47. Chapter 47
Chapter forty-seven
Iwas drowning in something soft and cool. It twined in my feet, around my ankles. Through my hair and around my wrists, and it would claim my throat and air too.
I woke with a start and sat bolt upright in a dark room. There was a breeze coming from a balcony door that hung ajar.
The sudden shift in my posture had me coughing from the sweetness of the tea still sticking to my tongue.
I was tangled in navy silken bedsheets. There was navy all around me. The bedspread, the walls and even the ceiling with its gold constellations …
My chest squeezed, and I clutched the fabrics around me. I was in Kaed’s bedroom.
In his bed!
I coughed again, and this time the door flew open, and Kaed was framed in it.
He looked like black wildfire as he stood silhouetted by the hall lights.
But before he could say anything, Audrie pushed past him and landed herself on top of me and crushed what little air I had in my lungs back out.
“Attempting to suffocate me?” I tried to laugh, but I was shaken from whatever Sapphine had done.
“Sorry.” She pulled away and stood off the bed sheepishly.
I watched Kaed as he hesitated over the threshold. “How did I get here? Why am I in your bed?” I grabbed more of the bedspread and pulled it up around my chest.
“Tymon found you,” Audrie answered before Kaed could. “And Kaedian insisted on here because of something to do with not letting you out of his sight. My room would have been fine. Even your room.” She rolled her eyes.
“Audrie,” Kaed cautioned from the door.
“Is Tymon here now?” I asked, ignoring him as I tried to sit up.
“I brought you home after …” A muscle in his neck popped with the tension in his words. Kaed shook his head. “Tymon will be back later.” His jaw was painfully tight as he spoke.
“It wasn’t Tymon’s fault,” I tried. I knew it wasn’t. He knew it wasn’t. Sapphine was acting in her own interests.
Had that all been to goad Kaed into taking action against the city?
He’d said someone was trying to bait him.
Could it really be Sapphine? If I died, he might retaliate.
Sapphine believed me to be important to him.
But she believed it for the wrong reasons.
But if she, or whoever was behind everything, wanted to force his hand to action …
attacking his soon-to-be wife would be a good place to start.
Or maybe she was just that vile that drugging someone was a reasonable thing to do. My mind was blackening at the edges as I recalled the sensation of my body crumbling in on itself, losing feeling.
“Sapphine. She … The tea …” My hand gripped at my throat. The feeling in my fingers was back, but something lingered under my skin. She had really done that to me.
Kaed shifted, and I didn’t need to say what we both knew. Sapphine had no line. She could have done worse. But she was trying to scare me. To remind me where power truly lay.
“Where is she?” I tried again.
“She’s already left for Gloriya,” Kaed ground out. His jaw looked like it might shatter at any moment with the continued force he was holding it with.
Relief and annoyance surged in me. “So I can’t kill her any time soon, then?” I tried to joke. It dawned on me then that I didn’t know how long I’d been out. “When is the Seeds and Starlight Celebration? Did Tymon get the invites?”
“Two days. And you won’t be going.” Kaed’s tone was emphatic.
I scoffed. “Of course I am. If you’re worried about Sapphine, you just said she’s left for Gloriya already. I’ll be fine.”
Kaed took a step closer to the bed. “That’s not the—” He steadied himself. “I am telling you, you are no longer going.” His words were sharp as they snared me. “She could have people who will be there. You’re recovering. No one will think twice if you’re not there.”
“I’m going,” I ground out.
Kaed was now at the foot of the bed, a hurricane brewing beneath his lashes.
Audrie stood abruptly. “I am the one who is going. Downstairs. Away from whatever this”—she gestured between the two of us—“is.”
The door slammed behind her, and I was suddenly alone with Kaed, lying in his bed.
And he looked like he would murder me, not Sapphine, for what had happened.
“You can’t stop me from going to the celebration. I’m part of this. And I will help.” I angled my jaw for emphasis.
“I warned you once, peach,” he hummed, eyes not meeting mine as he moved to the side of the bed so he was now looming over me. His gaze locked on me. “I would tie you to my bed if I had to keep an eye on you. And you’re already doing most of that work for me by being here.”
I fought a surge of heat at his words and watched his fingers clench around an invisible ball in his hands. Shadows materialised, summoned from deep within him.
I swallowed.
Was he serious?
He flexed his fingers until shadows lengthened and touched the bedsheets beside me. They rippled their way up the creases and folds of the silk until they found their path to my hands clutching the fabric.
