Page 81 of Lady of the Drowned Empire

“Don’t do anything else until I’m back. Lyr, promise me. As much as I hate the bastard, him being gone…I don’t know what trouble that spells for you. Shit. As if I wasn’t having enough nightmares about the past, now I have them about the future.”

“Were you having nightmares all week?” I asked.

“Yes,” he admitted. “Luckily, it’s snowing here. Or someone might have noticed.”

I’d once seen Rhyan’s full-blown nightmare in action. He had caused a blizzard in his apartment, had been freezing until I’d woken him from it. “Are you warm enough, despite?”

He gave a small laugh. “Don’t worry,” he said, his accent comically exaggerated. “We northerners have ice in our blood.”

I laughed. “Be that as it may, when you come back, I’m staying with you. In your bed. Every night from now on.”

I’d meant it to sound practical. We slept better together, keeping each other from nightmares, the cold of winter, and our pasts. And if we were both having nightmares, we could take turns. But the moment the words were out of my mouth, my skin flushed.

There was a long pause, and then he said, voice scratchy, “Are you now?”

I chewed the corner of my lip. “I mean, um, if that’s okay? Just because of, you know, nightmares and sleeping and—”

“Partner, I know. It’s okay.” I could tell he was smiling. It made me smile, too. “It’s more than okay. I like that idea a lot.”

“You do?”

His voice deepened. “Do you have any idea how much I want you in my bed?”

Heat spread through me. “So I can protect you from bad dreams?” I asked, my heart beating faster.

“Well, there’s that,” he said slyly. “But also the fact that I,” he lowered his voice, the sound echoing like he was cupping the stone against his mouth, “I desperately want to bed you.”

The heat pooled in my stomach then moved lower. My breath caught, and I licked my lips.

“Have you been thinking about that?” I squeezed my legs together.

“I’m thinking about it now.” He coughed, and there were more shifting sounds—fabric against fabric.

“You’re moving around a lot,” I said, realizing I was also moving on my bed, sinking deeper beneath my blankets, lying back.

“Had to, um, make an adjustment.”

I grinned. “An adjustment?” I tried to affect my most proper heir voice. “Why, whatever do you mean by an adjustment?”

“You want to play that game?” he asked, a low growl in his voice.

I made some sort of noise halfway between a breath and a moan and involuntarily lifted my hips, my legs still pressed as tightly together as I could manage.

“What I mean, partner, is that my cock is so fucking hard for you right now my pants are too tight.”

My breath caught. I could see him in my mind, lying under the blankets on his small cot in his tent. Probably in soft gray pants, a matching pair to the ones I was wearing. I held the vadati with my left hand and ran my right down my legs, down his pants, the thick material soft and worn after so many nights of wearing it. “Your pants are loose on me,” I teased.

“My—wait, you’re wearing my pants right now?”

“And your shirt. I’ve worn them every night this week.”

“Lyr,” he groaned. “Hearing that, you’re making it worse.”

My hand slid up and down my thigh. “I’m so sorry. You must be so terribly uncomfortable right now.”

“Do we need to have a discussion, you and me, about the word ‘sorry’? Because from your tone of voice, I don’t think you’re sorry at all.” There was a threatening edge to his words, something feral and hungry that made my toes curl.

“And what are you going to do about that?”