Page 25 of The Court the Fae Forgot
I saw no sign of the mill, its stone walls usually visible between the shifting leaves. Nor did I hear the turning of its wheel, in its place, only the sound of my own racing heartbeat.
“Yes,” I answered, despite my spinning mind. I sought out familiar trees, branches, anything that would connect me to the forest I was so familiar with.
“Why then …” he asked, leaning forward so that his long, black hair brushed across my shoulder, “do your thoughts tell me otherwise?”
Only when I focused my thoughts on him, on his hands on my body, on the feather-light brush of his hair on my skin, did the world around me begin to calm. The spinning, shifting forest solidified around us once again, a dark backdrop to match this dark fae.
“How do you know my thoughts?”
“You’re in my forest,” the fae whispered, his lips drawing close to the exposed skin of my neck. He didn’t quite let his lips touch me, but the hot breath of each one of his carefully chosen words was close enough to leave a warm trail in their wake.
“You let the Wildness in again. You letmein again.”
He leaned in closer, this time allowing his lips to press against my skin—if only for a second. In that second, however, it was as if my body alit with fire. It warmed me from within, heating my core with a feeling I didn’t know my body possessed the power to feel. A spark passed between us, a moment I knew we both shared, because I heard his breath hitch slightly, a sound that only served to steal my own.
“It was your thoughts that drew me to you,” he said, voice smooth and sweet as golden honey. “Interesting thoughts, the kind of thoughts I cantaste.Fear. Fury. Dread. All for a man you do not wish to take into your bed.”
Heat flooded my body again, but not for thoughts of the man Ididn’twant in my bed.
The fae’s hand began to move up from where it held me still. His fingers traced along the line of my shoulder, curling upward until they reached the hollow of my collarbone. He splayed his hand there, one finger wrapping around the side of my neck while the rest spread out to tease the deepening neckline of my bodice.
Somehow the laces had begun to come undone, the kirtle slipping low enough to reveal the upper swell of my breasts.
“What I wish has little to do with me,” I said, fighting to keep away any thoughts of Rayner in my bed. It wasn’t so difficult, however, not with the way my skin now tingled with every minute movement of the fae’s hand around my neck. It was far harder to keep flashes of what it would be like to takehimto my bed from my mind.
Even if I knew very little of what that actually entailed, my body certainly reacted as ifitdid.
“Is that so?” the fae asked, as if he instantly knew my most recent thoughts, the same thoughts that had flooded my skin with fire as soon as they were conceived. “You really think you’re not the master of your own fate?”
“You speak of fate like you know her. What do you know of myfate?”
I spat the word out with all the vitriol it deserved. Fate, whether or not I believed in it, had not been kind to me of late.
A dark chuckle rumbled through him and into me. He pulled me tighter until I was flush against him, until I could feel every hard muscle of his body—a body reacting, if the hard length of his manhood now pressing into my back was any indicator—the same way mine was.
My thighs tightened, pressing together as if they could squeeze out the ache that had started to build between them.
He, in turn, pressed his lips to the place behind my hear, to whisper his response.
“Iamfate.”
“More importantly so …” he added, before I could respond, his hand tightening until it wrapped around my neck entirely, “I amyourfate.”
Spoken by any other, under any other circumstances, the very thought of what this fae said would have been ridiculous. Impossible. Outrageous.
But there was nothing so ridiculous as the hands that held me tighter, each breath I drew shakier than the last as I fought the urge to press myself further into him. There was nothing so impossible as the way my body yearned for him in a way I’d never yearned for anything, let aloneanyone.There was nothing so outrageous as the thoughts that ran rampant and wild as the faerie forest around me, refusing to be tamed in even the depths of my own mind.
“And how do you know that?” I asked, at last.
His hand tightened around my neck as he bent his head to rest against the top of my own, his lungs expanding as he drew in an endless breath ofme.“I can scent it on you.”
“Scent—”
The question was yanked from my lungs as the fae suddenly spun me to face him, the jerking motion causing my hair to fall from its pins so that it cascaded down over my shoulders in loose waves. I was suddenly face to face with this creature of the darkness, his hands digging deep into the hair at the back of my neck so as to force my head up to look him in the eye.
As if I could look away if I tried.
“The moment we met in my forest our fates were bound, Lost One,” he answered, something deep and feral rumbling through him once again. “You and I, we are lost together. But together, we can be found. We can find a way out of this cage, this darkness of our fates, together.”
