Page 16 of Go Luck Yourself (Royals and Romance #2)

For once, it’s a good thing that this castle is mostly empty—I’m a mess in my rumpled T-shirt and jeans, and Loch’s half-dressed, and we make it about five feet up the hall before I’m kissing him again. His hesitancy is back, but he returns the kiss, hands plunging into my hair.

We pass the library and he’s kissing me up against the door in an anxious rush and I throw my arms around his neck. This is how we’re keeping warm in a castle in March, it’s science.

We make it up to his office.

The door shuts behind us and the click of it in the frame pops this fragile bubble, I can feel its residue on my skin.

Loch’s stance sharpens. He’s actively not looking at me, eyes downcast on the carpet.

“Do you want to sit?” He waves at the chair, the one behind the desk.

I shake my head. I want to touch him again.

But I stay where I am, rooted in the middle of the room, and Loch grunts like he’s decided something.

He crosses to the bookshelf. That bookshelf, the one with the hidden door I’m not supposed to know about.

I keep my face impassive.

He pushes on it. The door unlatches, and he shoves it open. “Here.”

I draw closer, shoes padding on the carpet. He’s staring at the joy meter in a trance. Like this thing is a nightmare and a dream all in one, and it has been, for him, the thing holding him back that will help him move forward.

He crowds in around it. The screen with readouts beeps as he hits a few buttons and a panel juts out of the side.

Coal and Dad put their hands on a similar one.

“Loch.” His name kicks out of me.

“Malachy and I did the power transfer years ago,” he says to the panel. The frosted glass is so harmless, a weird windowpane, nothing special. “But it never fully took. I told ya this. Transfers of power have to be joyful, and ours wasn’t. I think—” He reaches a hand out to the screen, flexes his fingers, recoils. “I think you were right. Since the original transfer never took, the transaction’s still in the joy meter. Lingering, incomplete. I think I could take it back.”

My gut swoops.

Is this what he wanted to tell me? To show me? Not that he’s been stealing our magic.

But I squash down that hope. God, I shove it so far down it wriggles in the base of my stomach.

“Do you want your sisters here?” I ask. “Do you—”

“No.”

He looks to me, his eyes bloodshot, and his exhale shudders.

“Just you,” he whispers.

I’m humbled into silence when, in a quick snap of action, he presses his hand to the screen.

Nothing happens. Outwardly. Nothing happened outwardly for Coal, either; it seemed to be a feeling he had. But I hold my breath, hold it and hold it until my lungs burn—

Loch lurches back, panting raggedly as he cradles his hand. His focus is on the joy meter as the screen slides back in, and he gapes, wonder mixed with disbelief.

“Did it…” I stammer. “Did it work?”

His response is small. Reedy. A voice spoken in the light after a storm. “Yeah.”

The air is heavy with the force of what this means for him. He turns to me and I already have my hands up, ready for him—

But he catches himself.

And that pause is the final press down on the hope in my belly.

I expect it to vanish. For grief to surge in. Or—or anger, even, something negative, something painful.

But Loch meets my eyes and I feel grief, yes, but not for me.

He shifts back to the joy meter and bends down. There’s a click, and he stands and holds out the device that’s been funneling off Christmas’s joy.

I take it from him, limbs stiff, motion automatic.

My gaze stays on his, though, and his shame breaks in a tumult of panic when I don’t react.

“This is why you’re really here?” He nods at the device.

“Yes,” I whisper. “You left a clover behind.”

He winces. He didn’t intend to leave it, then. “I’ll pay you back for every ounce of joy,” he says quickly. “I’ll make it up to you, I swear I’ll—” He stops, eyes teary. “You’re na angry, Kris?”

I fiddle with the device. It’s easier than seeing another choice I’m making, and it might be the wrong choice—it is the wrong choice—but walking away is a wrong choice, too.

Maybe sometimes, a bad choice can result in goodness.

Because sometimes, a good choice can result in pain.

“I went searching for your joy meter that day I left you at the music festival,” I tell him. “I saw the device on it. You planted the device in Christmas. Not Malachy.”

His lips thin.

“You’re na upset?” He sounds, honestly, baffled.

My throat cracks on a helpless laugh. “No. I should be, but—fuck, no. I’m not. I—” I bite my lower lip, heart beating hard. “We’ll figure it out.”

