Page 85 of FoolSilver
And now it was the Fae heir who held his breath.
I exhaled slowly. The guilt that had ridden me the whole way here was gone, and a quiet rightness had slid into the space it vacated. For the first time, the shape of this settled in me without argument.
The thought of having all of them—all three, at least—should have frightened me, or at least worried me. And beneath it, unbidden, the thought of leaving even one of them out caused a gnawing ache.
“I know it’s too much at once,” he said. “We should have prepared you better. But with the war on our doorstep?—”
“I don’t need you to coddle me.”
“No.” A ghost of a smile appeared on his lips. “But the last thing I want is to press you. Take all the time you need. Reject any of us. Reject all of us.” A pause. “Refuse me, Max, and I will still feel exactly as I feel now. Always. And without end.”
There it was in his impossible blue eyes, a deep, ancient sorrow at the very edge of them, conjured by nothing but the possibility that I might turn him away. It cracked my heart to see it.
“I have waited for you a very long time, Max.”
The words rang with the weight of truth, and that truth set up an answering beat under my ribs. An ache that didn’t come from fear but searing need.
I leaned in to kiss him, hands going to his clothes, clumsy and frantic, trying to get them off him all at once. His hands helped me finish. When I broke away gasping, I put my mouth close to his ear, and he shivered as my breath warmed his skin.
“F—” The word stuck. “Take me.”
I’d read it in that book—the one Drakken caught me with, two chapters before he ruined the whole thing—where the heroine looked the male lead dead in the eye and saidfuck melike a command, like it was hers by right. I’d wanted to say it exactly like that. But this was Aelindor, and this was me, and that version wouldn’t come.
Lust flared hot in his eyes anyway. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said. “But I intend to take my time with you.”
I shivered, and not only from his purr. There was nothing between us now but naked heat and cold silver light from the window. My gaze moved over him, and he let me look.
He was built like a god from the old legends. All hard muscle earned by centuries of sword work, faint scars silvering his smooth skin. His hair caught the moonlight and pooled past his shoulders like spun metal. My gaze dipped lower—and there it was.
I couldn’t look away from the size of him, the thick, heavy length of him jutting toward me, and something in me clenched—half want, halfhow is that going to fit—and only made me wetter.
My mouth went dry. Every nerve in my body lit at the sight of him, my core throbbing with the need to be filled.
Still, he didn’t take me to the bed.
He started at my throat, his lips cool against my pulse, and his mouth curved against my skinwhen my breath caught. His palms moved over me like a man taking inventory of something he’d waited too long to touch. The plane of my stomach. The curve of my waist. When his hands closed over my breasts,he looked at them the way he looked at rare things: with full attention, as if nothing else in the world existed. Then he lowered his head and took one into his mouth, and I stopped being able to think at all. His tongue circled my nipple until it ached, and when his teeth grazed the peak,I made an unholy sound.
He did it again, harder. My fingers twisted in his silver hair and held him there.
His hand slid down my stomach and between my thighs, where I was already wet for him—embarrassingly, desperately wet—and the sound he made when he found it, low and raw and hungry, hit me somewhere behind the sternum. He stroked me,coaxing—gasp by gasp—until I was gripping his shoulders hard enough to leave marks, my hips chasing his hand for more.
“Look at me,” he commanded.
His eyes had gone dark with searing lust, and watching me come apart was doing something to him—I could see it, feel it where he pressed hard and heavy against my hip.
He worked his way down my body,mouth dragging heat across every inch of skin, until he knelt before me in the moonlight like something out of a fever dream—and put his mouth on my pussy.
I was done holding back sound.
He was thorough. Ruthlessly attentive in a way that made Nikolai’s considerable skill feel like a preface to a book I hadn’t known existed. He learned exactly what undid me and stayed there, tongue working me until my knees threatened to give.
I trembled, fingers twisted hard in his silver hair, hips rolling against his mouth without my permission, chasing the pleasure he parceled out one stroke at a time.
“Please,” I managed.
He pulled back just enough to look up at me, his mouth slick with my arousal, his eyes molten. “Please what, love?”
“I don’t know. I can’t stand straight.”
