Page 42 of The Crimson Princess (The Ravengale Chronicles #1)

Chapter twenty-nine

S hellshocked is an understatement.

I stand at the window and stare out at the city without seeing it, the implications of Toren leaving me here alone sweeping, as are the details of the intel.

My father really intends to marry me off to Bellar.

It’s not for show and I feel as if I am nothing to him, and yet, Ravengale is my home to protect.

It’s hard to get my head around where this leaves me, or even to understand what comes next.

If I were in the human realm, I’d go kill some creatures from Third World to blow off steam and calm down.

If I were in Ravengale, I’d head to the forest and kill another damn werewolf or ten, just to prove they can’t take me down again.

Just to do something .

Instead, I’m forced to pace, my mind in wicked disarray.

Have Toren and I become official enemies?

I don’t want to be his enemy. How are we to face Toren’s brother with him as an enemy?

Does my father really plan to use Toren and turn on him again?

I don’t know what is happening. I need to talk to my father, but how do I do that, and not risk placing Toren in danger?

No wonder he doesn’t want me to hear his plan of action.

And the druids ultimately want to get close to the book and end my father.

Why can’t he see this?

I’m losing my mind, and there is nothing I can do to end my turmoil, not now.

Not here. After too much pacing and too little results from it, I decide I need to read.

Maybe somewhere in the ancient text something will click with me, some answer will come to me.

With effort to still my energy, I force myself to sit in the chair by the fireplace, and reach for the Codex, opening the cover, turning pages.

Hours pass, and I discover nuggets of information I find interesting, but no answer to all my problems. When my eyes are weary and my body tired, and Toren has been gone too long, I set the book aside and face the truth.

He might not come home tonight and tomorrow morning I may be sent back to enemy camp.

And it guts me.

It hits me then with bitter coldness that Toren has shown me many things and yet nothing at all.

Is this his version of a castle? Surely not.

The royal bloodlines and ancient processes stretch before even his time.

He must have a castle and a throne, but he’s chosen to keep me far away from those things.

He doesn’t trust me.

Perhaps I shouldn’t trust him, and yet, I still blink myself upstairs to seek out his bedroom, his sanctuary.

I end up in a room as magnificent as every other room I’ve visited in his homes.

The bed sits against a wall of intricately carved stone, surrounded by windows, always so many windows, the city seeming to float around me.

The air is chilly, and I use my magic to light the fireplace, simple magic I’d mastered long before twenty-three.

There’s a couch in front of the window, and I head that direction.

Somehow sleeping in the bed feels inappropriate. What king wants the enemy in his bed?

The cushion is comfortable, and I lay down across it, using the pillow already present but I lex my own fluffy blanket.

I wonder if Toren will even come home before morning.

As time passes, I’m certain he will not, and that I need to return to Ravengale sooner than later and try to talk my father into a new plan.

In my mind, I play scenarios and ways to talk him off the ledge with Toren.

Slowly, too slowly for as tired as I am, I drift into slumber, darkness consuming me.

“Satima.”

At the feel of Toren’s hand on my head, stroking my hair, I blink awake to find him kneeling in front of me.

“ Toren. ” His name is pain sliding from my tongue. There is so much between us, some might say too much. My hand presses to his face, and he leans into my touch, as if it’s everything to him.

“Why are you on the couch?”

“You know why.” My hand falls from his face and I sit up, tossing aside the blanket. “You can’t have me here. I need to go back and try to fix this.”

His hands press to my knees, warm and possessive. “I don’t want you to go back.”

My hand settles on his powerful bicep. Everything about him is power and while this part of him speaks to me as a woman, it terrifies me as princess of Ravengale. “The sooner I go back, the sooner I can try to find a way out of this for both our worlds.”

“If you return now, it amounts to so little time there, it will make no difference,” His hand slips under my hair in that now familiar way of his, his long fingers curling around my neck.

“I’m not giving up what little time I have with you.

” He drags my mouth to his, and his lips slant over mine, his kiss slow and sensual, and I’m moaning with the amber taste of him.

My fingers close around the cotton of his shirt, and when his lips part mine, he murmurs, “You were never supposed to happen. We were never supposed to happen, but you changed everything, Satima.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

He pushes to his feet, and takes me with him, rotating to sit on the couch, and pulling me on top of him.

I straddle him, the thick ridge of his erection presses beneath my backside, my hands resting on his shoulders but somehow, I stay focused on the question he hasn’t answered.

“What does that mean, Toren?” I repeat. “I changed everything?”

“Just be here in the moment with me, princess.” He rolls me to my back and my clothes disappear while his do not, and that means something, I think. It’s about his control, about his need for it where I’m concerned, about how the scout’s message impacted him, us .

