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I wanted more.

I wanted less.

I wanted.

I wanted him.

Despite what I’d lost, I wanted Arran with every breath I took.

I wanted his mouth on mine, his large hand curled in my hair. I’d touched myself to the thought of what his cock would feel like inside of me.

Despite the objections of my mind, his body called to mine.

Now. Now. Now.

“I want you,” I breathed, catching Arran’s arm.

He didn’t try to pull away, allowing me to drag him closer. There were no illusions of who would win a battle of physical strength between us. If Arran had not wanted to be there, he would not be.

He was close enough now that I could see what I wanted.

His eyes were not glowing.

The curse of a passionate race—desire could not be hidden, even among the treacherous elementals.

They were burning.

The legends told of a male with eyes darker than night, the irises enveloping the pupils until they were nothing more than ominous black orbs. But I could see their beauty.

They were black, like the soul he’d shown me again and again since our first meeting. But in shades. His pupils were the darkest, the color of forgotten desert pits where only death and decay awaited. But the irises were a softer shade of black. The color of a starless night.

A color I recognized from those first nights I’d snuck out of the water gardens. In the deep of winter, clouds came to the Kingdom of the Elemental Fae. While in summer the stars were so numerous one could walk without a lantern or magic flame to light the way, in the winter the night took on a different shade.

But just there, almost imperceptible, where the irises touched the pupils, danced a glittering black flame. A flame that lit every desire within my body.

Arran wanted me.

Maybe it did not consume him waking and sleeping.

In all likelihood, he did not sip his tea and imagine it was my mouth on his.

But he wanted me.

And he could not deny it.

“You will not sleep at my door,” I said.

Arran’s eyes burned into mine. Searching, surely, for the same hint of desire in my own eyes.

But he would not find it.

“Would you rather I sleep in your bed?” He couched the words in sarcasm, but I recognized them for what they were. He was searching for what he could not see. He was chalking it up to a trick of the light, that my eyes did not match my words.

Oh, my poor Brutal Prince.

If only you knew.

But he had not earned access to that part of me, even if he thought himself entitled to be protector of my physical body.