Page 51 of Curse the Fae

No leggings. Nothing but the mantle.

My eyes goggle. I swerve away, shielding my eyes before the garment ripples to the ground. While my pulse drums in my wrist, I listen to the thunk of his retreating feet. Once he’s put enough distance between us, my will takes on a life of its own and does something unforgivable. I tilt my head, split my fingers, and peek through the digits.

At first, I watch him trace the condensation. He follows the mist, using the fog like a path that guides him to a lower-level pool, where an emerald cascade topples down rocks and plunges into the water. As he approaches the ledge, my gaze trips over the plates of his shoulder blades, down the ladder of his spine, the muscles of his lower back, the taper of his waist, and…

And the swells of his backside. They’re smooth and firm, the dimples flexing, the concave shadows shifting with Elixir’s strides.

My flesh boils, my stomach flops, and the slit of my thighs aches. Worse, my attention fails to stray from his buttocks, from the way it contorts with his movements, which calls to mind how it might snap between a female’s spread legs, his hips slinging in and out in a sinuous rhythm.

Elixir halts at the pool’s edge. Slowly, his head lifts in my direction but doesn’t fully turn my way. Still, it’s enough to catch his profile—the keen awareness, which causes his irises to hurl gold at the water.

Instantly, his jaw locks. He knows what I’m looking at, and he knows how my body has reacted. The admiration of a human must repel him, as it does all Faeries apart from satyrs. My face scalds with humiliation and annoyance. I huff audibly and chastely to illustrate it has nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with discretion.

The moment I swivel from the view, I hear him exhale and slosh into the whirlpool. So, that’s what he’s doing in The Mer Cascades. Elixir intends to bathe as well.

Although the swim here had rinsed off most of the gunk, bits of dirt adhere to my scalp and encrust my fingernails. Plus, the memory alone of the swamps festering beyond the archways makes me feel soiled. I suppose if I’d inspected him more closely, and more platonically, I would have noticed Elixir’s own ravaged state.

I consider my options. While the showering alcoves draw my interest—no such things exist where I’m from—I imagine Elixir listening to the downpour sluice over my skin, to the point where he’d make out the water’s path around my curves, the deluge outlining my breasts and thighs. From that, he would know the shape of my body.

The prospect also causes a tendril of warmth to unfurl in my womb. I shake it off and pad around a corner. A set of steps etched into a wall spirals to an upper-level pool and a miniature waterfall of rich cobalt. Once there, I peek over the ridge, down to Elixir’s bath.

The Fae reclines in the frothing basin with a groan. His glorious back faces me, and his biceps splay on either side of him, resting along the ledge. I discern the viper tail, which has replaced his limbs.

Confining myself to my own niche, I prop my weapon beside the stair landing, peel off the sodden caftan, and discard it to the floor. Several times, I instruct myself not to think about Elixir below. Even if this high edifice weren’t separating us, and even if we weren’t situated at different heights, it wouldn’t matter.

He knows the emotions in my voice, in my breaths, in my blood, in my temperature, and in my movements. But he can’t see my nudity. He can’t see. He cannot.

I wade into the pool. The moment my soles plunge, the water churns and bubbles around me. I submerge myself and muffle a sigh while the temperature and pressure massage my joints. A crescent shaped bench lines the underwater perimeter, the seat carved from stone. I settle in, the hot bath dousing my shoulders and loosening the kinks. A crisp, aquatic sent I can’t identify mingles with the essence of florals, the combination imbued into the mist, so that it reinvigorates my senses.

The foaming bath absorbs the grime from today’s battle, the muck vanishing into nothing, as if I’d been unsoiled before entering. Amazed, I dunk my head under, then come up with cleansed hair. My intricate bun has long since unraveled. After combing my fingers through the teal strands, I melt into the pool. My body goes limp…until I hear him.

A masculine hum drones from below, deep and rustling. I’ve not heard this anomaly before, the sound of him satisfied. Nor have I ever beenin the nudewhile keeping company with a male.

My limbs steeple. I strap my arms around them and curl myself in like a snail while listening to the echoes of the Fae beneath me. His faint movements disturb the water, the commotion louder than it should be amidst the cascades.

Against my will, I think of him scrubbing his flesh. I think of those fingers rubbing his skin, kneading it.

After a beat, I unfold myself and sneak to the ledge like a critter, my eyes popping over the side. The vision stalls my next exhalation.

He hasn’t turned around, but he’s leaning back far enough that he doesn’t need to. His skull lolls against the foundation, and his tail extends. Elixir is so tall that while sitting on his own bench, the water only reaches his waist.

His eyelids are closed, his dark lashes fanning out. Sprawled like that, he resembles a sea king or a marine warrior luxuriating in a moment of pleasure, less than an hour after ripping the ocean in half.

One lazy palm drags over his abdomen. With each pass, my stomach flutters, feeling his touch there. When his free hand circles in the air, a slender cord of water plummets from an overhead crevice, and he rolls his head forward, so the surge beats against his nape. Then he flings his head back, the long layers whipping behind him, and he scrubs his digits through the roots.

Trapped by the sight, I watch what this does to his muscled arms and the grid of his torso. Then I watch the torrent reduce to a trickle before drying like an emptied pump.

And then I watch his eyes flap open in awareness.

I duck. Except I do so without finesse, my haste roiling the bath and chucking water over the side. The motions also aggravate my welts, so that I make another pained squeak, the racket giving me away more than anything. If I had stayed still, he might not have detected me being sneaky.

“I know what you were doing, mortal,” Elixir calls out. “Why do you stare at me?”

Condemnation! With a groan, I curl my fingers atop the rim and poke my head over the side. He has withdrawn from the cascade, turned in my direction, and is presently cranking his head toward my voice.

“Was I staring?” I query.

“I heard the water molding itself around you, fluctuating with your motions.”

---