“Toren,” I say, pushing to my elbows, a plea in my voice, but I’m oh so aware of where his hands rest on my knees, and the possessive way his eyes rake over my breasts. And when I mean to resist, my sex clenches, my nipples pucker, but somehow, I manage a weak, “We need to talk.”

His answer is to spread my legs wide and inspect me in the kind of intimate way a man does a woman he wants to fuck.

And despite my arousal, I’m not sure how I feel about that right now, but when I think I might find the will to object, to force him to talk to me, his mouth is on my belly, dissolving away my resistance.

His tongue dips into my belly button and I tremble beneath his mouth.

And I suddenly realize that I may never be like this with him again, and I don’t know if I have it in me to do anything but be here in the moment with Toren one last time.

I lex away his clothes, and he laughs, low and rough, but there’s a hollow sound to it that drives home how not right we are right now. “Impatient, are you?”

“I don’t like the divide between us, Toren.

” He lowers his head to kiss my belly again, and I tangle my fingers into his hair, silent demand for more than his mouth.

And when he looks at me, when those ancient blue eyes of his meet mine, the coldness in the depths of his stare could freeze an entire city.

“I don’t like how we feel right now.” I try to move away from him, resisting a blink that is all too final.

I don’t want to run away from him. I won’t run away from him, but that doesn’t mean I’ll allow this to happen.

He holds onto me, ensuring a blink is my only method of escape.

“Stay,” he says, and that emotionally-laden tone delivers hope that he’s really all here with me. But I just don’t know .

“Not like this,” I whisper. “No. Not like this .”

He stares at me for seconds ticking by before he slides up my body, the thickness of his erection settling between my legs. “How about like this?”

My fingers splay on his cheek. “Toren, I—”

His mouth presses to my mouth, and when his tongue slides deep and strokes, when his hands roam over my body, I moan with the taste of him, with the feel of him.

I’m done trying to talk to him. I’m done fighting for words that will change nothing.

This is it. This is us. And that’s all we have.

His hand sweeps my breasts, a rough quality to the way his fingers pinch my nipple, and I wonder if he can be any other way with his enemy’s daughter.

I wonder why I believed there was anything else.

Anger blossoms inside me, all through me, and my fingers find his hair again, and not gently.

A low sound escapes his lips and he kisses me again but I’m aware there is no fang, no blood.

Damn him, it feels wrong. He cups my backside and squeezes, the thick pulse of his cock pressing inside me.

There’s no slow and easy about it, either.

He drives deep, fills me, stretches me and I arch into him, my hips lifting off the couch.

But this isn’t hard and fast.

He grinds and shifts, slow, so slow, and I’m panting with the way our bodies move together, as if we’re one.

As if this is where he belongs, and where I belong, with him.

His face is buried in my neck and I know he will bite me, and drink from me.

I want it, I want it desperately, but it doesn’t come.

He pumps harder and deeper, lifting one of my legs, and I lift the other, angling to take him deeper, and there’s nothing but the wildness that follows. Nothing more to give or take, not now.

There just isn’t.

I want this to end in bittersweet bliss at the same time that I never want it to end.

I’m conflicted, touching him, aching for every touch of his hand.

When it’s over, when we collapse together, it’s as if I’ve lost him, too, when he was perhaps the only comfort I’d found since my mother was ripped from my life.

He was a facade, a dangerous facade. Grief has purpose and I’ve denied mine just as I’ve denied the truth of me and Toren.

But he knows.

That’s why he didn’t bite me. That’s why he didn’t drink from me.

We melt into each other, our bodies calming, but my mind is a frenzied mess. “I need to go back,” I say, shoving on his shoulders. “I need to go back to Ravengale.”

He pushes up onto his hands, his body still on top of mine, his eyes dark with torment. “Satima.” My name is a plea I barely understand. I don’t know what he wants from me anymore. The truth is, I never knew.

“I need to leave, Toren.”

“ No .” He blinks us to his bed, me in front of him, and he wraps his naked body around mine, holds me close, one of his legs draped over mine. His lips are by my ear, his breath warm on my neck. “Not yet. Stay with me. I need you to stay with me.”

I need you .

Those words undo me, they hit nerves I didn’t know existed.

I know my world needs me as a leader, I do, but on a personal level, I have no one.

Just him. Right now. For a little longer.

My body relaxes against him, and a blanket appears over the top of us.

Toren nuzzles my neck and whispers. “I want you to come back to me. When this is over. Come back, Satima.”

When this is over .

Will it ever be over?