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“I started searching for you when I was thirteen, but it was only once I was crowned king that I was able to lead my horde west, into the Roman Empire, and find you.”

The sorcerer falls silent.

There’s an ache in me, a very real ache, at his story. I don’t know why. Maybe because it sounds romantic—kings, and hordes, and a search for a woman he was connected to but could not find.

“What else?” I ask.

Memnon’s eyes linger on me. For a moment, they are so incredibly desolate. Then his mouth curves into a sly smile, and that calculating gleam reenters his expression. “Curious, Empress?”

My own eyes fall to his lips. “Why do you call me that? ‘Empress’?”

He settles back into his seat, and now his mouth curves into a sinful smirk. “Because the Romans subjugated you, and I quite like paying homage to your power in their language. It gives me a petty little thrill. You liked it even more.”

“Roxilana,” I whisper. “This all happened to Roxilana.”

Memnon’s eyes are like embers; I can’t look away from him. I sense so many pent-up feelings behind that face.

“Yes,” he agrees, “it happened to my Roxilana.”

This moment feels as though it’s balanced on a tightrope. At any second, one of us could fall.

“What do you want?” I say softly.

“Everything,” he says. “My empire, my riches, my palace, my adoring subjects. But most of all—I want you.”

I don’t know who moves first, him or me, only that we come together, and it feels inescapable. There is my rational, orderly mind, and then there is this. Instinct.

Memnon’s mouth finds mine, and he ravages it, kissing me with all the intensity one would expect from a warrior-king. I gasp in a breath when suddenly his tongue is there, sweeping through.

My body awakens at the contact, feverish for more of this, whateverthisis. I delve my fingers into his hair.

Memnon groans into my mouth, then hoists me into his arms, wrapping my legs around him and cradling my ass.

“My queen, my queen,” he murmurs. “Ineedyou to remember.”

“Shut up about that,” I murmur back. Memnon’s cute little delusions could ruin a perfectly good make-out session.

If I thought the sorcerer would be offended at my rudeness, I thought wrong. He smiles against my lips, then nips my lower one.

I moan.

“That is no way to talk to your king.”

On second thought, I could totally get behind role-playing this. “I’ll talk to you the way I want.”

At my words, Memnon growls, squeezing my ass, his smile searing against my lips. He maneuvers us onto my bed. My back bounces a little as it hits the mattress.

My fingers run over his scar, and he lets out a jagged exhale.

He pulls away, his breathing heavy. “Time to tell me to leave.”

Time to leave? I feel as though we’ve only gotten started.

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I find out just how sweet that pussy of yours really is, and I don’t stop until I feel you come on my tongue.”

Memnon has teased me plenty about intimacy with him, but he’s offering the real thing to me now.