Page 75 of Tempt

That’s not all. They like to stun one another.

One afternoon, she’s studious and diligent at a table when someone’s head nudges her knees apart beneath the furnishing. Wonder tenses in shock—and then she squeezes the chronicle she’d been researching, as Malice sidles under her pine-colored gown and slips between her thighs. His curls tickle her skin, and his curious tongue flicks into a valley of sensation, and Wonder is gone. Automatically, her legs hook over his shoulders and droop across his back, and she grips the chronicle, its contents spread open to the ceiling—just like her.

Wonder’s spine curls, her head flinging back, her mouth uncontrollable. The chair creaks, and it’s too loud in this hall, but nowhere near as loud as she.

By the time Malice is done with her, she’s wheezing, and his gleaming eyes surface from under the table.

She plots revenge, sneaking up on him later, in very much the same manner, her knees burrowing into the floor’s plush runner. Malice is scanning a journal, but the page-turning ceases once she grabs ahold of his jean buttons. He drops the book, the hardback hitting wood with a boom. She hears a speechless gulp, which grates into something feral the instant her lips find purchase. He tastes immoral, and it’s as though she feels what he’s feeling, understands the high-pitched groans. Amazed, delirious, she encourages him with each lap of her tongue, each mouthful of pressure around him.

The intoxication prevails in multiple areas of the Hollow Chamber, plus a few in the Archives. Yet they rarely feel sated. There’s too much to learn and discover with their bodies.

It’s a novel form of tutelage. His filthy vocabulary enhances their antics, but it never veers into lewd territory. Rather, it’s enticing, naughty how Malice recites what he plans on doing to do to her. It’s attractive how easily she silences him by taking his lips, splitting him wide and coiling her tongue with his. She’d never imagined herself capable of this, never perceived joining with someone like this, wild and wandering through the halls, exposed to danger and hidden from it.

They shouldn’t be doing this.

They shouldn’t be doing anything else.

Their escapades lead to snippets of affection. Malice takes her hand and laces their fingers as they walk down a stairwell. Wonder brushes her palm across the small of his back as she passes him. These random strokes of intimacy, touches and kisses and lovemaking, slip between the cracks of their mission.

However, their bouts of intimacy don’t override their dedication. If anything, these dalliances enhance productivity.

When he can’t find a book, she procures it for him.

When she can’t remember a fact, he reminds her.

When one of them locates a potential detail that might explain why Malice was reincarnated—how exactly had it happened? why did the stars allow it to happen?—they inform the other.

Unmistakably, the Fate Court hadn’t known about Malice’s past life. Otherwise, they would have banished him earlier, for that reason alone. To their kind, humans are inferior. Not to Wonder, Malice, or her friends, but to many others. Even if Malice is no longer mortal, his rulers would have seen his existence an insult, an accident of birth. Unless the stars commanded the Court otherwise, they would have tossed Malice from the Peaks without a second thought.

Malice and Wonder alternate between finding answers for him and answers for her. When they each have a theory about fate and free will, about deities and humans, about life and death, they compare notes. Historical accounts of their culture, analyses of combat, the strengths and weakness of immortality and mortality, their union with the stars, and maps of the Peaks.

Most of it, they already know and seek to review, in case they’ve missed a sliver of information during their upbringing. And some of it reveals hidden gems, such as techniques for targeting, the essence of compromise, and the choreography of negotiation.

But there’s a loophole missing, a key ingredient they’ve yet to sniff out.

Their days are comprised of gasps and quarrels and debates and chuckles. Wonder meditates, Malice breaks something in a fit of frustration. She drifts off, he calculates. She chides, he gets sarcastic. She puts him in his place, he makes her guffaw.

They hike into the Chamber’s abyss. They resurface, scouring the Archives. They come up for air, practicing archery in the forest or making each other climax against a tree.

And always, always, always they have something to say to each other.

***

She whines while rigged against the balustrade overlooking the acquisitions quarter, her backside rolling into Malice’s groin.

He bites the bell of her earlobe. “Like that?” he inquires, oxygen puffing from his lips and sliding across her nape.

To emphasize, he slants his movements at such an incline that Wonder goes breathless. “Like that,” she verifies, her thighs inching farther apart to accommodate each entry and withdrawal.

From behind, he brackets Wonder in, his arms flanking hers while grinding. His knuckles flex at either side of her hands, both of their grips choking the railing. The tempo of their bodies agonizes her, a prolonged exploration when it’s usually a passionate rush, as though they’ll run out of arousal or lose hold of each other any second—as though such rhapsody will never occur again. Their hips revolve into figure eights, pacing themselves and taking the conscious approach, searching one another like enigmas, gathering knowledge with every thrust.

Him, filling her. Her, surrounding him.

Planting her right heel on the balustrade’s lower rung enables him to vary the penetration, striking delicate areas that make her chant, her voice shivering across the repository. His torso rubs her spine, and her head lolls against his collarbones, her breasts pushing upward.

He murmurs, “Look at you, so happy. Can I make you happier? Hmm?”

In spite of the confident words, Malice is on tenterhooks for the answer. He likes being instructed, likes questing inside her, pulling these sounds from her.

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