Page 9 of Scorched
I hold out my hand. "Then allow me to welcome you properly. Would you dance?"
She doesn't want to dance with me. I can see it in the way her jaw tightens and her fingers curl at her side and her body screams no while her mouth forms the word "yes" because her cover requires it. Lady Sophie Moreau would be flattered. Lady Sophie Moreau would take the king's hand with a grateful, slightly overwhelmed smile, and that's exactly what she does, and the performance is so precise I'd believe it if I couldn't smell the truth underneath.
Her hand is in mine.
Her skin is hot. Far too hot for a human hand. When my fingers close around hers I feel her pulse slam once, hard, and then she drags it down by force. I can feel the effort in her grip—the controlled pressure of a woman holding herself together with nothing but will.
She's never been inside a Fae court before. I know this the way I know the temperature of my own forge. Her body is waking up under my hand and she has no name for what's happening to her and she's fighting it with everything she has.
I lead her to the floor. The waltz is a three-count, and she follows it exactly, her body precise and controlled, her feet finding the steps without hesitation. She's been trained in court dance. That's part of the cover. But the way she holds the distance between us—exactly arm's length, not a fraction closer, her spine straight and her chin up and her dark eyes watching my face for any information I might give her—that's not training. That's a woman who knows that closing the distance will cost her something she isn't prepared to pay.
I close the distance anyway.
I pull her a step nearer. Not much—enough that the heat of my body presses against hers through the air between us, enough that she can feel the fire magic running under my skin. Her breath catches. Her pupils flare. Her scent spikes—iron and heat and Bloodwork sweetness sharpening under the stress, and underneath it, the first faint thread of something that makes my balls tighten and my cock throb against my breeches.
Slick. The first thread of it, faint and unmistakable, cutting through the iron and the heat like a blade through smoke.
My cock throbs so hard the ridges burn against the fabric and I nearly lose the count of the waltz. Nearly. Not quite. Nine centuries of control and this woman has brought me closer to losing it in thirty seconds of contact than anyone has managed in four hundred years.
She doesn't know what her body is doing. I can see it in her face—the confusion underneath the cover, the flicker of something she can't name. She's never felt this before. She walked into my court carrying a blade meant for my throat and her body answered mine before she made it past the door.
I catch her wrist. Not hard—I turn her under my arm as the waltz requires and my fingers close around her wrist for a moment of contact the dance gives me, and I feel her pulse under my thumb. Fast. Deliberately slowing. Fast again when she can't hold it.
"You're here to kill me," I say, beneath the music.
Her face doesn't change. Not a flicker. Her pulse is hammering under my thumb and her scent is spiking and her body is flooding with the first heat it has ever known and her face doesn't change at all.
"I don't know what you mean, Your Majesty."
"Of course you don't."
I return her to the floor with a bow. She curtsies. The performance is flawless—Lady Sophie Moreau, flustered by the king's attention, retreating to the edge of the crowd with a grateful smile and a blush she's allowing them to see because the blush serves the cover.
She thinks the blush is part of the act. It isn't. The blush is her body talking and she has no idea what it's saying and no one ever taught her the language.
I watch her go. My cock is aching. The ridges are burning hot, fire magic surging through them in a way it hasn't done in longer than I want to count.
My hands aren't entirely steady.
My hands have been steady for nine centuries.
I go back to the edge of the room and pick up my wine glass and stand where I stood before, and I carry the scent of her on my fingers—iron and heat and Bloodwork and the beginning of slick—and I breathe it in while Aldric finishes talking about grain tariffs and the music plays and the fire dancers spin.
The rut is beginning. I can feel it—a low, insistent heat in my groin that has nothing to do with the fire burning in the walls and everything to do with the woman who just walked awayfrom me with a poisoned blade at her thigh and a scent that's set fire to six centuries of dead silence in my blood.
I don't tell anyone. I don't adjust myself. I stand very still and drink my wine and watch her move through the edges of the crowd with her flawless cover and her hidden weapons and her body beginning to wake up to something she doesn't understand.
I've waited nine centuries. I can wait a little longer.
But my hands aren't steady, and her scent is still on my fingers, and my cock hasn't softened, and the fire-thread in my formal black is running bright gold for the first time tonight.
I'm amused. I'm more than amused.
For the first time in forty years, I'm alive.
5
SOPHIA
