Page 46 of Golden Queen (Idrigard #1)

I didn't care who might be looking, I went to him and reached up to kiss him.

He obviously didn't care either as he pulled me closer and kissed me back, deeply, running his hands down to my hips.

I heard a whistle from behind us and turned to see a few of the dragon riders standing at the edge of the camp, smiling and looking our way.

Io shifted us so that his body was shielding me from view, but he was laughing.

"Get on the dragon before I shame us both and toss you down into the godsgrass, Sera.

" He kissed me once more and then turned me toward Veles who was waiting with what I thought looked suspiciously like a look of reproach.

We returned to Juriae's manor house as the sun began to set across the godsgrass plains.

Even though the specter of war hung over me, over my people, I thought I had never had such a good day in all my life.

We ate dinner in the formal dining room of the manor house.

Juriae and Cazmiri were seated together at the end of the table, so close that their shoulders touched as though they did not like the feeling of any distance between them.

They looked at each other with true affection, each paying careful attention to the other's wants and needs.

The rest of the guests—the Radune councilors and later, Aben and Malach still in their scale armor—were rowdy and cheerful.

Aben gave me a wink as he plopped down at the table, snatching a roll from a basket in the center. “Stab anyone today, Aelia?”

I grinned, raising my brows. “Not today. But it’s still early.”

Aben laughed, raising his hands in mock surrender. “Easy there, killer. I’m not looking for any trouble here.”

No one around the table seemed surprised or puzzled by the interaction, so I had to assume they all knew the story of the two times I had managed to put my blade in someone lately. “Neither am I,” I told Aben, feigning innocence. “But trouble seems to find me anyway.”

I caught sight of Io’s expression. It was something close to approval, and as always, it inordinately pleased me to see that look on his face.

It sometimes felt as though his every expression bolstered me in some way, as though he was the metric by which I could grade myself. Some deeper part of me warned me that wasn’t necessarily a healthy attachment to form with him.

He was only visiting. He would go home soon—return to the doubtlessly gorgeous women of Nightfall—to the ones I was certain regularly occupied his bed in Dragon’s Reach.

The thoughts sent something very close to panic through me, and it was suddenly a struggle to concentrate on the people around me.

It didn't take long for that panic to subside, though. They were all so cheerful that I was shortly drawn into an intense conversation about pirates that had once roamed the Sorn Sea and used the clear, blue waters of Scaldwater Bay as their base.

Cairl, one of the Radune Councilors, swore she’d once seen a ghostly pirate ship when she visited the waters surrounding Elysium as a child.

“They sailed right out of the mists, black sails snapping above a crew of living skeletons manning the rigging. They had a siren lashed to the bow—her mouth stuffed with rags so she couldn’t sing her deadly song.

My father clapped his hands over my ears just to be sure, though.

And he didn’t let go until the ship was out of sight and we were well away from the mist. That was the last time my merchant father ever put-to in the Sorn, that's for certain. He ran a route all the way around the Point of Lithaway, facing summer storms and those terrible big birds rather than chance seeing those dead men again.”

I hardly dared believe Cairl, but if it was true that her father preferred the treacherous journey around the Point of Lithaway to the calm waters of the Sorn, perhaps they had seen something on the waves that day.

The boisterous discussion went on from there, and I lost track of how many times the topic of conversation changed. None of them seemed even slightly aware of the class system or inclined to be careful of what they said to each other.

We laughed, ate, and drank the best wine that Windemere had to offer, and the dinner was more enjoyable than my mind had been capable of imagining one could be.

Io sat by my side, his hand by turns clasped around my thigh, or lightly stroking the outside of my shoulder with his arm draped around the back of my chair.

We were there together. That was obvious to anyone who cared to look. The way he looked at me, the way he touched me, the way he stayed attentive to my wants in the same way Juriae did for Cazmiri, made it apparent that we were embroiled in some sort of entanglement.

Yet, no one at the table seemed to give it a second thought. No one stood up and announced that we had no right to be together: he was fae, and I was the human queen of a kingdom that would never accept him. No one questioned us about the future that we both knew we didn't have.