The shadows nuzzled along my fingers and found my wrists, swirling around them, not tightening. Just circling like a school of fish shimmering in the water.
The weight of the mattress shifted under me as Kaed knelt one knee onto it. He braced a hand on the headboard and leaned in as the shadows swirled all over me. “Your choice, peach.”
“I always have a choice?” I repeated what he’d told me before.
He said nothing to that but moved until his entire frame caged me.
My breath hitched. How many times had I thought of exactly this? Of him above me, pinning me to his bed.
Unbidden, my tension flowed from me, and my body unspooled to accommodate his.
Kaed swallowed once as he watched me. Inviting him to make good on his threat.
In a single movement, Kaed was kneeling over me, straddling me until he pressed into me. His shadows wove around me and forced my back to arch into his body.
“What are you—” I forgot my question as I felt the length of him press into me. A moan escaped before I could rein it in.
A low, gravelly sound rumbled in his chest at that. “You always have a choice.” He leaned over me, taking my hands in his, twining our fingers together.
A single exhale was all I could manage in response, but my eyes said everything I needed him to know.
Yes. I choose this. Whatever this was.
Hot breath poured from me as I tried to arch closer to him. But he held his body just out of reach. And then his mouth was kissing me. Everywhere. His lips scorched my skin like a brand.
“You—” He kissed my neck. “Make—” He kissed my collarbone.
“It—” Then just above the curve of my breasts, the skin tightening a little as his lips sealed over the delicate skin of my decolletage.
“Very—” He nipped at me until my skin pebbled and cooled, “Difficult—” Another kiss to my neck. “To protect you.” Another kiss.
I panted uselessly under his lips as they marked me.
“But … I suppose.” He paused, examining me as I writhed, hands pinned in his, hips held under him. “I’ll just have to try harder to protect what is mine.”
He growled and released my hands but claimed my mouth.
His length pressed into me as his tongue savoured what it tasted.
For a moment, I forgot how I’d gotten here. Where we had to be. What troubles lay around us. And all I could feel—all I wanted to feel— was all of Kaed.
I gasped for air between exploring the confines of his perfect mouth as it devoured mine.
But then I pushed down the red-hot coals in me that were threatening to burst into flame. “You can tie me to your bed another time,” I said, trying to push him to make some space between us. One more minute, one more touch from him, and I wouldn’t be able to think straight.
“Or …” His voice shuddered low as the shadows around my wrists formed again and tightened, as he tugged them to wrap around the headboard. “I can do it now.”
I forgot how to protest. I forgot that I wanted to. Did I actually want to get up? To end this? There were things I knew I needed to say to him, but I was finding it hard to know anything other than his touch on me.
I pulled at his shadows, but in pulling on them, I felt something settle into me. They were him, he was wrapped around me, and I sank into that comfort.
“What was it you were saying, peach?”
I lost all words to his eyes and how hungry they were as his fingers grasped the bed sheets and pulled until nothing separated us other than the clothes I was still wearing.
I had conflicting feelings: grateful for the barrier between us, and cursing it at the same time.
Kaed’s fingers skimmed down my hips until they slipped under my skirts.
“Do you want me to stop, Imogen?”
No. Why would I want that?
I shook my head and pulled a little on my wrist restraints.
“I need to hear you say it.” Kaed looked like he was the one bound, straining against something holding him back.
He might have me tied to his bed—finally, I laughed to myself—but he had just let me know I had the power to restrain him. If I wanted him to stop, he would.
“Do. You. Want. Me. To. Stop?” Every word was punctuated by the thrust of his hips.
“No,” I breathed.
“Say it.”
“I don’t want you to stop.”
A single breath passed between us, but my heartbeat thundered in my chest as he moved to part my legs.
His hand hovered over me. Not yet touching me where my body was screaming for it. Was he uncertain? Did he want this?
His eyes fell to me as I writhed against the hold of his shadows on my wrists. I wanted this. I needed this. And I begged him to read that in my eyes because no words at all could form with the desire for him choking me.
Finally, his fingers landed on me, pulling the fabric of my panties aside, even as my skirts still covered me. A strangled and shuddered breath fell from him as I coated his fingers with my arousal as soon as they brushed my entrance.
Our eyes locked and something rumbled between us in the air. I could feel it pulsing in his magic as it wrapped around me. Please I wanted to beg.
“Kaed …” I pulled uselessly on the power that held me as my hips reached for him.