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How magnificent to have a partner claim the better half of this house, filling it with new smells and sounds. Her pencils and quills littering the tables. Her clothes folded on chairs and in the wardrobe. Her crossbow mounted beside my longbow. The smell of ink, parchment, juniper berries, and campfires. I haven’t told her she emits those scents, that they’ve seeped like water into my bed.

Ourbed. I fancy the sound of that word—short, uncomplicated, and sexy.

Ahh, my bookish woman of words. My scholarly huntress.

She’s an intoxication, a chemical reaction, a rush of blood. She’s verbal battles and pursed lips. She’s the green of spruce trees, from her hair, to her eyes, to the beautiful patch between her thighs. She’s willpower and intelligence. She’s righteousness and primness. She’s hidden desires and bossy opinions. She’s candid and says what she means.

She strikes true. She’s all mortal, all raw inspiration, all mine.

And I’m hers. Fuck if I’m not all hers.

I flop over to grope my favorite parts of the huntress, nibble on the rounded edge of her ear, and continue where we’d left off hours ago. But instead of skin, my fingers cup a pillow.

Stumped, I blink.

Nobody else has ever rendered me speechless. But she’s done that.

Nobody else has ever gotten my heart to pump at critical mass. But she’s done that.

Nobody else has ever left me alone in bed. But fuck, she’s done that, too.

Her side of the mattress is vacant. This blanket is smooth and devoid of wrinkles because she likes to make the bed seconds after rising. I know the Fable quote she uses to express why, touting a moral about clean homes and clean minds. It’s a darling penchant of hers.

On the flip side, the many times I’ve enticed her to chuck that routine and destroy the bedsheets with me dabs a smirk into the corner of my mouth. It’s a glorious balance of habit and impulse, in which we both tip the scales. I fancy that, too.

My cello case leans against the corner beside the writing desk, which the huntress has dubbed as her own, claiming it like a parcel of land. I don’t mind. I’ll give her whatever the fuck she wants. And I have, countless naughty times.

As for the cello, my temperature scales to a combustible degree when I recall yesterday. I’d played for her. Then I’d hunted her through this cabin, stalking her laughter from the living room, to the kitchen, to this loft.

And oh, then. I’d gotten that divine female to touch herself. She had been tentative at first, sheepish but curious. Sprawled on the mattress, with her legs spread like the pages of an erotic novel, she’d pressed and probed and panted.

I’d watched in mindless, helpless delirium. Blood had rushed to my skull, my fingers itched, and my pulse detonated with the spangled light of an exploding star. Not to wax poetic, but she’d looked so fucking pretty—so real. I’d watched this unparalleled woman give herself power.

She came, her smoke-edged voice striking the rafters. Afterward, she’d tossed me a demand: my turn.

Who was I to deny her? I’d gripped myself while feeling her gaze on me, exerting a delicious pressure that had undone my very soul.

Naturally, she’d upped the ante. Tugging my fingers away, she’d lowered her head, and I’d gone mute. And Fables, she’d clamped her studious lips around my cock, sucking the sanity out of me.

Happiness. That’s what got me to holler and release. She makes me happy.

But it’s more. It’s that I makeherhappy.

By some lopsided miracle, not only do I make her climax. I make her smile. I make her laugh. What else is there?

I roll onto my back and keep grinning like a moron at the wood-beamed ceiling. My torso inflates and deflates, letting the sensations fuel me like oxygen or a merry goblet of wine. The crackling of flames tickles my ears, the sound lined with the crisp flip of a page.

With another hearty rumble, I swagger out of bed and get to my hooves. Mellow candlelight and eventide shadows trickle down my naked body. I won’t lie—because I can’t, ha—but one appendage has been fully awake since before I’d regained consciousness. If I don’t learn to calm it down, my cock will be perpetually stuck this way, knocking shit over as I track through the house.

I do myself a favor and scrape my fingers over my ribcage and abdomen, a relaxing, lazy migration that settles the phallus in question but wakes up the rest of me. Most importantly, my brain. I won’t last a second in the huntress’s presence without that.

I snatch my breeches off the floor and step into them, letting the waistband slouch like a troublemaker around my pelvic bones. It’s a cheap trick, a racy maneuver to get her attention, and she’ll see right through it. But then, I like when she calls me out.

The planks sag under my weight as I saunter down the staircase, bookended by a pair of walls. At the bottom, the passage twists like the end of a fox tail and dumps me into the foyer. Around the corner, I swank into the living room—and go still.

Shit. I don’t just go still. I go stupid.

The couch is a crescent around the fireplace trunk. A sumptuous vision perches sideways across the cushions, mortal toes gilded by the blaze writhing on the grate. The compact shape of her body takes up only a fraction of that sofa, yet she’s the largest, vastest thing in the room.