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CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 49

AUREN

His gaze is the piercingsort that I’ve never learned how to dodge. It cleaves into me, perforating my walls and reaching past the smile I’ve still got pinned up against my cheeks.

The cracks form in my cheeks first, whittling my lips back down, no longer able to hold up the lie.

“Better,” Slade says, the moment my smile drops. “Now, tell me what’s wrong.”

“It’s not important.”

“Don’t be dismissive. We do not lie to one another.”

I let out a snort. “I’m pretty sure our entire foundation was stacked with lies.”

“Maybe in the beginning before we knew we could trust each other, but we’ve moved past that now.”

He reaches forward, snagging my hand, tipping my palm up before I even realize I should try to hide it. I feel the skate of his gaze as he takes in the blotted smears of gold.

“Your gold comes out with your anger.” His thumb brushes against the clammy metal drying on my skin, rubbing it over every line and groove.

“They were talking about me—some men in the market. But I think they might’ve been right.”

His thumb pauses, smears against the pad just beneath my index finger. “What did they say?”

My eyes lift up so that I can look at his face as I speak. So that I can gauge his reaction. “They said that I jumped from one king to another.”

The stern line of his brow lifts ever so slightly as he flicks his eyes up to me. Waiting. Watching.

“Isn’t that what I’ve done?” I challenge, pulling my hand away from his touch. “I’ve gone from Zakir, to Midas, to you. Letting men take care of me.” I shake my head at myself, reeling from the outside perspectives. “I thought I was making changes, making strides to be independent, but what if I’m not? What if I’m making the same mistakes all over again?”

He jerks back, spine gone stiff against the carved wall. “You think you and I are a mistake?”

I toss up my hands with exasperation, because the more I talk, the more frustrated I am. “No. But what if I am hopping from one king to another? I just got away from a one-sided relationship riddled with abuse. I’m finally free of all that, free to live, and I’ve never had that before. Ever. Maybe trying to show my face today was a mistake.”

My chest rises and falls with the waves of my acknowledgement, while his stays still and quiet like a breezeless air.

“For twenty years, I’ve been caught beneath the will of another. What if I want to just...leave? To escape all the bullshit and stay in a little cabin in the middle of the woods where no one can find me? Or what if I want to travel all of Orea, never setting down roots, never staying anywhere long enough to outstay my welcome? I could...learn something new. Climb a mountain. Practice music. I could get a job somewhere. Build something. Get a pet. I could go flirt in a pub. Swim naked in the sea. Go dancing. Make a friend. Kiss a stranger. Maybe that’s what I want.”

My eyes flash up at that last bit, and I catch myself bracing for his reaction.

For a long while, he’s quiet.

I sway with the movement of the carriage, or maybe it’s the movement in myself—jerking me side to side with wavering emotions, while I wait for him to respond.

How he can be so still, I have no idea. Not when I’m a motley of riotous shifting. Not when words are bouncing around in my skull hard enough to give me whiplash.

“Well?” I demand. “Aren’t you going to say something?” Gold slips along my wrist, spilling from the crease of my hand. “I just told you I want to kiss someone who isn’t you. I’m freaking out about the fact that this whole newfound independence might not even be real, all while realizing the public is calling me a seducing, king-hopping thief, and you’re just sitting there!”

My face is hot, my chest tight.

He sits forward, bent elbows flanking his knees, threaded hands coming up in front of his chin.

“Do you want me to yell at you? To get pissed off?”

“No—I don’t know,” I say, feeling more and more insecure about what the hell I’m even saying. What I’m feeling.

Catching me completely by surprise, he suddenly plucks me up from my seat and sets me on his lap. I jolt in surprise, but his steady hold keeps me in place.

“What are you doing?” I demand, floundering as I glance to the carriage window. Although the curtain is covering the glass, it’s still slightly sheer.

“Your aura is quite erratic right now,” he says, his tone conversational. As if it’s completely natural for me to be on his lap. As if the dozens of people we can hear just outside don’t even exist. “Usually, it’s calm, like the glow around a morning sun right as it drifts above the horizon.” He shifts his hips, and my breath snags in my throat when I feel him hardening beneath me. “But when you’re angry or overwhelmed, it starts to jump and swirl like its own gleaming tempest ready to bait and blind.”

“So?”

His lips curve up with the force of my snapped retort, his fingers digging into my waist. All of a sudden, I’m reminded of just how thin this clothing is. Just how few layers are between my skin and his.