He said he’ll pay us back. That’s all we ultimately need from this, our joy back, so Christmas can pay the other winter Holidays what we owe them. Everything else, blame and repercussions…

He twitches towards me but catches himself again, and my gut knots up at his restraint.

“I need to touch you, Kris,” he begs.

Don’t ask. Don’t ever ask. The answer’s always yes.

My arms spread, and he dives in, face pressing into the bend of my shoulder. He clings to me so tightly, so intently, that every piece of my soul remakes itself to fit the way he holds me. I shouldn’t want to conform to fit him, but it isn’t like the way I’d get with other people—this isn’t chipping away pieces of myself, it’s like all my pieces bloom even fuller, vines reaching for the sun.

I’m hit with a careening bolt of terror.

It doesn’t happen this fast.

I cannot have fallen for him this fast.

“Congratulations are in order,” I say into his neck, hoping he misinterprets my racing heart, or thinks it’s his own—his pulse is galloping under my lips. “King Lochlann.”

He goes to iron, his grip on me crushingly tight for a moment before he loosens. I think he might push me away but he untangles my arms from his neck to plant my hands on his hips, one still holding that device. His fingers drape around my wrists and he rests his forehead to mine so when we speak it’s in our own little cave.

“It’ll backfire,” he says. “Malachy will—”

“Malachy won’t do shit. What can he do?”

“I—” His throat contracts. “He has access to some magic as part of the family, so he might na notice right away. But once he does, I do na know what he’ll do.”

“Cut him off completely. See how he likes it.”

Loch huffs. “I canna—I will na be like him.”

Fuck this guy and his sexy honor.

“Could you do me a favor,” I moan, “and be like a little repulsive in some area? Just one. I don’t even care what it is. I need you to not be so inhumanly attractive.”

He chuckles, but it’s pinched and thin. “I admitted to stealing from you. Is that na repulsive?”

“Not as much as it should be.”

And god, if that isn’t the truth. It should be repulsive, but it isn’t, because he was stealing from us to sustain his Holiday, to fight against his uncle in a way I admire more than I can say. I can’t even stand up to my mom about how she treats me.

“I do na deserve you,” he whispers, his hold on my wrists tensing.

“You got lucky, I guess.”

His laugh this time is more sincere, still tinged with disbelief, but he straightens and stares down at me with a smirk lingering on his lips.

It wavers. “This’ll blow up in my face.”

“No. It won’t. You have Siobhán and Finn and Colm. You have your court coming around too.”

He starts to argue, so I keep talking.

“You don’t paint a whole picture at once, right? And I wouldn’t write a whole book in a single moment. So let’s take it word by word. What you just did, us, all of it. Word by word, okay?”

I can see arguments on the edge of his tongue, stalking his thoughts, his response.

So I kiss him.

He relents to my lips on his like I’m sustenance, cupping my jaw and opening my mouth and seizing control in a grateful, delirious attack. He kisses in promises and oaths and I accept every one, fingertips clawed into the muscles along his spine.

We break to gasp and I tell him, “Come with me.”

His eyes are wet. He looks exhausted, the adrenaline crash after stress, so he nods without a fight and closes the bookshelf and I take his hand.

Half his mind is elsewhere, wrapped up in everything he’s done, and he only realizes I’ve taken him to my room when we step inside.

“Kris?”

“Just—hang on.” I toss the device from the joy meter into the chaos of my suitcase and grab the notebook I’ve been working on from the desk. My heart charges like mad as I flip through pages filled with my scrawled handwriting.

There are two things I could show him.

One is the writing I did about him. Mushy, embarrassing shit.

The other is… unbearable.

Don’t overthink it. Don’t linger.

Word by word.

I rip out the letter and hand it to him.

He takes it with a frown. But the moment he sees the top line, his eyes widen.

“Kris—are you sure?”

“You wanted to see something I’ve written.” I sit on the bed because my legs won’t hold me up anymore. “I want to show you this.”

He lowers into the desk chair. “You wrote a letter to your mam?”

I shrug.

“Are you gonna send it to her?”

“No.”

“All your encouraging me to stand up to Malachy,” Loch says, “and you are na gonna send this?”