They just let us be together, including me in their conversations as though I was an old friend who had come back after a long absence—one who had a little catching up to do, but who was accepted by rote.

And so, the evening in Juriae's manor gave me a glimpse, however heartbreaking it would end up being, of what a life at Amon Aldur's side would look like. A glimpse of what being his other half, as Cazmiri was to Juriae, would feel like.

When he took me upstairs to his rooms after dinner, that glimpse—that beautiful vignette of life—was perfected into something much more. Something that I knew would eventually be so sharp that it would cut me into ribbons, leaving my heart shredded in his wake.

But eventually was later, and he was standing in front of me with that wicked smile on his gorgeous face.

As he closed the door behind us, I found it quite easy to throw out the whole concept of later and all the things that would come with eventually and leave them on the other side of the door.

He offered me first dibs on the bath, and I found a neat pile of clothing Cazmiri left for me in the bathing chamber. She hadn’t left them in the room I'd been taken to when I was injured, as though she already knew I would come to his chambers.

I expected to feel embarrassment about that, but there was only some strange feeling of satisfaction. They all knew that I meant something to him—that he was keeping me close to him because it mattered to him to have me around.

Stupid, reckless, fool, I chastised myself again, even as I knew it was insincere. I might know in my heart there was no future for us, but I would wring every drop of happiness from these moments with him while I could.

So I bathed in the huge marble tub, half expecting him to come and join me.

But he did not. So after I dried off, I walked out of the bathing chamber without bothering to dress or even wrap a towel around myself.

He was seated at a little desk across the room. At the sound of my footsteps, he looked up. His pen stopped scratching across the page as he stared, his eyes tracking me across the room.

"What were they thinking?" he asked as he set down his pen and straightened in the chair.

"Who?" I asked, coming to perch on the edge of his desk, feeling not even a sliver of shame or embarrassment.

"The gods," he said, eyes sliding up and down the length of me.

He rose, rounding the desk to stand in front of me, leaning down and running a hand down the center of my chest. "What were the gods thinking when they gave all this to one person?"

I laughed, but he frowned. "I'm deadly serious, Sera. You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

He held my face in his hand, running his thumb over my lips. And then he slid his hands lower, down my neck, across my breasts, and over my belly. "And your body is a fucking masterpiece."

His hands came back up to my breasts. He cupped them, lifting them as though testing their weight. "And these," he groaned, closing his eyes for a heartbeat. "Dear gods, Sera, these are my favorite things in the world."

He said it so seriously that I burst out laughing. He joined me, laughing against my lips as he kissed me.

When I began to undo the buttons of his shirt, he stopped me. "I need a bath. You go get in my bed—"

He turned me toward the big, comfortable-looking bed. "I'll be right back and see if I can pay proper homage to those glorious tits of yours."

He gave me a playful swat on my backside before he turned to the bathing chamber.

In the end, my patience didn't go as far as his had.

The sound of splashing water drew me up and across the room.

Without even questioning whether he might have wanted some privacy, I pushed open the bathing chamber door.

I found him standing in the middle of the tub under a shower head that I hadn’t noticed mounted in the ceiling.

The sight of him took my breath away.

He was so big—every part of him so wonderfully made.

He had his face turned up to the water, and I didn't think he'd heard me enter.

I went to him like a moth being drawn to a flame, and before I knew what I was doing, I was standing in the tub with him, my body pressed to his.

His arms came around me before he even opened his eyes. "So impatient," he said, looking down at me as the water sluiced over his fine features.

"I came to help," I said, leaning around him to pick up a cloth and a little bar of soap.

He looked at me strangely for a moment, but then his face changed to something like wonder as I worked up the lather and ran the cloth over his chest.

“I can’t say I’ve ever had someone wash me before,” he said as I moved around behind him. “At least not since I was a child.”

“I would’ve thought the Lord of Darkwatch had plenty of handmaidens to see to his every comfort,” I said as I used my fingers to trace the dragon tattoo that ran down his spine. The beast was stylized, the image twisted together into a beautiful representation of Veles.

