Page 70 of Roma Queen
ZARA
The valley lookslike it’s wreathed in flames. Drums rumble like thunder in the distance, and the chilled breeze seems determined to tease the flowers from my hair, but I’m too distracted to mind the cold, or the riot of noise that churns and pounds just on the other side of the ridgeline. My attention’s solely focused on the man standing in front of me, stripped to the waist. His torso is stacked with muscle, and a cartographer’s map of tattoos seems to shift over his skin, alive, as he holds up a shirt and considers it.
“Don’t you dare put that on,” I command.
A scandalous smile spreads across his face, his eyes sparking with lust-filled amusement as he turns to me. His dark hair falls in waves around his face, so much longer than it was three months ago in the depths of winter. With the spring thaw now over and the glen gripped in the throes of spring, Pasha Rivin seems to have transformed into a creature entirely different to the one I met at the Midnight Fair.
He refused to let me come to the cage fights. He stopped doing them altogether when he came home with a split lip and black eye one night and he saw the look on my face. I would never have asked him to surrender that part of his life, no matter how much it upset me; when I asked him why he was throwing in the towel, he told me, “I fought because I was angry. I’m not angry anymore, Firefly,” and that was it. Since then, he’s been working out like a fiend, training with Partin every day of the week, and the two of them are fuckinghugenow.
The ever-present tension that seemed to shroud him like a cloak is long gone. He’s…freernow. We’ve been living together for months, sharing a bed, no matter where we find ourselves. We split our time between my apartment at the Bakersfield, Pasha’s loft overlooking the city, and we also spend a good amount of our time with the Clan, too. I’m no longer ‘the gadje.’I’ve been dubbed ‘Ves’or ‘Ves ‘tacha’instead.
Shireen heard Pasha whispering that little sweet nothing to me during a very private moment, and then proceeded to tease him mercilessly by letting everyone know it was his pet name for me. Not only am I his ‘beloved,’ but I’m everyone else’s too, especially when they want to take a playful dig at him. Apparently, it’sveryout of character for Pasha to bestow such a weighty term of endearment on anyone, and it’s been providing the Clan elders and youth alike with hours of entertainment.
Pasha’s eyes are practically dancing as he prowls toward me, dropping the shirt he was holding at his feet. He’s one hundred percent predator, and he’s obviouslyhungry.Biting back a smile, I consider making a run for it, knowing he’ll chase and catch me in four seconds flat, but there are still people loitering around the camp, getting ready for the ceremony, and we’ll never live it down if we’re seen running, screaming, between thevardoslike sex-mad fucking teenagers. That’s what we are, though: sex-mad. No couple in the history of mankind has fucked as much as Pasha and me have over the past three months. It’s as if we’re making up for all the time we only got to ravish each other in our sleep.
“You nervous?” I ask, trying to distract him.
“No. Areyou?”
“Why wouldIbe nervous? You’re the one being crowned.” I know perfectly well thathewasn’t talking about his coronation, though. He was referring to something else entirely. He’s only three feet away from me now, and he looks like he’s trying to figure out which part of me he’s going to devour first. “Pasha. Pash,no,” I say, laughing. “Patrin’s coming to get us in a second. Do you want him to find us naked, fucking up against a tree?”
“I don’t care how he finds us fucking. Although the tree does sound like a good idea.”
He’s in front of me, then, hands reaching for the straps of the flowing Irish green dress Shireen loaned to me that I cinched in at the waist with a length of purple silk. Not strictly a very Roma-looking dress, but very pretty all the same, and the colors compliment my hair like crazy. Pasha’s eyes feast on my bare shoulders and the column of my neck, and a heat begins to rise in my stomach, spreading outward, pooling at the apex of my thighs and making me squirm.
“Last chance to fuck a prince,” Pasha rumbles.
“Oh yeah? I’m pretty sure fucking a king will be much the same.”
“Hell no. Fucking a king is way worse. They’re super entitled. They know they’ve reached the top of their game, so they don’t even try any more. Things are only gonna go downhill from here, Firefly.”
I have a hard time feigning horror when all I want to do is smile. “Sounds miserable. Maybe I’d better take you up on that offer.”
The straps are down, over my shoulders in seconds, and the dress is slipping down my body, gathering at my feet. Pasha catches his bottom lip between his teeth, eyes dipping down to travel the length of my very naked body. “No underwear,” he muses. “Are you trying to give me a fucking heart attack?”
His voice is like a rough caress; it sends a violent shiver up the length of my back, pins and needles prickling at the skin between my shoulder blades. “It was supposed to be your post-coronation surprise. But youarethe most impatient man I’ve ever met. So…”
His calloused hands, even rougher now from working outside with Patrin, are strong and powerful as they take hold of me at the hips and pull me to him. He’s a delicious wall of heat and muscle. My breasts crush up against his defined, inked chest, and a surge of need hits me like an electric current.
“You want me?” he growls, voice coarse and thick with his own lust.
I tilt my head back, lifting my face to his, wetting my lips in a way that I know drives him absolutely fucking crazy. “Yes, your highness. I sure do.”
“Good girl.”
He goes to unbuckle the belt at his waist, but I get to it before he can. “One of these days, I’m gonna give this toyouto bite down on.” I rip the length of soft, supple leather from the loops of his pants, flushing a little when I realize I can actually see my own teeth marks imprinted in it.
Pasha’s mouth curls up at one side. Dangerous. God, he is so fuckingdangerous. “I’ll look forward to that day. But for now…”
“Time is of the essence,” I finish for him. My hands might have fumbled trying to undress this man at the beginning of our relationship, but I’ve had a hell of a lot of practice since then. I have his pants off his body in three seconds flat, right along with his shoes and socks.
Pasha’s body is the stuff of myths and legends. He easily puts every single one of the Greek gods to shame; Zeus himself didn’t look this good naked. The low V that dips into his groin is enough to make me dig my fingernails into my own palms hard enough to draw blood. Fuck, he is beyond perfect. The tattoos that form a shield across his chest, the kings of his people, snaking down his defined, strong arms, and creeping up his neck make my head spin. His washboard stomach, muscular thighs, and the curve of his extraordinarily toned ass are all the stuff of a woman’s daydreamed fantasies, but it’s the finer details of the man that I appreciate the most. His full, bitable lips. The cut of his collarbone; the fine, downy hairs on the back of his neck; the deep dimple that forms in his cheek whenever he’s really,reallysmiling.
I slip my hand down between our bodies, taking hold of his cock and squeezing, and his eyelids flutter. The stuttered sigh he releases kicks my heartrate up a gear. With steady, sure movements, I begin to stroke him, and Pasha hisses under his breath. “Fuck. Firefly, you’refartoo fucking good at that.”
He makes his own move, then, palming my left breast and kneading at my flesh, pinching and rolling the swollen bud of my nipple between his fingers, before cursing and bowing himself over me so he can fasten it between his teeth. The pain is intense. The pleasure is unbearable. “Ahh!Fuck, Pasha!”
He doesn’t relent. He switches to my other breast, giving my left nipple the same treatment, and I grab a fistful of his hair, yanking his head back and pushing him away. “Bad boy,” I chide. I’m biting intohispec a second later, and I feel his flesh give way against my teeth.