“It’s different.” I kick the carpet. “What Malachy’s doing to you is fixable. My mother is… not. But processing what she did? That is fixable. So that’s what the letter is.”

He hums, maybe a little unconvinced, and folds his legs under him in the chair to read.

It isn’t a long letter. I could barely stand to write even a few paragraphs. And I try not to watch him read—I open my phone, and there are about a dozen texts in the thread with Coal and Iris, complaining about her hangover.

No new texts or missed calls from my mother.

I pull up the thread with her. Messages fly by as I scroll, years of her abuse—that’s what it is, I know now. Abuse. It was never a prelude to her coming back or requests I could obey to get her to love me. It was never anything but on her and I’ve let it go so, so long because I didn’t want to admit how powerless I’ve been this whole time.

There is nothing I can do to fix my mother.

The paper crinkles in Loch’s hand.

My eyes tear as I delete her text thread, flip over to her profile screen in my contacts, and block her number.

The chair groans a few seconds later.

Loch kneels between my legs. “Jesus, Kris, that ripped my heart out. You should send it. She should know what she did to you.”

“She knows. She doesn’t care. And that’s why I wrote it—she’ll never care, not really. She’ll keep acting like nothing happened and we can pretend it all away without acknowledging all the shit she’s dragged us through—”

“ Us. We, ” Loch cuts me off. “You’re allowed to feel this. Just you. ”

My eyes sting, filling too much now. A tear breaks free, tracks down my cheek. “She’ll keep acting like she didn’t do anything. To me. She’ll keep acting like what she did wasn’t cowardly even though she knows she hurt me. And even if she’ll never care, I care, and I’m not going to keep acting like it’s my responsibility to make up for what she did. This way”—I nod at the letter, on the desk now—“ I get to acknowledge what she did. I get to deal with it. It’s for me. ”

The sadness in Loch’s eyes is so potent that it detracts from the way my own are hot and my breathing is cramped and my chest is straining.

“I wrote about you, too,” I tell him. Talking to fill the void he leaves in his quiet sadness, something brewing in his expression that I don’t like. “Really sappy, poetic shit. I wanted to send it to the reporters. Have Christmas release it, so everyone could read the truth about who you are. But you don’t need something like that. You’re showing everyone who you are on your own now, and you’re doing this for you, not for tabloids or rumors. You helped me realize how okay that is, sometimes, to do things for ourselves. There is selflessness in being selfish.”

Loch’s eyes shut.

Something hovers over him, a shadow on a wall with no source. And it feeds into my terror all over again, that sharp, stabbing pain that this happened too fast and I remember what it was like for him to pull away. But there shouldn’t be any more reasons for that, right? Everything’s in the open now.

“Loch.” I can’t help that his name comes out imploring. I’m fraying, sleeplessness inching up over me. I cup his face, but his eyes stay shut. “Don’t do this again.”

“Kris—”

“I don’t know what your problem is—maybe you don’t deserve me, which is insane; but I sure as hell don’t deserve you, either. So be unworthy with me, in this moment, right now. We’re here. We have all day. I showed you part of my soul and we’re next to a bed. So kiss me, you idiot, and be with me.”

Now, his eyes do open, and god, that agony on his face is an arrow straight to my heart.

But he surges up and kisses me, and it’s… different. There’s no possession in it, none of that aggressive control. It’s soft and savoring, his lips and the abrasiveness of his facial hair and it does something to the building fear in my chest, guides it away with a gentle hand.

Loch stands and yanks me to my feet with him. Then he’s stripping off my clothes and his own in efficient silence, backing us into my ensuite and turning on the shower. The water heats while he kisses me, that slow drop of his lips over mine, and when the room is steamy he pulls me under the shower with him.

Clear marbles of water roll down his body, dragging streaks through the paint, pooling at our feet in rivers of gray. His silence in any other situation would feel off, but the way he looks at me as he works his hands in my hair, cleaning out the paint, is strung with such force that he doesn’t need to speak at all.

The air fills with the spicy scents of shampoo and body wash and my eyes roll shut under the massaging tips of his fingers on my scalp. I let my own hands run wild, following the trails of paint, scrubbing them off his skin, lingering on the bend of his hips, that spot that will forever drive me out of my mind.