“You want to be independent? You want to live your life however you see fit?”

I tilt my chin up. “Yes. Is that a problem?”

His eyes darken, like shadows filtered through a forest floor. “I must’ve made myself unclear.” He lifts a hand to wrap it around my throat, not to hurt or strain, but to hold. To bend.

My head is tilted to the left, my neck curved in invitation for his lips to descend. “You want to travel the world?” he murmurs against my skin, making it pebble, making it rise up to meet his touch. “Then I’ll be your escort.” His lips press against me, closed at first, just the tiniest feel of pinched breath between the seams. “You want to hide away? I’ll build us whatever cabin in whatever remote wood you want.”

His mouth opens, a rush of warm breath drifting out to coat my neck. But I feel that warmth drift down, lower and lower, until it’s a swirl of ardor kindling in my stomach.

I reach up, sifting my fingers through his thick hair, twining the black strands in my grip. I tug hard, jerking his own head, making his neck bend too. And he meets me with a flash of a grin that makes that kindled fire start to spark.

“Who said you’re invited?” I challenge with demure provocation.

He chuckles.

That low, sensual laugh that will always ruin me. It travels from his chest, making my own arch up to meet it, just so I can feel it. So his laughter can travel from him into me, and I can feel like I’m basking in something entirely different from sunlight. For my insides to revel in this sensual heat.

“Oh, Goldfinch.”

Oh, Goldfinch.

My toes curl. My head turns as much as his hold on my throat will allow.

“You haven’t been paying attention. Not at all.”

I suck in a breath at both his words and the way his teeth come down to clamp on the skin beneath my ear. The nibble of his teeth, the slip of his hot tongue, it makes my eyes flutter closed, makes my breath flutter, too.

He bites down harder than I expect him to—not enough to break the skin, but enough for my eyes to spring back open, for my breath to suck in a gasp. Outside, the carriage wheels bump over the choppy road, our weight shifting with a slight turn. People’s voices are just a backdrop cacophony.

His fingers tighten, thumb lifting my jaw as he leans back to look at me, and then he shifts his hold so his hand is wrapped around the back of my neck instead. “This isn’t going to be some casual dalliance. This isn’t going to be temporary,” he purrs, reciting his previous words back to me. “I get your soul.”

A kiss pressed to my cheek.

“Your mind.”

Another pressed to my forehead.

“Your body.”

His hold tilts my body back, making me arch, making my head fall against his hand as he presses a third kiss to my chest. His lips close around the button just below my collarbone.

I don’t know how he does it, but his mouth slips the button out of its gap, makes the fabric flare out an inch. The smallest amount of skin is bared, and yet my entire body tingles as if he’s just stripped me nude.

“I get your past.”

Another button.

“Your present.”

Another inch.

I’m panting now, three buttons undone. Only the thinnest bandeau trimmed with dainty black lace covers my breasts.

“Your future.”

The hand from my neck glides down my back. Pinning my spine. Arching me up even more. The solid line of him digging into my ass.

“That’s what you promised me, isn’t it, Goldfinch?”

My entire upper body is balanced on his hand, my knees bent, thighs on either side of his waist. A scorch of his breath presses right over the curve of my breasts, the hook of his teeth dragging down the front fabric. The friction makes me want to catch fire.

When I don’t answer, too caught up in what he’s doing, reveling in this lust of heat, he nips me right there on my breast, making me jump. His grip on my waist keeps me locked down on his lap—on the stiffness of his cock. “Isn’t it?” he demands.

“Yes.”

He soothes the spot with a kiss, leaning back up. “That’s right,” he tells me. “Now reach up.”

“What?”

His chin jerks upward. “See that wooden loop there? It’s meant as a knocker for the driver, but I want you to grab hold of it.”

I follow this gaze to the ceiling, to the hinged circlet just above my head. “Slade—”

“Do it.”

His instruction tightens my stomach with arousal, and I swallow hard. “Bossy.”

“King,” he drawls.

Reaching up, I feel the loop of wood and pull it down, let my fingers curl around it. With my arms up, I somehow feel more exposed, more vulnerable.

More excited.

“Happy?” I counter, grip shifting, tone brazen.

He doesn’t reply. Instead, his fingers come down to the last remaining buttons on my shirt. Scooping them through the slits, letting each one come undone.

“What are you doing?”

Outside, people say too much to grasp. In here, he says nothing at all.

Somehow, that’s louder.

