinky as fuck.
As Kethara edged the sexy prince, in my mind she became a boy, then became me, and the prince became Moerrven.
I imagined myself using my tongue as a weapon of devastating control, pulling back right before he could tip over into orgasm.
I imagined him begging for release the way the prince was, promising his devotion and submission.
I flipped the page. The prince was still being edged.
Kethara brought him to the edge a fourth time, her hand tight around the base, her thumb pressing into the ridge beneath the head, pre-cum slicking her fingers, the twitch of his hips, the broken sounds he made when she loosened her grip and started again.
I bit back a giggle. Grumpy, proper Moerrven had written this.
The man had a kinky streak a mile wide, and he was sitting six inches away.
“Sky.”
I slammed the book shut against my chest, face-down. “What? I wasn’t doing anything wrong!” Shit, why had I said that?
“I didn’t think you’d done anything wrong. We’ve arrived.”
I blinked and looked up. The road had climbed into rocky foothills while I’d been otherwise occupied, and a town had materialized out of the hillside, stone buildings with heavy doors, built on a scale that made me feel like a kid in an amusement park.
Through a tavern window I could see trolls eating their dinner.
A blacksmith’s forge sent sparks across the street.
“Sorrend,” Moerrven said. “We’ll stop for the night.” He glanced at me, and his brow furrowed. “Are you all right? You look flushed.”
“I’m fine. It’s the sun.”
“It’s been overcast for an hour.”
“Maybe it’s allergies, then. New varieties of pollen my body isn’t used to.”
He looked at me for one more beat before turning back to guide Clover toward a large building at the center of town.
An inn. Poppy yawned on his shoulder and stretched, her claws pricking through his shirt, and he tucked her safely into her basket before we reached the inn, making sure she wouldn’t get distracted or lost.
I held The Stonewall Bride against my lap like a shield and waited for my erection to subside.