Page 71 of The Crimson Princess
Chapter twenty-nine
Shellshockedisanunderstatement.
I stand at the window and stare out at the city without seeing it, the implications of Toren leaving me here alone sweeping, as are the details of the intel. My father really intends to marry me off to Bellar. It’s not for show and I feel as if I am nothing to him, and yet, Ravengale is my home to protect. It’s hard to get my head around where this leaves me, or even to understand what comes next. If I were in the human realm, I’d go kill some creatures from Third World to blow off steam and calm down. If I were in Ravengale, I’d head to the forest and kill another damn werewolf or ten, just to prove they can’t take me down again.
Just to dosomething.
Instead, I’m forced to pace, my mind in wicked disarray. Have Toren and I become official enemies? I don’t want to be his enemy. How are we to face Toren’s brother with him as an enemy? Does my father really plan to use Toren and turn on him again? I don’t know what is happening. I need to talk to my father, but how do I do that, and not risk placing Toren in danger? No wonder he doesn’t want me to hear his plan of action. And the druids ultimately want to get close to the book and end my father.
Why can’t he see this?
I’m losing my mind, and there is nothing I can do to end my turmoil, not now. Not here. After too much pacing and too little results from it, I decide I need to read. Maybe somewhere in the ancient text something will click with me, some answer will cometo me. With effort to still my energy, I force myself to sit in the chair by the fireplace, and reach for the Codex, opening the cover, turning pages. Hours pass, and I discover nuggets of information I find interesting, but no answer to all my problems. When my eyes are weary and my body tired, and Toren has been gone too long, I set the book aside and face the truth. He might not come home tonight and tomorrow morning I may be sent back to enemy camp.
And it guts me.
It hits me then with bitter coldness that Toren has shown me many things and yet nothing at all. Is this his version of a castle? Surely not. The royal bloodlines and ancient processes stretch before even his time. He must have a castle and a throne, but he’s chosen to keep me far away from those things.
He doesn’t trust me.
Perhaps I shouldn’t trust him, and yet, I still blink myself upstairs to seek out his bedroom, his sanctuary. I end up in a room as magnificent as every other room I’ve visited in his homes. The bed sits against a wall of intricately carved stone, surrounded by windows, always so many windows, the city seeming to float around me. The air is chilly, and I use my magic to light the fireplace, simple magic I’d mastered long before twenty-three. There’s a couch in front of the window, and I head that direction. Somehow sleeping in the bed feels inappropriate. What king wants the enemy in his bed?
The cushion is comfortable, and I lay down across it, using the pillow already present but I lex my own fluffy blanket. I wonder if Toren will even come home before morning. As time passes, I’m certain he will not, and that I need to return to Ravengale sooner than later and try to talk my father into a new plan. In my mind, I play scenarios and ways to talk him off the ledge with Toren. Slowly, too slowly for as tired as I am, I drift into slumber, darkness consuming me.
“Satima.”
At the feel of Toren’s hand on my head, stroking my hair, I blink awake to find him kneeling in front of me.
“Toren.” His name is pain sliding from my tongue. There is so much between us, some might say too much. My hand presses to his face, and he leans into my touch, as if it’s everything to him.
“Why are you on the couch?”
“You know why.” My hand falls from his face and I sit up, tossing aside the blanket. “You can’t have me here. I need to go back and try to fix this.”
His hands press to my knees, warm and possessive. “I don’t want you to go back.”
My hand settles on his powerful bicep. Everything about him is power and while this part of him speaks to me as a woman, it terrifies me as princess of Ravengale. “The sooner I go back, the sooner I can try to find a way out of this for both our worlds.”
“If you return now, it amounts to so little time there, it will make no difference,” His hand slips under my hair in that now familiar way of his, his long fingers curling around my neck. “I’m not giving up what little time I have with you.” He drags my mouth to his, and his lips slant over mine, his kiss slow and sensual, and I’m moaning with the amber taste of him.
My fingers close around the cotton of his shirt, and when his lips part mine, he murmurs, “You were never supposed to happen. We were never supposed to happen, but you changed everything, Satima.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
He pushes to his feet, and takes me with him, rotating to sit on the couch, and pulling me on top of him. I straddle him, the thick ridge of his erection presses beneath my backside, my hands resting on his shoulders but somehow, I stay focused on thequestion he hasn’t answered. “What does that mean, Toren?” I repeat. “I changed everything?”
“Just be here in the moment with me, princess.” He rolls me to my back and my clothes disappear while his do not, and that means something, I think. It’s about his control, about his need for it where I’m concerned, about how the scout’s message impacted him,us.
“Toren,” I say, pushing to my elbows, a plea in my voice, but I’m oh so aware of where his hands rest on my knees, and the possessive way his eyes rake over my breasts. And when I mean to resist, my sex clenches, my nipples pucker, but somehow, I manage a weak, “We need to talk.”
His answer is to spread my legs wide and inspect me in the kind of intimate way a man does a woman he wants to fuck. And despite my arousal, I’m not sure how I feel about that right now, but when I think I might find the will to object, to force him to talk to me, his mouth is on my belly, dissolving away my resistance. His tongue dips into my belly button and I tremble beneath his mouth. And I suddenly realize that I may never be like this with him again, and I don’t know if I have it in me to do anything but be here in the moment with Toren one last time.
I lex away his clothes, and he laughs, low and rough, but there’s a hollow sound to it that drives home how not right we are right now. “Impatient, are you?”
“I don’t like the divide between us, Toren.” He lowers his head to kiss my belly again, and I tangle my fingers into his hair, silent demand for more than his mouth. And when he looks at me, when those ancient blue eyes of his meet mine, the coldness in the depths of his stare could freeze an entire city. “I don’t like how we feel right now.” I try to move away from him, resisting a blink that is all too final. I don’t want to run away from him. I won’t run away from him, but that doesn’t mean I’ll allow this to happen.
He holds onto me, ensuring a blink is my only method of escape.
“Stay,” he says, and that emotionally-laden tone delivers hope that he’s really all here with me. But I just don’t know.