Both hands come up, calloused and warm, slipping the center of my shirt apart like peeling open the pages of a book. He lets the fabric rest at my sides, stomach exposed, breasts heaving inside my bandeau.

My skin crackles, every nerve ending sitting up in wait for what he’s going to do next. But I don’t expect him to slip down to the ties at my pants. To pull the string and let them loose.

One of my hands snaps down, finger and thumb circling his wayward wrist. “What are you doing?”

He pauses, black brow crooking up. “Did I tell you that you could let go of that handle?”

My heart skips a beat. “Slade...”

I receive a pat against my ass from his other hand, so swift and sharp that it makes me flinch. “Hey!”

“I want your hands up and gripping it.”

I don’t know what it says about me, but when Slade looks at me with this hunger in his eyes, when his rumbling voice slips out words of sensual command, I buckle. Boil. Burn.

My hand comes up to take hold of the loop, my chest automatically arching back up. Bending toward him.

He nods in satisfaction. “Now, where were we...”

His hand slips down to the waist of my pants, fingertips grazing inside and making the skin of my stomach jump.

“You want to climb a mountain—I’ll be right there to make sure you don’t fall,” he goes on, just as the first inch of his fingertips grazes over my panties.

“You want to build something? I’ll be handing you the tools.”

My head whirls and my nerves whip, and when his hand molds against me, when I know that he’s just found the wetness gathered there, I quake.

“Mmm, you’re wet for me, Goldfinch.”

I can’t help my wobbling breath. “Yes.” I shift my hips, an urge for him to move, to touch where I’ve begun to throb.

He answers my silent beckon. His fingers come up to my clit, rubbing and circling, making a moan drift past my lips. My hold on the loop tightens, grounding me, even as it helps me lift my hips, seeking his touch.

“You want to flirt in a pub?” Slade asks, mouth coming down against my breasts, over the thin band right at my hardened nipple. His lips close around it, tongue wetting the fabric, just as his finger moves past the edge of my panties and slips inside of me.

The gasp that tears from my throat is a corrugated rip that seems to echo inside this confined space.

“You can flirt and play all you like,” he purrs, tongue lapping, moving to my other nipple, making it match in wet heat. “You can make men and women desire you, crave you, and I will crave right along with them.”

My heart is flexing in my chest, wrinkling my ribs, making it hard to catch my breath. His finger begins to pump. Curl. Thumb lapping at my clit and making it surge. Making me need.

“Slade...”

His other hand comes up to cup my face, demanding my mouth that I willingly give. A harsh nip, a soothing lick, his plush lips pressing against mine.

The perfect dance.

“You want a friend? I’ll be very friendly to you for the rest of our lives.”

He looks at me, thumb brushing over my bottom lip while his other thumb presses even harder against my clit, building the pressure, making me squirm.

“Great Divine...”

Slade takes my jaw, turns my cheek.

“And you want to kiss a stranger?” he adds, the caress of his breath a dark smolder. “Go right ahead.” His touch at my core is pressed harder, a second finger fed in. His thumb moves faster. Deliciously so.

I can’t think, and yet, all I can do is hear him. Feel him. It’s his words and his touch and everything inside of me wanting to burn and to burst.

“If you need to kiss and fuck and play in order to feel free, then that’s what you’ll do.”

I arch up even more, body begging, seeking...all while my mind spins with his words. His mouth is against my ear, hand supporting my waist, the other using friction to make me ignite.

“But remember, Auren. Your body—your pleasure—you gave it to me. So I will be there, wherever you decide you need to be. At a pub. In a sea. On a bed. I’ll be there with you. Watching you. Joining you. You are mine, and I am yours, and whatever pleasure you seek, I will be there to watch you get it, and I will feed it to you tenfold afterward because you are mine, and I will see that you get what you need.”

His words. His filthy, delicious words.

They’re a balm against the turbulent doubts, coating me with provocative assent.

“Slade—”

“Come for me, Goldfinch.”

And I do. A strike, so hot it feels cold, charges through my body, making me arc. I cry out from the bolt, from the pleasure at his touch, at what he’s said.

It charges through me with pure electricity, until I’m struck and thundering, my whole body flashing from blinding pleasure that makes me tremble head to toe.

It takes several seconds for me to see clearly again, for my eyes to blink past the bliss still dotting my vision. My entire body feels raw, like the charred ground where lightning just hit, and I practically slump in his arms.

But he chuckles.

And I know that chuckle.

“Don’t get too comfortable. We’re just getting started.”

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