Forever. Not forever. Word by word. This moment, only.

He presses me against the tiled shower wall. His hands and mouth are reverent, moving with an artist’s care, turning me into a dizzying masterpiece with lips sculpting the contours on my chest and stomach. He’s wary of my injuries, washing them even more tenderly, and I hope the thunder of the shower covers the whimpers I make, deep, resonating pleas to my root.

“Fuck me,” I tell him.

Mouth on my neck, he spasms, and I wish I could record the noise he lets loose. That hoarseness, that grind.

He pulls upright and it still feels like he’s one thought from coming to his senses, but I can’t be senseless alone. I know I should talk him through whatever is keeping him restrained, but in the wreckage of the past twelve hours, all that’s left when his hands and mouth are on me is Edenic need.

I’ve been trying to let myself be selfish.

He is the pinnacle of that, pure living wish-fulfillment.

His forehead rests on my shoulder. Water pounds down on us, cooling slightly, but the warmth between us stays cosmic, the wild collisions in deepest space that create their own heat, create their own suns.

Feather-light kisses trail up my throat. When he gets to my ear, he exhales, and I feel it over me, in me.

“I’ll prove myself to you, Kris,” he promises. “I’ll be worthy of you now.”

He nuzzles the side of my head and groans, rutting against me in the wash of the water and the interstellar intensity. We’re both steel-hard and the water eases the grind somewhat, but it’s not enough, not now.

“Dry off and get on the bed,” he commands, and every nerve in my body swerves online, a ruthless plunge of attention that banishes all other awareness.

The water squeals off behind me and I stumble out of the shower, grabbing the nearest towel and drying myself in half-assed obedience. We spill into the bedroom, both mostly drenched, but the bed swallows me up as he pushes me down on it and his body is there, stretched over mine.

He’s not just wish-fulfillment, he’s an intoxicant, and I’m blackout drunk on him.

Our dicks align and we groan simultaneously, riding the motion of a need that never went away last night, was never satisfied, the sweetest eternal decay.

“ Christ, Kris.” Loch pushes up over me and his look is so dark with need I can see galaxies in him. “Supplies?”

I squirm out from under him and he leans back on his heels to let me go.

But as I crawl off the bed, a sharp crack cuts through the room.

I yelp.

“Did you—” I gape at him. “Did you smack my ass?”

His eyes sparkle. “Lightly.”

“Lightly?”

“To get you to hurry your arse up. ”

“How is that going to make me want to do anything other than dive right back into bed?” But I’m already rummaging in my suitcase.

Loch makes a strangled noise. I glance over at him, and he’s watching me with narrow amusement.

“I canna tell if you’re serious. Is that something you want?”

I shrug. “Not anything too painful, but I meant what I said earlier. I want whatever you want to do with me. That ”—I motion towards the floor, back to his studio—“that was perfect.”

It’s a heavy admission. I hear it as soon as I say it, the power I’m giving him with this knowledge.

He’s quiet. Eyes searching mine.

I’m worried I’ve fucked up the mood again when he smiles.

“I meant what I said too,” he whispers. “I will prove myself to you. You give me too much trust.”

That’s so obvious I don’t even have to agree. We both know it, feel it deep beneath whatever this is.

I toss a condom and a small bottle of lube on the bed next to him.

He clocks them and pins me with a stern look. “You had these awfully ready. Planned on fucking your time away here, did you?”

I kneel on the bed next to him and arch one eyebrow. “How do you know I haven’t been?”

He works his tongue across his teeth, a slow build of that vulturine glare that is quickly becoming a physical necessity.

“Kris,” he says, “has anyone else been touching you?”

Every part of my body shivers. Shoulders. Hips. My toes curl and I knee-walk closer to him, towering over where he’s seated back on his heels. It lets me stroke my fingers through his beard and hold on to his neck, a brief power exchange.

“Why would you care about that?” I whisper.

He’s gotta stop making noises like the one that rumbles in his throat. Halfway between a keening mewl and a growl.

The possession and need in Loch’s eyes tell me he’s letting me lean over him, letting me hold his neck, letting me toy with him. I shiver again, nerve endings swelling in the intuition of payback coming.

