Page 65 of Beyond Those Gilded Walls

Her finger prodded him in the chest. “You are going to get herkilled.”

Both Tallon and I were struck still by her words, by her bravery to approach him directly. He looked over her head at me only for a moment before focusing his attention on the woman in front of him.

“I assure you, I have a vested interest in exactly the opposite.” His voice was smooth—Eadric’s Tallon was speaking now.

“You should know better,” she hissed. “Leave her alone before you get her killed.”

“I believe who she keeps company with is entirely up to Odyssa,” he replied. While his voice was still that smoky silk, I saw his eyes when he pulled the mask down for just a moment. To let her see the real him. She stiffened at the glimpse. “But I do admire your courage for confronting me. I shall take your words under advisement and I assure you I will do whatever I need to protect Odyssa.”

“See that you do,” she said. Without a backward glance at me, she stalked down the hall that would take her to our rooms.

Before me now was just Tallon, smirking after Zaharya. “I quite like her, I think.”

“Yes, I think I do too,” I admitted.

We both watched until she turned the corner and disappeared from our view.

“Are you finished, then?” he asked, pushing off the wall. He fell into step beside me and nodded down at my feet. “Sylviana has been complaining about missing you.”

“Was she now?” I looked down at the Soulshade cat and then back at him, a wry smile on my lips. Sylviana had been tucked beneath my dress most of the night, her cold spot comforting against my ankles. “Only her?”

He hummed in affirmation. In one moment he was pulling both our gloves off, and in the next he’d clasped our hands firmly together. I nearly pulled away from the sheer surprise but managed to suppress my reaction. Tallon’s focus was firmly on the halls in front of us, but there was no tension in his shoulders or jaw, no taste of ash on my tongue or any other voices in the hall, so I let my own shoulders relax and squeezed his hand gently.

It was different, certainly, but not entirely unwelcome. His hand engulfed mine, and I felt my cheeks blazing as I remembered what his touch felt like around my waist and at my neck.

Based on the quick glances from the corner of his eye, I was far from the only one feeling the rising tension in the halls as we made our way back to his room. I tried to ignore it, to push it back and remember what I needed to be focusing on, but the burn where our bodies connected had no desire to be dismissed.

Finally, his room was within sight, and I slipped my hand from his, if only to take a moment to compose myself before willingly stepping into his domain. He waved me inside, letting his hand drag a trail of blazing fire across my lower back as I passed. The door shut behind him, and once again I found myself pressed between him and the wall of his entryway.

“I’ve been waiting to do this all night,” he said. Before I could ask, he had one hand weaving into my hair and the other cupping my hip as he tugged me to him and met my lips with his own. It only took me a moment to respond in kind, pushing up on my toes to meet him halfway.

The kiss was hot and slow, as he thoroughly plundered my mouth with his own, pressing me back into the wall and angling my head to take even more control of the kiss as he removed all space between our bodies. His fingers flexed on my hip and I clutched at his sides.

His kiss was consuming, burning me from the inside out, and all I wanted was to get closer to him. A teasing bite to my lip had me gasping, and then he was pulling back, both of us panting as he rested his forehead against mine and slowly untangled his hand from my hair to cup the side of my face instead.

“What was that for?” I asked, my voice hoarse from the fervent experience that was kissing Tallon.

He closed his eyes and groaned softly. When they opened again, they were like quicksilver. “A thank you.”

It took me a moment to register his words, my attention too fixed on the darkness in his eyes and how his lips were slightly swollen. When they did register, my brow furrowed. “Why would you thank me?”

He smiled and let his hands fall away from my body as he stepped back. I mourned the loss of his heat against me and had to press my fingertips back into the cold stone to keep from reaching for him. He pushed his hand through his hair, looking at me with a fond smile I’d never seen on him before. “You stood up for me at the party, to Eadric. It was foolish and you put yourself in entirely too much danger, but I…” He shook his head. “No one has ever done that for me, especially not at their own expense. So thank you.”

And with those words, nearly all the lingering anger from the night before had faded and I wanted nothing more than to burn the castle to the ground for what had been done to him. “You never have to thank me for that.”

“I do, but if I show my thanks the way I truly wanted to, we’d never leave this room. And unfortunately, I have news to share with you that does require us to leave it at some point.”

For a moment, I almost let myself ask him what he truly wanted to do, but the appeal of news on our bargain won out in the end, just as he knew it would, based on the smirk across his lips. I sighed, pushing myself from the wall and moving further into the room to settle in the chair that had quickly become mine. “What news is that?”

Tallon did not follow me to the chairs as he had the past nights, instead choosing to sit on the edge of the bed and stoop to unlace his boots, kicking them haphazardly away. He stretched out on the bed and tucked an arm behind his head, reaching across his body to pat at the space next to him. “Come lie down with me and I will tell you.”

I didn’t even pretend to protest, just removed my own shoes and settled in beside him. He huffed a breath of a laugh and pulled me closer into his side, my head resting on his shoulder. His arms came around me to hold me in place and I couldn’t stop the laugh. “If this is what having no manners gets me, I would hate to see what being polite would do.”

His arms tightened around me and when he spoke, his voice was dark and smoky. “I don’t think you should put the image of you saying ‘please’ in my head right now.”

My body heated and I shifted, pressing myself tighter into his side at the same time as I pressed my thighs closer together. I cleared my throat, trying to distract myself from the images he was painting in my head. “What news do you have, Tallon?”

A tense silence, one that nearly sent us crashing even further into each other, reigned for just a heartbeat more before he sighed. “Eadric will be out of his study at midday. That will be our only chance with any certainty to enter anytime in the near future.”

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