Chapter 27 #3
Her heart did a strange thing as she thought of the bound power somewhere in her own chest. “Mordred, that is . . .” She trailed off.
“It is a lot to carry.” She bit down on her tongue to stop herself from telling him the truth about Uccu’s son and her resulting banishment.
“It is a difficult thing, to have little choice in how deadly you are.”
Frustration flared in Nyneve, her hands curling tighter around the jug. Why did she feel so comfortable with him? Why was it so easy to escape a faerie hill together, to pretend to be lovers, to speak like this, so open and frank?
“Is that a hint of sympathy I detect in your tone?” Mordred asked, pushing off the table and closing the distance between them, exactly like she was afraid he might. She watched him, detesting the muscular slopes of his body that made her body thrum.
“Some sympathy, yes,” she admitted, tilting her chin back to look at him as he halted in front of her. Gods, why did he have to be so much taller than her, particularly without his glamour? His fingertips ghosted her jaw, and despite herself, she shivered at his touch.
“You should know,” Mordred said with an intensity that made her heart race faster, “I only want sympathy in the form of you crawling into my bed.”
For a moment, Nyneve’s mind struggled to catch up with his change in behavior.
Then anger coursed through her—how dare he come seeking her help, show his soft underbelly to her, and then try to walk it all back with a crude little line?
She hated him. Hated his perfect body and how it felt when his gaze landed on her, hated his cruel mouth and sharp tongue, hated how he made her feel like she had no control over herself whatsoever.
Nyneve slammed the cider back into the cabinet, drew her hand up, and slapped Mordred across the face.
The sound of it rang out in the quiet cottage, banishing the distant revelry of nighttime creatures.
For a moment, the force of her strike drove his eyes away from her, but then his gaze returned, burning even hotter.
Nyneve drew in a deep, shaking breath. Mordred’s lips parted, a dark trickle of blood in the corner of his mouth. He took her in, shoulders hunched, looking more like a wild animal than a knight of the Round Table. In the witchlight, his gaze was all dark and slinking madness.
“Nyneve,” he rasped. “Again.”
Her mind went blank. When she finally managed to understand, all the hatred in her body contorted into something not unlike desire.
His ravenous expression made her painfully aware of how easy it would be to drop the woolen wrap to the floor, leaving her in little more than a sheer chemise, an easy thing for his large hands to slide beneath.
So, she slapped him again. The moment her palm made contact, Mordred wrapped his long fingers around her wrist and pulled her into him until their mouths were a mere breadth apart.
“I hate you,” Nyneve told him in a snarl, surprising herself with the intensity of the three words.
“Good,” the changeling knight replied. “I happen to detest you as well.”
Then his mouth crashed into hers, and Nyneve let herself be swept away by his endless dark.
He wrapped both hands around her waist and lifted her onto the table as if she were weightless.
The woolen blanket pooled around her legs.
When his palms slid up to her breasts, she moaned into his mouth, her back arching.
With a low, animalistic sound, the knight dragged her closer to the edge of the table, their hips meeting.
His mouth left hers abruptly, and Nyneve hated herself for whimpering.
But then he pushed the skirt of her chemise up around her waist and knelt between her thighs.
“Finally giving me what I want, you godsdamn bastard?” Nyneve asked, her breath coming in short gasps.
Mordred shrugged, the sight of his muscles contracting making her weak. “Why should we not both have what we desire?” he asked, pulling her smallclothes over her hips.
He settled her thighs on his shoulders, eyes sliding to hers when his mouth met the inside of her knee.
She leaned back on her elbows as he kissed his way up her thighs, his fingertips digging into the flesh of her ass in a way that made her heart flutter.
And then, for the second time, the knight she absolutely loathed brought his mouth to the hot, needy center of her.
Nyneve cried out as his kiss devolved into something near-feral, his clever tongue drawing sounds from her own lips that she’d never heard before.
Her chest heaving in desperation, she palmed her breast through her shift, though Mordred noticed a moment later, one hand skimming up her side to tease her nipple in precisely the way she wanted.
“Take what you need from me, little thief,” he murmured with his mouth still against her.
Nyneve tipped her head back and moaned, pulling him closer with her thighs.
She’d never felt so unbridled, unabashedly rolling her hips into his mouth, chasing the pleasure of his tongue.
It was so, so easy to take what she wanted from this knight of Camelot.
As the hot wetness between her legs drew tauter, she crossed her ankles, pinning him in place.
“Wait,” Nyneve gasped, pushing to sit up.
Mordred halted immediately, pulling away from her.
“No, I didn’t say to stop,” she hissed, reaching forward to pull him closer.
Then she shimmied her weight until her skirts were free and tossed them over his head.
“I just don’t want to see your smug, stupid face when I come. ”
“As long as you do come for me, Nyneve,” he replied from beneath her chemise.
Before she could tell the knight that it wasn’t for him at all, his mouth was on her again, and her vision went white.
She lay back on the table, eyes fixed on the ceiling, not thinking at all about his long-fingered hands gripping her thighs and her breasts, or his clever tongue inside of her, or the way his cock strained against his trousers for her.
If he weren’t such an absolutely heinous person, she didn’t think she would ever be able to get enough of him.
Nyneve’s fingernails scrabbled at the tabletop as she threw her head back and shattered, fighting to keep Mordred’s name out of her mouth. Then she lay there, boneless and floating, panting hard.
Distantly, she felt him disentangle himself from her chemise and rise to stand.
Sweeping her mess of curls off her shoulder, Nyneve propped herself up on her elbows and forced herself to meet the burning weight of the ocean-eyed knight’s gaze.
As his eyes found hers, his bare chest rising in sharp, quick breaths, she realized something that terrified her:
Mordred Pendragon did very much make her feel something she had never felt before.