He snorted. “I don’t have a single handmaiden,” he said with mock disappointment. “Perhaps I should get some. This is quite nice.” He looked over his shoulder with a half-grin.

"Lean down," I said when I finished with his back. I didn't have the nerve to clean any lower.

He turned and did as commanded, sinking to his knees before me.

He was silent as I ran my hands through the thick strands of his beautiful black hair.

He closed his eyes and groaned as I massaged his scalp with my fingertips working the soap into a lather.

The feeling of him in my hands gave me such a heady rush that I thought I was enjoying it more than he was.

As I tipped his head back into the water to rinse, I noticed he wore that wicked, sly grin of his. I met his dark eyes.

"You really love the sight of me on my knees, don't you, Sera?"

I looked at him seriously. All the strength and perfect features beneath my hands felt like a power that I could somehow wield. "Yes, I admitted. “It never hurts to add a new supplicant to my ranks."

He laughed, and I lost the fight to keep my own face straight. He placed a kiss on my stomach, moving lower until the water was running over his head as his tongue delved between my legs.

I nearly fell as I reached release, my body shuddering and trembling. But his hands steadied me, holding me securely as they always did.

He carried me to the bed after we dried off, and he was inside me the instant my back touched the mattress.

His hands, wreathed in that beautiful golden flame, stayed on me, away from the bed.

It was as though some part of him had been holding back before—like the fear of being discovered in my castle had tempered his passion because he took me fast and deep, his hips never stopping as he drove me to the brink of madness with the pulsing, winding ache of my building climax.

I cried out his name so loudly that he covered my mouth with his fiery hand to stifle the sound. He grinned with obvious satisfaction as he replaced his hand with his lips.

His kiss, the taste of his fiery lips heightened the waves of pleasure coursing through me until I was shuddering again, climaxing again at the same time I felt him tense. He growled my name against my lips as his body shook with its own release.

Afterwards, I lay on my back with him on his side, playing with his golden fire and tracing it over my skin. The liquid sunshine coursed through me, laying to rest all the day's turmoil, and making me feel a peace I couldn’t possibly have deserved.

"What is this fire?" I asked, lifting his hand and watching the way the flames played around his fingers. "It's not like the other."

"No...it's something else."

"What?" I asked, eyeing him speculatively.

"I don't know. No one does. The masters at the Citadel in Darkwatch and the Tyrion in Orin, where I went to school as a child, have never seen anything like it.

Nor can they explain how I came to have the darkness, except to say they are like competing forces—light and dark, day and night.

It's not elemental like the other magic in my blood. "

"Is that why it scares some people—because it's unknown or unfamiliar?"

"Maybe partially," he offered. "But it was more an issue of control.

I found it very difficult to manage it growing up.

I would sometimes wake from a childish nightmare and have the entire fortress shaking—and if you know anything about Dragon's Reach, you can understand why that would be a problem. "

I did understand. Dragon's Reach spanned the entire valley, supported by pillars marching across the land from mountain peak to mountain peak.

"Is that why you don't sleep very much?" I asked, remembering the way his hands had burned as he dreamed beside me.

He didn't answer for a long moment. "That's when the habit began, I suppose. But these days, I have much better control." He paused, his mouth curving up. "When I don't have an actual goddess in my bed, that is," he added with an almost boyish grin.

"So...control was never a problem when you were...with other women?" I asked, feeling suddenly embarrassed to have formulated the question that had been bouncing around my mind.

He chuckled. "No, Sera darling, that is a distinctly you phenomenon."

That stoked that same primal female satisfaction in me, and I couldn't stop the grin that spread across my face.

"You really like that," he said, wonderingly. "You're blushing!"

"You're blushing," I accused, though he was not, and I could feel the heat in my cheeks.

"You wicked, cruel thing," he bemoaned in a mock tone of reproach. "You love driving me mad."

I did. It was perhaps my favorite thing in the world.

When we were covered by the soft blankets and he pulled me into his arms, I heard his breathing even out, and I thought he'd fallen asleep.

But he surprised me by whispering against my cheek. "I can always sleep when you are with me."

I didn't realize I was crying until the tear rolled hot down my cheek.