A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire

I lay there frozen, my breath in my throat. My breasts were pressed against the side of his body. One of his thighs was tucked between mine, the soft buckskin of his breeches nestled against a very, very intimate part of me. The robe had parted below the sash in my sleep. There was nothing between his palm and my skin, and that hand spanned my hip, the tips of his fingers resting against the curve of my rear.

A sweet, hot feeling swept over me, and my eyes drifted shut. I knew I shouldn’t feel this. It was reckless and stupid and felt oh so dangerous. Instead of basking in how his body felt against mine, I should be plotting a way to somehow extract myself from him without waking him up, but my brain went in a totally different direction. It was almost like I could…pretend again. That this was okay. That Hawke was holding me in his sleep, and that this was just one of many mornings we woke up like this. He’d kiss me and touch me, fitting our bodies together, and this would happen because we were lovers about to marry for no reason other than the fact that we wanted and desired and needed each other. My breath caught again, and my pulse quickened. Heated lightning danced over my skin and zipped through my veins. I could almost imagine the hand on my hip slipping more to my behind and then lower still. Those fingers of his were capable of eliciting sensations I hadn’t even known were possible, not even after reading the scandalous diary of Miss Willa Colyns. My entire world concentrated on the memory of his fingers skimming over the sensitive skin of my inner thighs and then slipping inside me. A throbbing ache settled in my core, and a tiny part of me wished I had never experienced such pleasure at his hands. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t want this now, but that was only a small part. The rest couldn’t regret experiencing something so powerful and beautiful when I’d spent most of my life being forbidden to know what pleasure felt like.

But I shouldn’t be thinking about this—about what it had been like for him and me, and how he made me feel even now. Because in the early morning hours, when it was just me, I could admit that what he elicited from me went beyond the physical.

It didn’t seem to matter that I really shouldn’t desire any of this, but my body didn’t care about what was right and wrong. I still shivered with need as my toes curled.

Casteel shifted against me, and my heart seemed to stop in my chest. He was asleep, but could he still…sense my desire? His arm tightened, pulling me more firmly against him. His thigh pressed against the apex of mine. A shocking, aching pulse ricocheted through me in hot, tight waves. Suddenly, even my brain betrayed me. I was bombarded with images and sensations—the wicked memory of his mouth nuzzling my neck, the slide and scrape of sharp teeth, and the burst of pain that had so quickly turned into intense pleasure. There was a wildfire in my blood, pooling in my core. In the furthest reaches of my mind, I knew this was the slippery slope I feared would come with this…arrangement of ours. Sharing a bed. Pretending to be…in love. Touching and kissing. Pretending…

Pretending I already wasn’t slipping down that slope.

His arm loosened, but I was still pressed against him, my heart pounding so fast I would be surprised if he didn’t feel it. Was he still asleep? Each breath I took scorched my lungs as I carefully lifted my cheek.

His head was turned slightly away from me. A tumble of dark waves falling over his forehead. The line of his brow and the curve of his jaw were relaxed. Thick lashes shielded his eyes, and his lips were parted as his chest continued to rise and fall in deep, steady breaths.

Unable to look away, I was snared by how peaceful Casteel appeared while asleep, how young and vulnerable. Seeing him like this, I never would’ve guessed that he was over two hundred years old or that he was capable of such feral, deadly action.

My gaze drifted over his features, settling on his full mouth. I should’ve known the first time I saw him that he wasn’t mortal. No one looked like him. At least no one from the Kingdom of Solis, including even the most beautiful Ascended. Why had he wanted me? Why did he still want me? But the night he’d help replace the panic and fear from the nightmare with something good, something wanted, he hadn’t sought any pleasure for himself. Did that mean he didn’t want that…from me any longer?

Those questions didn’t come from the niggle of insecurity that I did everything to keep hidden, but simply from pure logic. I knew what half of me looked like. I knew how people saw the other half. Many wouldn’t consider me undeniably attractive even though I had heard people claim that attraction didn’t always stem from the physical. But I wasn’t sure if that was true. It wasn’t like I had a lot of experience with such things. Queen Ileana had once told me that beauty was more than straight, smooth lines as she showed me the Star, a diamond highly coveted throughout the Kingdom for its rarity and luminous, silver appearance.

