“I’m fine.”
“Even your mother said—”
“Now you’re listening to her?”
“And I can feel it through the bond. It’s like a great sucking hole inside you.”
“Wow, thanks for that uplifting metaphor.”
She took heart at his meanness. It actually seemed to invigorate him, his movements slightly less labored. “In the marshes, there’s this particularly treacherous sort of unstable boggy ground,” she told him. “It looks like a thick mat of vegetation that should hold your weight easily, but if you step on it, it gives way in this big slidey motion.”
“You’re quite the poet with these colorfully creative words and metaphors.”
“It’s so slidey,” she continued undaunted, in fact encouraged by his poking at her, “that there’s no purchase, no way to prevent yourself from going down. One wrong step and, before you even realize you’ve fucked up, you’re in over your head with no ability to climb out.”
“I perceive that we’ve reached the extended analogy phase of our story.” They completed two more passes back and forth across the room. “Don’t stop there. I assume that you, our plucky heroine, suffered such a plunge and survived to tell the tale, as you’re currently here attempting to teach me a moral lesson.”
“I thought I was done for,” she agreed. “My lungs were bursting, heart hammering, vision going black. I wanted to breathe so badly even though I knew I’d only inhale mud and water and it would just kill me faster. Even knowing that, it took everything in me not to give in.”
He grunted at that. Could be from pain, but she took it as a sound of sympathetic solidarity. Because she still wanted to think the best of him, despite everything.
“Then I hit bottom,” she said, before he could prod her again. “My feet touched solid ground and I pushed up up up with all my strength. Luckily I broke the surface near some tectona tree roots and was able to pull myself out.”
They made three more labored circuits of the room. Though it might be her imagination, and a dollop of wishful thinking, he seemed to be moving better, though his face still looked terrible. “Well,” Jadren finally said, “if the point of your morality tale is to instruct me to find power and ultimate escape from peril after hitting rock-bottom, then I suppose I’m poised to break surface. Any moment now,” he added darkly.
“It’s just a true story,” she said quietly. “No great message to it.”
“Ah yes,” he breathed. “All spurred by your observation that I’m akin to your sucking bog of doom. Have your own feet touched bottom yet, poppet?”
She had thought she’d already hit the lowest point, but somehow she still continued to fall. Like she’d simply hit a false bottom and broken through it, helplessly plummeting to some doom even worse than both of them dying, if Jadren even could. It seemed he’d be forever denied that ultimate escape, just as his mother predicted. “Just take some of my magic already,” she answered instead, and with considerable exasperation.
“I don’t need you,” he bit out, sounding more like he was trying to convince himself. “I’ve been through this innumerable times before, all without your nubile assistance, tasty though you might be.”
Nubile? Tasty? Uh oh. He’d reached that stage of the healing process, apparently. Sure enough, at the next turn, he nuzzled her temple, turning his face more fully into the side of hers and inhaling deeply. “Mmm,” he purred. “Now, wanting you is something else. You smell like moonlight on still water.”
Absurd pleasure fluttered through her. We are in a glass cage, she reminded herself. No doubt someone was observing them, taking notes on their behavior. She should put distance between them, not melt into him. “What does that even smell like?” she retorted with extra tartness to counterbalance the will-sapping desire to yield.
“You smell like that.” His lips whispered over her ear, then found the hollow beneath, sucking lightly on the skin to draw it tightly into his mouth where he licked the taut flesh, then released it with a nip of his teeth that sent a lightning bolt of need straight to her groin. “And you taste like snowmelt from a glacier, pure and invigorating.”
“When have you ever licked a glacier?” And what was wrong with her that she couldn’t seem to find it in her to shove him away?
He laughed, warmly, and licked her neck. She repressed a shudder. The man was infuriatingly seductive. If she wasn’t insane again, he’d drive her there. “The glacier came to me,” he purred, making it sound ridiculously sexual. “A beverage featured at a fire and ice banquet to celebrate my beloved maman’s natal day. No expense was spared. But let’s not talk about her.”
With surprising agility and sudden strength, he pinned her to the wall instead of making the next pivot. One moment he had an arm around her shoulders, leaning heavily on her, the next she had her back to the wall, his hand behind her neck, the other stroking down the thin black silk gown she still barely wore. At least she’d managed to keep that intact. Not that it felt like much protection with Jadren’s caress burning over her ribs and waist, sliding intimately over her hip and, finding the slit in the skirt, down her naked thigh. She groaned as she managed to duck his kiss, his mouth catching the corner of her lips. Apparently unbothered, he took advantage of her exposed throat, gliding kisses along the astonishingly sensitive hollows there.
“Jadren…” she choked out, but managed nothing more as his hand closed over her breast and she lost all breath. The shock of his thumb grazing her nipple was like nothing she’d ever felt before. Nothing like the clumsily sweet fumblings of her teenage lover. He circled the areola through the flimsy silk, scraping his thumbnail over the tiny, sensitive bumps as her nipple pebbled. He knew exactly what it did to her, too, his lips curving knowingly against her jaw, kissing along the line of it as she tipped her head against the wall. She made some sort of strangled, incoherent sound she didn’t recognize from herself.
“Seliah,” he purred against her skin. “Seliah. Seliah.” Chanting her name, he pressed kisses between. “Seliah, my beauty. Let me pleasure you. I will be so much better than whatever lovers you scrounged out of that swamp. I know what I’m doing.” Proving his point, he pinched her nipple lightly between thumb and forefinger, just hard enough for a fleeting stab of pain that made her gasp, followed by a moan at the ensuing erotic release. He chuckled, another sensual stimulation as he found the hollow at the base of her throat. “It’s driving me mad to know you’re mine now. I have to have you. All of you. Say yes. You’ll know when you feel me deep inside you, my magic in yours and yours in mine. Let me, Seliah.”
She was clinging to him, fingers digging into his leanly muscled shoulders, not to push him away, but to draw him closer. Trying to muster her wits and rally the very good reasons to say no that had been present in her mind only moments before, she opened her mouth, hoping the words would find their way.
Instead, Jadren found his way in, his lips closing over hers with consuming passion. This wasn’t the awkward kiss she’d pressed on him and regretted almost immediately. This wasn’t him tensing, making it clear he wanted nothing more than for her to go away. This was him drawing her in, inhaling her, holding her in place with that burning hand gripping the back of her neck with erotic intensity as he plundered her mouth—and her magic.
Despite his earlier refusal, he drank of her magic now, pulling with deep, demandingly visceral tugs that touched intimate places inside her. She groaned and he swallowed that, too, his magic roaring through hers as he pressed her to the wall, hard chest crushing her breasts and teasing her nipples so her head swam with dizzying darkness. She yielded to that demand, too, seemingly unable to summon any inkling of rational resistance, her body heating, slickening, softening into submission.
His hand slid hot up her naked thigh, cupping her bare bottom, and he murmured into her mouth about needing, wanting, possessing, urging her to spread her legs…
Reality roared back. “No,” she managed, finding it in her to push that hand away, to lever him off of her. “Jadren, we can’t. Not here. They’re watching.”
