Page 8 of Scorched
The scent hits the back of my throat.
My cock stiffens. My hands go still on the wine glass I'm holding. For the first time in decades I lose the thread of the conversation I'm having with Lord Aldric of the northern human territories, who has been talking about grain tariffs for nine minutes and will have to continue without my attention.
Bloodwork.
My chest locks. My lungs forget to work for a beat and then remember, and the breath I take drags her scent deeper into me—iron and heat and something underneath that's sweet and old and alive, something I burned out of the world six hundred years ago and have carried the absence of ever since.
It is in my throat. It is in my blood.
My hands have gone white on the wine glass and the glass is heating under my grip and if I don't let go I'll crack it.
She's standing near the south wall. Dark wine dress, dark eyes, brown skin that the firelight catches and holds. Black hair coiled back from her face—natural, dense, not a strand willing to stay where it's been put. A face designed to be forgotten. She's holding a wine glass and she's very still and she's watching the room the way I watch the room—not taking it in, but taking it apart. Exits, guards, angles, distances. I've seen this kind of stillness before. It belongs to people who kill for a living.
My cock is fully hard now. The ridges are running hot under my breeches, fire magic responding to her scent before my mind has finished deciding what to do about it.
I haven't been hard without my own permission in over a century. The last time was an embarrassment I chose not to repeat.
This one I'm not choosing. My body has made a decision my head hasn't caught up with yet and I can feel the heat of it pressing against the fabric.
I don't adjust myself. I'm a nine-hundred-year-old king. I don't fidget.
I turn my head and look at her.
Across thirty feet of crowded hall, I find her the way the forge finds metal that wants to be shaped. Her dark eyes lock on mine and hold, and I watch her pulse jump in her throat—I can see it from here, the small movement at the base of herjaw—and then I watch it slow as she forces it down. Discipline. Trained discipline, the kind that takes years to build and seconds to break.
Her hand drifts to her thigh, where the blade is hidden. Her fingers touch the hilt before she catches herself.
She's reaching for her weapon. She's standing in my hall and her body is responding to mine and her first instinct is to reach for the blade she brought to kill me with.
I like her. I like her immediately and without reservation, the way I haven't liked anything in forty years.
I look away. I turn back to Aldric and his grain tariffs and I let the moment pass as though it was nothing.
I carry the scent of her in my throat and the ache of my cock against my breeches and the image of her hand reaching for the blade while her pulse hammered in her neck.
She's afraid. She's aroused. She doesn't understand the difference yet.
She will.
The music shifts. The string quartet I hired from the human territories—the only part of the evening's entertainment I actually chose myself, because I've been forced to watch fire dance performances for nine centuries and I despise them—moves into a waltz. The dance floor fills. Fae and human pairs circling in firelight, the Fae leading because the Fae always lead, the humans following because that's what they've been taught to do in these courts.
I cross the room toward her.
She sees me coming. I watch her body change—the subtle straightening, the shoulders drawing back, the jaw setting in a line that's trying hard to look relaxed. Her hand has moved away from the blade. Good.
Her cover is in place. Lady Sophie Moreau, minor landowner, border dispute, grateful smile. Her composure is the practicedkind—worn when the audience is watching and the stakes are real.
I stop in front of her. My heat reaches her before I do—I can see it in the way her breath catches, the slight widening of her eyes, the flush that moves up her throat and onto her face before she can suppress it.
She's lovely. Not in any way she's arranged. The loveliness is in the things she hasn't been able to control. The flush darkening across her brown skin. The pulse. The way her body leans toward me a fraction of an inch before she catches it and pulls it back.
"Lady Moreau," I say. "I don't believe we've been introduced. I am Ignatius Pyrion."
"Your Majesty." Her voice is level. Her pupils are blown wide. "It's an honor to attend your court."
"The honor is mine. You've traveled far from the eastern territories. For a festival."
"The Ember Court's protection is worth the travel."
