Chapter 26
TERRAN
I couldn’t trust her.
And yet, I wanted her to stay.
It was madness. Insanity, as the humans might say. But something had shifted between us this night. Those words which began as a game, a tool of dominance, were no longer either.
They were real.
“You are more perfectly formed than any in Elydor,” I said, watching her dress. When Lyra had risen, I considered asking her back to bed. There was nothing I wanted more than to continue to caress her soft skin. Learn every curve.
But wanting had led me to bed a woman who should be my enemy. One who deceives… withholds… even if she had let me see a secret part of her.
“Training,” she said, adjusting her gown. I’d attempted to assist her until Lyra shot me a look that had me chuckling and lying back down to watch instead. “Though I’m certain it pales in comparison to yours.”
Fully dressed, she turned to me, unabashedly scanning me from head to toe. I hadn’t bothered to cover myself in any way. Gyorians were not known for modesty.
“Keep looking at me like that if you care to find yourself disrobed and pinned beneath me once again.” This after I told myself not to ask her to remain…
“Don’t tempt me.”
I was up from the bed and before her before Lyra could utter another word.
“Me”—I reached for her neck, pulling it toward me—“tempt you?”
I kissed her. Claimed her with my mouth, wanting more even knowing I should not.
When she reached down between us and grasped me, I was lost. Her fingers slight, her movement as easy and graceful as the wind, she stroked me.
And then knelt down at my feet.
The sight of her… “Lyra, no.”
It was more insane to attempt to stop her than it was to want Lyra to stay the night. But as she wrapped her hands around me, guiding me into her mouth, I had no more thoughts of distancing myself from her in any way.
In fact, as I reached for the back of her head and pulled her toward me, I did the very opposite.
Clutching two fistfuls of hair in my hands, I matched her pace as Lyra took me in…
and out. If Lyra’s goal was to ensure I’d have no coherent thoughts left in my head before she left, she’d accomplished it already.
“The love of Terranor,” I said, evoking our god and considering evoking hers too. There weren’t enough Elydorian deities to pray to, the feeling of her full lips around me. When I warned her, sooner than I’d reached a climax in memory, Lyra simply took me in more deeply.
She meant to keep me there.
I had no notion to pull away, releasing every bit into her sweet mouth, the suckling sounds she made, combined with the sight of her at my feet, making every spasm intensify tenfold. If there was something to hold onto, I would have, for fear of toppling over.
“That was…”
No words could do it justice.
As she licked the last drops and pulled away, the look Lyra gave me then couldn’t possibly have been any sexier. Sitting back on her feet, her lips wet, Lyra’s eyes wide with anticipation as if… as if she’d wanted to please me…
“Do you mean to kill me?” I asked, only partly in jest.
She wiped her mouth and stood.
“Why?”
It was a simple enough question but Lyra had no ready answer. What happened between us earlier? We’d been building toward it for some time.
But this, ’twas for my pleasure alone.
She blinked. Lyra didn’t know why she’d done it. She had planned to leave. But instead… My eyes widened.
Of course.
I reached for her. Pulled Lyra into me. Cupping her cheeks between my hands, I summoned my most commanding tone, and I looked down, into her eyes.
“The bedroom will be my domain. In there, you are mine, Lyra. Do you understand?”
She nodded. “Aye.”
“Out of it? ’Tis yet to be seen. But if I ask for you to drop to your knees, you’ll do it.”
Her lips parted. If this aroused her, I would gladly give Lyra what she wanted.
“But know this,” I added, “there will always be pleasure, for us both, in here. Never pain.” And the next part would be important. “Never deceive. If we cannot be honest about what we want, this will not work. Do you understand?”
“I do,” she said.
I released her wrist. It seemed to snap Lyra out of the trance she’d been in since I started my speech.
“I have to speak to Mev before the morrow.”
I was certain she’d done so already, but I offered no argument.
“Until we meet again, then,” I said. “Tomorrow should prove an interesting day.”
“Until then,” she said, fleeing the bedchamber as if she wasn’t certain what had just happened. But I knew.
Whether I liked it or nay, it mattered not.
And I most certainly did not like being bound to a woman who continued to actively deceive me. But we were bound, despite it, in a way that would be difficult to walk away from.
But she was Aetherian.
And war was coming to our clans. The air was too still… The breath before the break. I’d fought battles before, but never one that would carve the fate of realms. If we fell today, Elydor would fracture, and every sacrifice we’d made would turn to ash.
I told myself I was ready. But readiness and peace were not the same thing, and peace had abandoned us long ago.