Page 96 of The Book That Held Her Heart

Livira smiled a slow smile and continued, with her free hand, to clean his wounds. Every place she touched him, the pain ceased. Evar would not have been surprised to angle his gaze down across his chest and discover that each cut had closed behind the passage of her cloth. Instead, he kept his attention on her face, her black eyes, skin still bronzed by the pitiless sun of her childhood, the firm but delicate line of her jaw, the slight asymmetry of her nose, as if it might once have been broken and reset.

Livira, realising herself to be under study, paused and returned his interest with a bold stare. “You don’t look so big lying down.”

“You don’t look so small up there.” He released her wrist and traced a gentle finger from the corner of her eye, following the line of her cheekbone, coming to rest at the side of her mouth.

Without speaking, Livira climbed onto the bed, hitched her nightdressup above her knees, and straddled him, the white fabric straining across her thighs. His hips moved, testing her weight.

“Sorry.” Evar wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for.

He tried to sit up, but Livira pushed him back. Despite her boldness, he could see she was trembling. Fear and desire mixed in equal measure within her scent and lay written less clearly on her face.

Evar might have taken comfort in Livira’s nervousness, knowing her as unsure as himself, but somehow, he just added it to his own, wanting to reassure her, but not knowing how. She might share his own fears, of rejection, of having misread the signs even though they seemed so plain, of discovering humans and canith were more different than either of them had thought, more incompatible.

“I—”

Livira planted her hands to either side of his head, just above his shoulders, and leaned in close, sealing off his question with a kiss. Her breasts grazed his chest, nipples firm through the sheerness of the fabric. Evar wrapped his arms around her, pulling her against him, eliminating any space until her body met his along its whole length. Kissing they had done before. Kissing Evar understood. Their questions were silent ones now, asked tongue to tongue.

Despite their phonetic similarities “consummation” and “consume” share no common linguistic root. And yet in the marriage bed there is considerable overlap.

Bedding Ceremonies, by Prudence Smith

Chapter 43

Livira

Livira had written stories and become lost in them before. She had not always felt that she was the master of those stories, but she had always known that however deep she might plunge into them she would resurface in time.

The story that held her now, though, was something different, something that twisted, changed direction, tried to shed its skin and abandon its past. She had been a princess, though she was far from that. She had been trapped in a tower with no door, though in truth it had been a wasteland that had first trapped her, and it hadn’t been a door she’d needed to leave it, just a push.

A man had come to kill her, but Evar had arrived in blood and fury, and the man had fled into nothingness. Had Evar come to save her, or had she brought him here, written him into her own story?

She had him now, where she had wanted him for the longest time, pinned to her bed by the weight of her body. And it was her body, should she let it, that would write the rest of this story for her. The urgency with which it moved against him knew nothing of the hesitation, awkwardness, and fear that had so often kept her tongue tripping over the easiest of words, skirting around the things she had wanted to say and sidetracking into the pathless wilderness of small talk. Her body knew how this ended. Her hips thrust against him, a stranger to shame, and as she slid down to kiss his chest, her softness pressed against his answering hardness, and herheart’s pounding fluttered, losing momentary tempo. His kisses had undone her.

The knowledge that something wasn’t quite right had been nagging at Livira. The story wanted her to forget things. To accept changes that didn’t make sense. But then Evar had arrived, bloody from his battle with the thorns, and suddenly the rest of it had ceased to matter. The world owed them this moment. The world that had held them apart could now pay off its debt if only it would take itself away for a short time, look away an hour, for a few hours, look the other way and let them be, let them at least reach for happiness. Look away and let them find the comfort and haven of each other’s arms.

Look away.

“It’s a goodthing this tower doesn’t have any doors.” Livira returned to the bed, tossing aside the cloth with which she’d cleaned herself.

Evar lifted his arm and she laid her head on his chest. He had, she now noticed, six nipples, the top pair most like a man’s, the lower two pairs hardly noticeable. But she was now in a mood for noticing the small things about him, having dealt with the big ones.

“Why is that a good thing?” Evar murmured sleepily.

“Imagine if someone came calling.” Livira’s research and earlier worries had proved to be half-right. Towards the height of their union, it felt as if they had become physically locked together. A state that would make answering the door, or even leaving the bed, impossible. In many ways she had liked it, after the initial surprise. The physical fact carried with it an idea of being bound together, of being a single entity, both parties committed to the act, neither going anywhere until a conclusion had been reached.

Livira hugged him, more comfortable and more relaxed than she could ever remember. It had been more than she had expected. More intense and emotional. More physical. More exhausting. And entirely more wonderful. When he had finally left her it felt like losing some vital part. “I wish this—”

“—would last forever.” Evar squeezed her gently and knowing what a tiny fraction of his strength lay within the action somehow made it all the more tender.

“But we need to leave.” Livira frowned as she found the unwelcome words in her mouth.

“We do?”

“The others need us.”

“Others?” Evar echoed her as though the concept were foreign to him, as if she and he were the whole of the world, and the room was all of space, this moment all of time.

“Others.” She wanted to join him in that abandoning of everything that was neither here nor now, but some iron at her core refused to bend to the story’s will. She couldn’t even name the others, but she could still name the word that tied her to them: “love.”

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