KISS IT BETTER #2
“I love you,” Esme confessed, terrified that if she didn’t get it out, the words would eat a hole in her tongue.
Her hand slipped up her wife’s back. This time, Esme didn’t check for scrapes or bruises.
As far as Esme was concerned, Mina was an ancient oak so solid no manmade axe could dent her.
She had roots too deep ever to sever. They grew through Esme’s anxiety, broke it up, and did away with it. Only Mina could do that.
“I know.” Mina nipped Esme’s chin. “You wouldn’t try to save me in such silly ways if you didn’t.”
“They aren’t silly—”
Mina shut her up with a sharp suck below Esme’s ear, kissing the sensitive spot before settling her plush lips just at Esme’s earlobe.
“If you ever try to break us up because you think you’re protecting me without discussing it first, I will bite this clean off,” she growled.
Her voice was silky soft, but her kiss was full of teeth.
“I won’t, I promise,” Esme gasped, eyes fluttering.
Mina’s finger drew down her chest, snagging on her loose neckline before pulling the strap of her chemise down. “Good. Now let’s see if we can make enough a racket to get those nosy busybodies crowding at the door to stop listening in.”
Esme had completely forgotten about the Wraiths in her living room. But the second the threat left Mina’s lips, five sets of footsteps rushed away and Esme’s door clicked shut.
* * *
The knock was light enough that Esme might have missed it had she not already been awake.
It was deep into the night, the third since the Valosia, and she was up only because her wounds were giving her an awful time.
It turned out that fighting a magical death collar and then slitting your own throat didn’t result in optimal comfort.
Instead, Mina snored lightly beside her as Esme sat up in bed, a silly romance book in her lap.
Jemima had just told Marcus that she was in no shape to love again because she still had feelings for the lord who’d betrayed their marriage pact when the second knock tore her from her swoon.
She dragged herself from bed carefully enough not to wake Mina and walked to the door. She smelled food through it, and something disgustingly medicinal.
Then she caught the scent of lavender over blood.
Esme’s stomach twisted. She’d come to know Bal’s scent well, and she was suddenly aware of the old-style chemise she wore.
The top was tight enough for him to guess her every dip and curve, and the skirt opened at either side below her hips.
It was long, but when one bend could let him glimpse her most secret areas, length did nothing for modesty.
But the prospect of Bal outside of her door had her cracking it open anyway.
“Hi,” he said and gave her a sheepish smile as she stuck her face out through the crack in the doorway.
He was dressed in an old, plain shirt that was nearly as tan as he was.
His right arm rested in a sling, but he had three plates of food with flat covers and a small jar of something balanced in a makeshift string holder in his left hand.
“Hello,” Esme replied, licking her lips.
“You weren’t at the feast tonight, so I left,” he said.
Then he realized what he’d said. “I mean, I figured you were probably still feeling unwell, so I brought you some food. And I came up to eat with you, too,” he explained quickly, looking down at the plates.
Then he bit his lip. “And I assumed Willimina was with you, so…”
So he’d bought three plates.
It was sweet—his little stutter, the way he showed up at her door with his buttons done up to the top and a little ribbon tied in the collar like he’d tried to look nice.
He had only one arm to work with today. Someone had taken one look at him, deemed him too plain to go romancing, and given him that ribbon.
It was all very sweet. “I haven’t eaten, actually,” Esme said. She’d slept much of the day and had grumbled groggily at Mina when she’d tried to feed her earlier.
Bal gave her a lopsided smile. “Can’t have you starving,” he said. His eyes found a way to drip down the bare hint of her body he could see through the crack in the door. Judging by his look, Bal had a personal interest in keeping her fed. “I also found a nice spot to eat, if you want.”
Esme bit her lip. She desperately wanted to sneak out with the handsome man delivering her food late at night… but she shouldn’t just leave Mina.
“You could let the poor man in at least.”
Esme jumped at Mina’s voice, then turned to find her wife leaning against the wall seperating Esme’s bedroom and living room. She’d already shaken off sleep and was staring intently at the scene of Esme whispering through her doorway like a lovesick teenager.
Esme let Bal sneak in. His eyes went first to the purple velvet furniture, the oak desk, and the gauzy curtains separating her bedroom from her living room.
Then they found Mina, one of Esme’s thin robes slipping from her naked shoulder.