He rests his fingertips on my pec, drags them down, the lightest scratch over my nipple that makes them both pebble tight. “I care,” he starts, that mewl-growl roughening his voice, “because I need to know where anyone else touched you, how they touched you, so I can do it better.”

It should be enough. Teasing, taunting each other—that’s what we do.

But I hear myself ask, “Is that the only reason?”

I want everything implied in his jealousy. I want everything hungering behind his control.

Loch stops with his fingertips over my belly button. His eyes stay on mine, reading me.

“It has to be the only reason,” he whispers.

“Why?” I’m too revealed. Too exposed. It’s pleading and childish and I hear that, but Loch keeps stroking his nails over my skin.

He leans forward, and I let him, until his mouth rests on my stomach. He inhales, exhales, warmth and coolness winding me up so I almost retract it, apologize for being needy.

But then he rocks his forehead on my chest. “Do you want me to say it’s because I do na want anyone else touching you? Only me.”

A mutinous gasp rips out of me. It gives everything away if I hadn’t already.

Loch chuckles into my skin.

“Only me,” he says again.

I shudder, another full body tremor. I can barely swallow around the way my pulse is thudding in my neck and I sure as hell can’t keep up this game anymore.

“I usually have a condom in my wallet,” I explain quickly. “Habit, always be prepared and whatnot. And the lube, well. I knew you’d stress me out while I was here, and how else would I relieve that stress?”

“And did you?” Loch’s hand glides down my leg. Sends a quiver surging off in his wake. “Relieve stress right here in this bed?”

His smile holds daggers and immediately flips this dynamic right-side up. I’m still kneeling over him, but he’s in control. He always was, and it crashes through me, freeing, weightless.

“Yes,” I whisper.

“Tell me.”

My lungs ache, chest and stomach clenching helplessly as he pushes a kiss to the tattoo below my abs, his eyes on mine.

“I—” My words come tangled, a frenzy. “It was like you said. Your face was in my head the whole time. Your voice. Your— you. Just you, Loch—I don’t know how you didn’t hear me crying out your name.”

His pupils dilate, blowing wide, his upper lip curling slightly, the whole of his expression sending a pulse of warning over me.

“Oh, I will,” he promises, and those wide eyes dip down my torso, mapping me, planning, and I hold steady for him.

My chest is hot. My cheeks, my arms, burning up under everything I’ve said and his gaze on me now.

He tracks that heat, the blush, and something in him breaks.

“You’re so fucking reactive, shite.” He crashes into me, teeth and tongue fighting themselves against my abs, and I grab his head and moan as he licks at me, bites at me.

His arm locks around me and in one quick flip I’m on my back again, hurtled into pillows that go flying, the bedspread flinging away at our agitated kicks. Loch’s mouth beats down on me as ferociously as the blood beats at my veins as he works his way lower.

“How many different shades of red can I make you turn, eh?” He brands the question into the jut of my hipbone, bites a response where my thigh meets my groin. “Where else can I make you blush?”

“ Loch. ” Zero to imploring in five seconds flat.

My fingers find his hair and latch in but he yanks me away.

“Ah-ah—hands over your head. There’s a good boy.”

Shit why is that so erotic.

I find handholds in the wooden slats of the headboard, eyes on the bed’s canopy, breathing hard and jagged. Not looking at him, not being able to touch him, ratchets every sensation higher until my whole existence is the points where his lips and fingers stake their ownership.

He grabs my thighs and shoves them up towards my chest.

I was wrong, my whole existence also encapsulates inhuman cries that make me grateful the castle is mostly empty. How sound-deadening is stone? I can’t care right now; no pretense, no build-up, his satin, venomous tongue licks over my hole.

“Holy fuck, ” I gasp and squirm, but Loch keeps me in place, his hands iron vises spreading me for him, holding me together.

He’s ruthless here too—I shouldn’t be surprised. Taking, taking, but his taking is also giving because with every lap of his tongue, every scratch of his beard on my thin skin, I’m begging incomprehensibly for more, and even then, he doesn’t stop. He brings his fingers into play and alternates licking and stretching, plunging me into sensation without a break until I’m hanging by a thread.

When I’m sweating and frantic, he climbs back up my body to a symphony of breathy, throaty sounds from both of us. He’s rolling on the condom and taking care of the lube before I can fight my way through the fog to do it for him. And it is a fog, I’m bobbing in a wide, endless rush of need and I know it will all be far too evanescent but he’s made me here and that consumes me more than I’ve ever been consumed before.

