Page 91 of The Beast King's Bride

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ASH

The pleasure is like a sea, ebbing and flowing, sometimes dragging me under, drowning me, then lifting me high where the waves lap at me, whispering softly. He’s buried deep inside of me and he’s the sea, he’s the pleasure.

The way he touches me with his hands, his mouth, his cock, it breaks me and puts me together again. The knowing look he gives me every time he makes me come is both smug and joyous, proud and content—and how can I judge him for it when he has held back from his own pleasure to make sure I got mine first? When he’s so damn good at it, and I don’t want to think about how he learned this art of love-making.

He’s Fae. Lived for over a hundred years already. Who am I to judge if he was with other women before me? At least he learned well and unleashed that knowledge on me.

“Ash,” he whispers, and I stroke the silky black hair off his forehead as he brushes his lips over mine. He’s still hard inside me and when he starts to move again, I gasp. I’m sore but it also feels good, and my body responds without asking for permission—my hips snapping up, undulating under him, against him. “Oh, skies, Ash…”

It’s faster this time, more frantic somehow. We rock together, his arms flexing as he moves over me, thrusting faster, harder, bringing me to climax so fast I have to stifle a scream, my release almost painful.

And when he finds his, right after, he groans my name as if it burns him.

He’s breathing hard this time, sweat trickling down his long neck, over the perfect planes of his chest. But his smile… His smile is everything. Gorgeous, devastatingly happy.

Oh, my Gods, I think, torn between joy and horror. I’m never leaving this place. Never leaving him. Am I?

I don’t want to go, not anymore. Faerieland, the Sapphire Court, and its king have my heart.

But before I open my mouth to say anything stupid like that, he grunts and pulls out of me, making me whimper. His face is serious now, all traces of joy and mirth gone.

“Talen? What’s wrong?”

He doesn’t lean over me, doesn’t embrace me, doesn’t smile at me and for a moment a terrible sinking feeling takes over me.

But then he growls, scooting back, the sound not quite human. Crouching on all fours, he bows his back, his face twisting—with pain but also with something else.

He’s transforming, I realize, jerking away as it begins, the crunching of bones changing shape, the fur flowing over him, the nails turning into talons, the jaw changing shape, long teeth springing up in his mouth.

And I see the look of desolation plain in his gaze before the horned tyger towers over me, then turns and shoves the door open, vanishing inside the palace.

After being led to my room by the two guards who kept looking over their shoulders as we crossed the palace, ready to defend me against any monster leaping at us from the shadows, I spend the rest of the night tossing and turning in my bed.

I’ve pulled his cloak over me and I don’t bother changing into a nightgown.

It’s no use. Any of it. I can’t sleep. Not when everything that happened keeps flashing through my memory, when the soreness between my legs reminds me with every step what we did. The things he admitted. The way I feel.

I find myself pacing my room. Learning letters, helping in the kitchens, lying with Talen on a bearskin in front of the fire… It all fills my head, fills me up—the blossoms outside, the stars in the purple sky as dawn breaks, the horned tyger, the strangeness of the Lesser Faeries, the endless halls…

They say that once you’ve eaten and drunk in the land of Faerie, you can’t go back.

It wasn’t the food and drink that did it, I know now. It was him, Talen. Through him, I’m starting to like this place in all its strangeness. Starting to feel like I’m home.

As long as I get to see it with him by my side.

How could a feeling like this grow so quickly? I want to dismiss it as a passing fancy, as a spell cast on this place, but if I look, I can see the small things that snagged me and kept me wondering, that slowly pulled me toward him—from the very first time I saw him, from his beauty to his gentleness, his kindness, his worry about his people and about me. His offer of freedom even though it was obvious it cost him.

Cost him his hope to lift the curse.

If he believes it… if he believes I can do it, what if he’s right? What if I need to find the final clues and solve this riddle, save his land, save him?

There is no way I’m going back. I have to try.

Still, uncertainty lingers in my mind. I heard so many stories of men having their way with girls and then vanishing from their lives, not wanting to see them again after they got what they wanted. What does Talen feel? I’m obviously not only a weapon against the Empress for him anymore—not since he gave me my freedom back—but how does he feel today, after bedding me?

I hate this doubt eating at my insides, this terrible fear that he doesn’t feel the same way I am, that he’ll break my heart, cleave it in two, ruin it for any other man, ever.

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