Chapter 7
Sky
I dreamed about Moerrven in his stone tub in his stone cottage, hot springs water steaming around him as his muscles rolled with each movement.
I was kneeling on the ledge with my hand around his cock, stroking him slow, watching the water slosh against the rim every time his hips jerked.
Dream Moerrven was staring at my cock like he wanted to devour it, and calling me Sir, as I whispered filthy praise in his ear, bringing him closer and closer to the edge, until I was tempted to let the submissive little slut have his orgasm.
I startled awake with a gasp, disoriented for a moment as the memory of my dream blended with a reality in which my face was on Moerrven’s bare chest, and my cock was so hard it ached.
We’d fallen asleep side by side, hadn’t we?
Moerrven had put a respectful distance between us, and then…
well, I must have passed out from exhaustion because I couldn’t remember anything after that.
Now, the distance was not respectful. I was draped across him, with one leg thrown over his thigh, my arm across his stomach, my cheek pressed to bare skin.
His arm was around me, heavy enough to hold me pinned there, with his hand on my lower back, under my shirt.
A bird chirped outside, and the window was already pale with dawn.
Poppy was purring somewhere nearby. There was another sound, too, a slow, deep heartbeat under my ear that reminded me that I needed to extract myself from this ludicrous position before Moerrven woke.
Not that things I’d done in my sleep were in any way my fault.
Clearly, from the hand on my back, sleep-Moerrven had been complicit.
But that didn’t mean he needed to feel my erection making a wet spot against his hip.
His skin was smooth and smelled of cedar soap and a warm masculine musk. And I needed to move. Now.
But I didn’t want to wake him. I would lose the warmth, the weight of his arm, the sound of his breathing. I knew the moment he woke, because when awareness hit, his whole body went rigid. The arm around me tightened for one involuntary second, pulling me closer, and froze.
“Morning,” I said, trying to sound casual.
His chest expanded with a controlled breath. “Good morning.”
“Sleep okay?”
He swallowed, loud enough that I could hear it. “Yes.”
“Me too. Best I’ve had in a long time.” I yawned against his chest. The dream was still clinging to me like steam. “You’re like a heated mattress. Has anyone told you that? You’re very warm, and I’m very comfortable, and to be perfectly clear, I didn’t mean to end up here.”
“Noted.”
“But now that I’ve wandered over here in my sleep, I’d kind of like to stay. Unless you want me to move.”
He didn’t say anything, and his arm stayed where it was. We lay there in the gray morning light, breathing, his heart rate gradually slowing from the initial spike of waking up with a human plastered against him.
“Your heart was going pretty fast for a second there,” I said.
“I was startled.”
“Startled by what? The cuddling? We established cuddling last night. Shouldn’t you pretend it’s ancient troll tradition? Subsection: morning-after cuddles.”
“There is no such subsection. And I’m not pretending. Why would you think that?”
“No reason.” Shit, me and my big mouth forgot all about my evil plan to milk this for all that it was worth.
Next, I’d be telling him I knew he was telling people I was his soulmate.
And that couldn’t happen, because then innkeepers wouldn’t stick us in a single room together.
No, I was invested in my plan. So invested that I pressed my face against his collarbone and breathed him in, and his fingers curled tighter against my hip.
We stayed like that. His thumb moved once, a slow arc across the curve of my hip, and I didn’t know if he was aware he was doing it.
“Moerrven.”
“Mm.”
“About last night.”
His whole body tensed again. “Sky—”
“Do you want to talk about what you said last night? About being a widower.” I tipped my head back and looked up at him. In the dawn light, his face was guarded, braced for impact. “I’m not going to push you on that. But can I ask you something?”
“If I say no, will it stop you?”
“That’s fair. No, it won’t, because I like to be clear on things, and this one is bugging me.” I held his gaze. “Do you want to fuck me?”
His ears went blue, an immediate, furious flush spreading from the tips down to his jaw. His mouth opened and closed, and no sound came out. His hand had stopped moving on my hip. His entire body was so tense that each individual muscle stood locked against the others.
“Because I want you to,” I said. “I’m attracted to you. I’ve been attracted to you since you picked me up off a bridge like a sack of flour. I’ve been reading your books and thinking about your hands and the possibility that you may be submissive—”
“Submissive?” He frowned.
“—and having extremely detailed fantasies.” I grinned. “So I’m just asking. Straight up. Do you want to?”
“That is not—” His voice came out strangled. He cleared his throat. “The question is considerably more complicated than you are making it out to be.”
“It’s really not. Well, unless you enjoy complicated sex. I once tried shibari, and I did not have the patience to spend hours weaving ropes around a guy. I just wanted to pin him down and fuck him, you know.”
He stared at me. His jaw worked. The blush was spreading down his neck now, sliding down over his bare collarbone, and his chest was rising and falling fast. Against my inner thigh, where my leg was thrown across him, the hard evidence said the question was not, in fact, as complicated as he was making it.
“You never ate your pastries,” he said.
I blinked. “What?”
“Last night. You bought an entire packet of pastries from the bakery and you never ate them. You must be hungry.” He was already sitting up, dislodging me, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “We should eat before we leave. The road today is more demanding.”
I lay in the warm dent his body had left in the mattress and watched him pull his shirt on. The muscles of his back moved in the most delicious way under that gray-blue skin, and I could imagine marking him, if only I had my flogger.
He didn’t look at me as he dressed. But his ears were still blue.
“We have a long day,” he said. He opened the door, and the cold air from the hallway flooded in and took his warmth with it.
I stayed in bed for another minute, pressing the heel of my hand against my cock, which had opinions about the way that conversation had ended. Poppy climbed up onto the quilt and sat on my chest and stared at me with calm, unblinking judgment.
“He didn’t say no,” I told her. “He didn’t say yes, but the lack of a no feels like an opening, don’t you think?”
Poppy yawned, which I took to be agreement. I thanked her and scratched behind her ears, spoiling her a little, too.
I got up, got dressed, splashed water on my face from the basin.
I grabbed the paper-wrapped packet of pastries from the table and opened it.
Inside were two cherry turnovers, two apple, several crisp rolls, some kind of cheese pie, and a note from the baker that invited me to enjoy myself. So I did.