Chapter 52 Restraint #2
At his approach, a light flared behind Saffron’s eyes.
She stilled, and as he lay down beside her, there was a crackle of anticipation, both of them fighting too hard to control their bodies.
Saffron rolled flat onto her back, the full peaks of her breasts rising and falling with shortened breaths.
Levan cupped her jaw in his golden palm, running a thumb over the petal-smooth skin of her face.
She tilted her head to face him, pupils blown wide and black, her teeth subtly biting into her lower lip.
“Thank you, Silver.”
“For what?” she breathed.
He nodded to the incense, hating how ragged his own voice sounded. “It’s been a long time since anyone…”
Cared.
Dropping his hand from her jaw, he pressed his forehead against her upper arm, the curve of her shoulder, and let his eyes flutter closed, feeling both exhausted to his bones and entirely awake.
Saffron laced her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck, so gently it almost unraveled him, and he lay there for several moments, letting the want in his body swell and pulse until he could no longer bear it at all.
Once it felt like his lungs—or his vock—might explode from the pressure, Levan traced his cold fingertips down the side of her throat, across the ridge of her collarbone, around the pear-shaped curve of her breast. Her body shivered involuntarily, and she closed her eyes, but did not move to touch him in return.
She simply let him rove and wander, a palm splayed over her flared ribs, a thumb stroking the swell of her hip.
He planted the smallest kiss on her temple, her cheekbone, the side of her mouth. Now she was the one trembling, but she kept her hands at her sides, fingers curled into tight fists.
Did she still carry the embarrassment of his rejection all those weeks ago, when he’d left her sitting on the trunk at the foot of her bed, just moments from taking his vock between her lips? The memory was so fresh he could practically still feel her warm breath against his tenderest skin.
Levan traced a finger back down her jawbone as he whispered, “Touch me, Silver.”
She shook her head slowly, this stubborn mule of a woman. “You’re not yourself right now—you’re struggling.”
He gave a rueful laugh. “I’m always struggling.”
Saffron pressed her palm against her ribs, clawing her nails into the fabric of her tunic as though trying to create a sensation other than desire. Levan was familiar with the tactic. “I don’t want to take advantage. Last time—it was ill-judged. I got caught up in the moment.”
“Do you really think I turned you down because I didn’t want you?
” Levan said roughly. “Silver, what you said all those weeks ago about my compelling, my will bleeding into yours…causing you to slip, make careless mistakes, bend to my subconscious command. That terrified me. The only thing that kept me from spiraling entirely was the knowledge that the first time we…well, I was pinned in place with deminite. It couldn’t have just been my desire seeping into you.
But the time after—I made such a show of being the one in control. Tying you, silencing you.”
“Levan.” To his immense surprise, Saffron laughed, bright and clear as a church bell.
“I have wanted you most seconds of most days since the moment you re-enchanted my necklace. Even when you’re nowhere near me, and so could not possibly be compelling me.
Even when your mind is so clearly on other things.
I promise my desire is entirely my own.”
Though the laughter lightened the atmosphere, these words did little to assuage Levan’s concerns—he did not understand, in any real sense, why anyone would want him at all.
An addict, a killer, someone who came across so cold and callous despite (or perhaps because of) his deep inner turmoil.
Subliminal compelling was the only feasible explanation.
Saffron turned to face him, peering at the harsh lines of his face through her soft, fluffy lashes.
“You’re so beautiful,” she murmured, as though reading his self-loathing thoughts.
His stomach flipped. “What? No.”
“You are.” She traced the very tip of her forefinger over his cheeks, his brows, his chin dimple. “The most beautiful mage I’ve ever seen.”
He had to look away. It was so patently untrue. Whenever he looked in a mirror—which he tried very hard not to do—he saw only a monster.
“If it’s deminite you need to feel certain I genuinely want you…” Her voice dipped into a breathy, devilish tone. “You brought manacles in your backpack, did you not? Just in case the apothecary’s grandson turned on you.”
The air caught in Levan’s throat.
Saffron retrieved the cuffs, moving slowly through the room as though wading through treacle.
The feeling of imminent implosion only intensified in Levan, and as she clamped the cuffs around his wrists, the deminite cool and hard against his belly, the blood rushed to his head so hard and fast the room stippled black.
She locked them, but there was still a small gap through which he might be able to wiggle a hand free.
“Tighter.”
Saffron raised a brow. “That sounds like a command,” she murmured, adjusting the manacles until they were flush against his wristbones. “You can’t cede control and issue orders. I can be quite punitive, when I want to be.”
Levan’s voice was coarse, his whole body aflame, as he lifted his bound wrists over his head and he said, “Punish me, then.”
For a moment, Saffron looked at him as though he was the most complicated mage in the world.
And then she got to work.
As he had done to her, her hands roved over the muscled lengths of his thighs, the veined column of his throat, the hard planes of his torso.
Climbing on top to straddle him, she ran a palm over the peak in his trousers, and a ragged groan tore free from his throat.
The weight of her on top of him and the tightness of the manacles compared to the perilously light touch… it made him throb.
Unbuckling his belt, she paused for an interminable second, perhaps remembering the rejection that had followed the last time she did this, and deciding to make him suffer for it.
She ran a forefinger along the low ridges of his hips, lowering herself to plant tiny kisses right above his waistband, each of them punctuated with a tiny flick of her tongue.
When the belt finally came undone and his underwear came with it, the cold air of the bedroom was a fresh kind of torture.
“Silver,” he begged, knowing it would not work.
Plucking her wand from her own waistband—why was she still wearing so many clothes?—she ran the beech tip down the length of him, slowly, as though deliberating what to do next.
“Do you know how hot this is?” she whispered, moonlight pouring over her shoulder. “To dominate the indomitable?”
Saffron unbuttoned her trousers and, leaving them sagging loosely around her hips, slid a hand down into her underwear.
The dome of it moved through her trousers as she kneaded herself, loosing several intoxicating little moans and sighs as she watched Levan grow harder beneath her.
Levan’s belly clenched with want, his throat dry and his pulse pounding in his temples, between his legs.
“If you ever find yourself doubting whether or not I truly want you,” she murmured, shuddering and shivering, “think of this moment.”
When she came, it was a soft shattering, and Levan felt the reverberations of it through his thighs as she clamped her legs together around her hand.
With an airy expression, she removed her boots, her trousers, her perilously thin and lightly wet silk underwear.
Perfect thick thighs trembling, she lowered herself onto him at last, and the pleasure was so rich, so complete, that Levan’s eyes rolled back in his head.
She ground her hips, once, twice, and every part of him throbbed.
And then there was a knock on the door.
Instead of ignoring it, Saffron gave Levan a frankly evil look, climbed off him, tugged her trousers back on, and ambled over to answer it.
The bed was only just out of eyeshot of whoever stood on the other side, and Levan flushed furiously and brought his manacled hands to between his legs—though if their visitor entered the room, there would be no preserving his modesty.
“Your stew, Mademe,” came an old, gruff male voice, deckled with a northern accent.
“Much appreciated.”
She took the tray and pushed the door closed with her foot, carrying the two steaming bowls and plate of crusty bread rolls over to a small desk by the window. Horrifyingly, she pulled out the crooked chair and sat, tearing into a bread roll and slathering it with butter.
“Silver,” Levan groaned. “Really?”
She shrugged.
“I’m hungry,” she said sweetly. “And in no particular rush.”
As Levan lay there and watched her eat, he thought that she was perhaps a twisted sort of genius—because he was no longer thinking about nightpoppy at all.