He pulled her up to the tips of her toes, and her eyes prickled at all that big, warm Tor safety. Finally.
He buried his nose in her neck, breathing in deeply… and froze. “You washed off my mark.” He dropped her to the floor so hard she winced as her raw feet met hard stone. Hard fingers wrapped around her wrists, pulling them from around his neck.
He shook her hands away and stepped back. “Up the stairs, Klym.”
What happened to amiera? Abellina? She put her hand on the banister and took a few steps up, but he didn’t follow.
“Now.” His eyes narrowed to points. “Before anyone smells you.”
“Alone?”
He was already gone.
SHE WOKE WITH A LURCH to find him standing by the door, dressed in a dark togata, armored plates over his chest, calves and forearms. Holsters clung on each of his shoulders, sword and ax and knife on a low belt across his hips. His hair was back in a tight bun.
Pale light slanted across the room, and he was dressed for war.
There was no depression on the pillow beside hers. She’d come up and bandaged her feet and fallen promptly to sleep, but never heard him come in.
She bolted upright. “Where did you sleep?”
“I didn’t. I spent the night in the city with the armies, cleaning up after the riot. Go back to sleep, Klymeni.”
She swallowed. “You never call me that. Why now? What happened to amiera?”
He shifted, and his leather creaked. “Go back to sleep, amiera.”
She wrapped her arms around her knees. It wasn’t the right amiera. The inflection was off, the purr on the r was missing. Instead it was hard. Like it had been back on the ship on Araa-Ara, and he was saying it like she was useless and stupid again. “Where are you going?”
“After yesterday, the armies need to see me fight. I’ll be gone for a couple days.” He yanked open the door.
She threw herself off the bed and yelped, because her feet hurt, but got her palm in the flat, broad face of the door and slammed it shut. “You can’t leave.”
“I can. I am.”
“But… but…” She looked around desperately. “Y-y-you need to mark me. You had three rules by the way. Not two. Three. And that was one of them.”
He made an ugly sound in his throat. “And yet you broke that one too.”
“But I don’t want to break it again.”
In the pale morning light, the pearly orbs in his dark eyes honed in on her. “So now you want me to mark you.”
She swallowed thickly. Of course, the minute she wanted something from him, he’d resist. “I do.”
He shoved the door shut and took a step toward her, his boots scuffing on the peachstone floor.
She licked her lips. “Are you going to spank me?”
He threw his duffel, and it landed with a dull, metallic thud. “Do you want that?”
Normally, he was head and shoulders taller than her, but today, in his boots, fully dressed, with all his armor and weapons, and she in nothing but the bandages on her feet, he positively dwarfed her. A massive hand closed around her throat, backing her up to the wall. His callused thumb traced up and down.
“Would it make you stop being angry?” she asked.
The dimple flashed. Not a happy dimple. Not a happy dimple at all. “No. Get on your knees.”
Heart pounding in her throat, she dropped down to the floor. No spanking, then.
The scent of machine oil and leather and Tor rose around her like a spell. Birds chirped on the terrace, but they were drowned out by the frenetic pounding of her own heart.
Moving at half-speed, staring at her with dark, gleaming eyes, he touched the pad of his thumb to her mouth. Dragging down until her lower lip dropped open, he stroked along the wet inside of her lip, and she tasted the salt of his skin. “I’m not going to spank you, Klym.”
She lifted heavy lids to find his eyes and sucked his thumb into her mouth, traced her tongue along the hard striations of his fingerprint.
He inhaled long and sharp—maybe she smelled like heaven to him too. Down here, so close to his shaft, it was stronger, the woody, spicy musk that called to the fibers of her bones and made her burn.
The shadows at the corners of his mouth deepened. The pads of his fingers tightened on the back of her scalp, and he pressed his thumb deeper, dragging it along her tongue.
She may be inexperienced, but there was nothing wrong with her imagination, and she’d imagined him doing that very thing with his cock, understood on some deep, primal level that he wanted to do it too. He may not spank her, but there were hundreds of other things he could do.
Liquid heat pooled between her thighs. He didn’t push back hard enough to make her gag, but he came close, his thumb stretching back, and she opened for him, just stared back at him, trusting him, willing to let him take whatever he wanted.
“You broke the terms of our deal, Klymeni.” His voice was raw and rough. In that moment, he was exactly like her first image of him. As cold and hard as the ancient carved statues. “By your own agreement, I could fuck you now and never let you go.”
She nodded. She’d awaited it all last night, in a potent mixture of dread and hope.
His thumb still stroking up and down her tongue, her heart pounding so hard she nearly rocked on her knees, she rested her shaking hands on his bare thighs, slid them up hard muscles, over crinkly hair, to the bare skin of his sack.
He dropped his head back and groaned, pulling at the togata, tucking it into his belt and out of the way. She palmed the heavy weight of his shaft in her hand, stroked its silky-smooth surface.
His eyes were unreadable, his shoulders were heaving. She moved up, wanting to take him in her mouth, feel