Loch runs a hand up one of my arms, still over my head, still death-gripping the headboard. His grip clamps tight around that fist and he looks down at me; he could say something. He could kiss me. He could do anything, but he chooses to watch my face as he lines his dick up with my softened hole and pushes against the first tight ring. I feel his attention as much as the pressure, the give.

His breathing grates heavier, the only outward sign of him being as close to unraveling as I am, but he takes it slow, propped over my body with one hand on mine, the other on my hip, guiding me.

It’s too slow, a gentle thrust in, pulling back, giving me a little more—it’s not enough. All that need is shoaled up inside my chest until it bleeds out through the rest of my body and I’m writhing underneath him.

I don’t let go of the headboard, but I wrap my legs around him and pull. “Loch, please —”

His hips snap forward.

Pleasure whites out my vision.

I hear the warbles of my cry like an echo. I feel the reverberations like the retreating crest of a wave, all white-capped foam and popping bubbles.

Loch holds, body strung taut over me, and my eyes find his through the haze, through the whimpers I think I’m making.

“Good?” he asks, concern etched in the slant of his brows, the focus of his pupils.

I nod, immediate, and yeah, I am whimpering, and it devolves to wordless pleading.

It’s permission granted. It’s a door opened. Loch takes my nod and my whimpers and his grin is extraordinary.

He drapes over me, one arm snaking around to hold me to him as he thrusts, broken grunts and firing pulses. Slow at first, then faster, tunneling into me, I’m well and truly gone.

“Shite, Kris,” he moans. “You’re so tight, fuck. Making me feel so good, look at you. Arch your hips, I wanna—there, Kris, there. ”

It’s another unendurable contradiction: the way he holds me to him, tenderness; the way he fucks into me, aggression; but both those things are possession, aren’t they? And I am, fully possessed, utterly his.

Nips of his teeth on the underside of my bicep are soothed with his tongue until he works his way over, breaks through the seam of my mouth with a vicious kiss. I hadn’t even realized my jaw was tensed but I relent to him, let him in, rocking my hips to meet him.

“Loch, I need—I need—”

He changes the angle again and nails my prostate dead-center.

My head throws back in a shower of sparks.

His teeth sink into my exposed neck and he sucks, hard, scatters more of those sparks across my skin in another mark of his, replacing his paint. Each thrust hits me exactly right, embers flying wild.

His hand snakes between us and closes around my dick, pumping in time with his firestorm hips. “Let it out now, Kris,” he orders into my skin.

My thighs are shaking, arms strung taut, every muscle straining, reaching, his cock drilling me relentlessly, I can’t not obey.

Sensation releases me like cannon fire, a clawing shout and an explosion and I’m wrecked, spilling over his hand and streaking across our chests.

Loch’s thrusts stutter. His face is buried against the side of mine and I hear him, babbled, senseless groans—no, words, words that slip through me like water before I can think to hold on to them.

“Mo chroí, mo chuisle, mo mhuirnín,” then “ Kris, ” and his whole body tenses and quakes.

He doesn’t give himself a chance to relax, he barely lets me breathe before his lips are on mine again, desperate, even more so now. He rocks steadily, almost absently, and I’m over-sensitized but I meet him there, gently pitching my hips with tiny, fevered grunts until we’re twitching in aftershocks.

Loch pries at my fingers on the headboard.

“Touch me,” he orders, and I do, I have to, arms damn near jelly but I curl them across his back and feel the sweat sheen on his skin, the rattling beat of his heart against his ribs.

The kiss settles from needy to savoring. Our lips are raw, our breaths pushing through in demanding gasps, but I can’t stop, and he doesn’t either, licking and tasting and feeling, I can’t get enough.

I want to know the evolution of his kisses. How today’s will be different from tomorrow or next month or five years from now, how the texture of his lips will change, how sometimes he’ll be aggressive and sometimes he’ll be this and I want to be able to track the differences like constellations. I want to know what it’s like to kiss this man at every stage of his life.

Word by word.

It’s too big to think of anything else.

But I want his forever.

I want it and I love him and I’m a goddamn moron.