“The most beautiful things in all the kingdom often have jagged and uneven lines, scars which intensify the beauty in intricate ways our eyes nor our minds can detect or even begin to understand,” the Queen had said as she turned the diamond in her hand, light catching on its irregular dips and peaks. “Without them, they would just be common and ordinary, like all the other smoothly cut diamonds you can find anywhere you look. Beauty, my sweet child, is often broken and barbed, and always unexpected."

I wasn’t sure if what she said held true for people. It didn’t seem that way, because Casteel was all smooth, straight lines, and he was magnificent.

Why he wanted me or how he could when there were others with equally smooth, straight lines didn’t matter. What did was the fact that I was staring at him while he slept, and that was borderline creepy.

Tugging my gaze away, I bit down on my lip as I decided that this would very much be like ripping a bandage from a wound. I would need to just move. Do it fast and well, and hope that he didn’t wake until I fixed the stupid robe or before he realized I was sleeping on him. I started to pull away—

Without any warning, Casteel moved. There was no time to even respond. He was shockingly fast as he rolled me under him, a hand curled around my throat. I gasped in shock.

Casteel’s eyes were so dilated that only a thin strip of amber shone as his lips peeled back, revealing sharp, slightly elongated fangs. A low, feral growl of warning rumbled out of him and vibrated through me.

“Casteel!” I forced out around the hold on my throat. “What is wrong with you?”

The grip on my neck tightened, forcing a harsh breath out of me. Instinct took over, breaking through the coating of surprise as I swung at him with my fist, fully planning to bring it down on his arm, breaking his hold on me. It never happened.

He caught my hand, thrusting it down to the bed. I strained against him, but his hand was like a band of steel. Lifting my left hand, I sank my fingers into his hair and pulled hard, jerking his head back. “Let go of me!”

The sound that came from him sent goosebumps rushing across my skin as he easily resisted, leveling his head once more.

There was no visible amber to his eyes now, and the way he looked at me was like…like he had no idea who I was. As if he didn’t see me.

My heart stopped. Something…something wasn’t right. “Casteel?”

The only answer was a snarl that reminded me of a very large, cornered wild animal as those nearly black eyes moved down the length of me. He didn’t seem to recognize his name or me.

At once, I remembered what he’d told me. He had nightmares, and sometimes when he woke, he didn’t know where he was. That had to be what was happening here.

I willed my heart to steady. “Casteel, it’s me—”

The rumbling warning came once more. His nostrils flared as he inhaled sharply. Modesty be damned. I didn’t care that everything from the waist down was clearly visible because of a nightmare or something else, whatever was going on, it had a grip on him. I had a horrible suspicion that I was seconds away from turning into breakfast.

Remembering the dagger I’d placed under the pillow, I reached behind me, grasping the handle as Casteel shifted above me, his hand leaving my throat to curl around my hip—

Shock splashed through me as I felt the curve of his chin against my lower stomach. Oh, gods, what was he doing? I snatched up the blade, sitting up as far as I could with one hand still pinned to the bed by his. I pressed the dagger against his neck.

He seemed completely unaware as warm breath danced lower. Tension clamped down on my chest, and coiled even lower—unexpectedly and crazily. Because he was—

Oh, gods.

It didn’t matter what I thought. Neither did the indecent throbbing echoing from within me or the way my entire body seemed to clench tightly as his breath neared the space between my thighs. Another growl came from the back of his throat, this one different, deeper and coarser.

“I don’t know what is wrong with you, Casteel, but you need to let go of me.” I put pressure on his throat with the blade. “Or we will find out what happens to an Atlantian when their throat is cut.”

That seemed to catch his attention because he stilled and lifted his gaze. Those all-black eyes shook me. I willed my hand to stay steady. I knew if he decided to strike, there’d be very little I could do to stop him. I could make him bleed if given the chance, maybe even worse. “Get off me,” I ordered. “Now.”

He was incredibly still as he stared down at me, like a predator who had sighted its prey and was about to pounce. I tensed as my gift came alive, spilling out from me in the way it did when I was in a crowd of heightened emotions. There was no stopping it. The connection was made, and his feelings rushed through me in a wave of…gnawing darkness and insatiable hunger. The kind I had experienced myself on more than one occasion when Duke Teerman was disappointed with something I did or didn’t do and I was denied food until I learned to do better. The longest had been three days, and that hunger had been the kind that twisted up the insides in painful need. That wasn’t the only thing I felt. Under the feeling of utter emptiness was a lush, dark spice coating my mouth and stoking the banked flames inside me.     PrevNextTip: You can use left and right keyboard keys to browse between pages.

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