Finally, he looked sideways to Esme, at the slit up the side of her dress and the ghost of thigh he could glimpse through it.
At the way the fabric pulled against her chest and the careful twists in her hair, pulled back and tucked into a deep purple scarf.
By the time those eyes made it to her face, any airs of sheepish infatuation had been smoked out by lust.
“How’s the arm?” Mina asked Bal.
The general started before looking down to said injury like he hadn’t realized he had it. “Better,” he said. “This feels more like a precaution more than anything. You?”
Mina didn’t answer immediately. She slunk from the wall and looked up at Bal, her eyes icy and assessing. Esme realized now that the last time she and Bal had been this close, he’d been racing to either save or martyr her. Did Mina know which it had been?
“You like her, yes?” Mina asked Bal.
Bal stuttered until steam practically tripped from his lips, and then all he could give her was a “Yes, I do.”
Esme gulped at them being so close. It was one thing to manage her wants with them separately, but with them nose to nose…
Esme’s mind wandered to places it had no business treading.
Briefly, it brought her back to the Den, to the image of Bal leaning back on the chaise, grazing the calloused tips of his fingers down Mina’s shivering spine.
And reaching an arm into the curl of her body to pull her deeper into his lap was the man from the maze. Esme realized suddenly that’s who he had been.
Calamity, Massacre, Tyrant… Seduction.
“Our rules are simple,” Mina said. “We don’t guard each other like dogs, and we don’t meddle where we aren’t asked. But I have one question for you.”
Bal nodded, standing up straighter.
“In the maze, you were the only man I couldn’t see. What were you reaching for? Me, or the pouch?”
The question knocked Esme’s breath out of her stomach. She wanted to know the answer to that question just as much as Mina did.
Bal looked back and forth between the two of them before his eyes settled on Mina. A sigh gusted out of his lungs.
“The pouch,” he said. Esme’s stomach dropped.
“Because if I’d have tried to save you, we both would have died.
The man that saved you had nothing to win.
He was going for you, and we were right across from each other.
If I’d tried to save you, we would have hit the platform at the same time and brought the whole thing down. ”
Esme weighed her belief in that. She was astonished Bal hadn’t tried to save Mina, but he had a point: had both he and the other man tried to jump up on that platform, they all would have fallen in.
If anything, that had probably been Isobel’s goal, that Bal would try to be a hero and fail, taking Mina with him.
She was glad to be wrong about him, then.
“Hmm.” Mina took a step back and crossed her arms under her chest. “At least he’s honest.” Esme pouted, but Mina went on, “I saw all three of you. I knew the man from the Valosia was running for me, and I knew you weren’t.
I’ll say it’s pretty shameful to admit to the woman you’re attempting to seduce that you didn’t try to save her lover, but you did anyway, either because you knew I was lying or because you’re an honest man.
So either you’re smart or good. One is enough. ”
Mina stepped away from Bal as he blubbered about maybe being both.
Esme had never seen him so flustered. Then again, it was hard to keep one’s nerves from fraying against Mina’s sharpness.
Said blade of a wife leaned forward to slip the string harness from Bal’s hand.
She sat it on the living-room table and took one of the plates out from the stack before handing the other two back to the general.
“I’m peckish, but I refuse to put on shoes,” she said.
“You should take her to that spot.” Mina checked the food under the cover and her brows popped up.
Was she impressed? “Oh, and she won’t let you put that on unless you practically hold her down.
Don’t listen to her when she says it doesn’t hurt. She likes it when you kiss it better.”
Mina purred that last bit over her shoulder as she took her plate of food into her and Esme’s bedroom. This wasn’t territorial bullshit; Mina was telling her that this was okay, that Balthazar was okay. Though he’d earned her initial suspicion, he’d passed her test.
Before Mina disappeared past the curtain, Esme hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her into a kiss.
How Esme had gotten such a brilliant woman to put up with her antics long enough to marry her, she’d never know.
Mina hummed into her wife’s mouth and pulled her closer as Bal’s eyes slid across their bodies.
Esme felt them like hands gripping their hips to hold them together.
When she and Mina finally parted, she found Bal staring at them, fists balled at his sides like he was strangling his restraint.
“’Night, General,” Mina whispered, parched from the kiss.