Page 49 of Valor’s Flight (The New Protectorate #5)

Chapter Thirty

The following days were the happiest of her life.

Alashiya wasn’t sure what had stalled Taevas’s urgency to return to his people, but for the next three days, he didn’t say a word about it.

Instead, he became a calm, often disarmingly charming presence in her home.

Where she went, he was determined to follow, whether his body would allow it or not.

His health improved, and his fever at last seemed to disappear, but she wasn’t blind to the fact that he often hid his pain from her.

While his cuts and bruises had healed, whatever had been done to him during his captivity didn’t appear to improve with bed rest and over the counter pain medication.

She often caught him grimacing when he thought she wasn’t looking, and he suffered most in the evenings, when his strength finally fled.

She worried about him, but he did his best to distract her.

Taevas waved away her concerns with practiced ease, as if he was used to reassuring people that he was fine when he wasn’t.

Perhaps that wasn’t far off the mark, considering who he was.

She imagined that the leader of a territory rarely got the chance to rest. It sounded like he was close with his clan, which she hoped meant there was always someone around to pester him about that.

Alashiya still struggled to grasp the idea that Taevas was as important as she knew him to be. Of course she believed him, but it was a hard thing to conceptualize from her tiny corner of the world.

What did it do to a person to have so many lives dependent on your judgment, your ability to know what’s right in a crisis?

Of course she had her hyphae to draw from, all those generations of queens who made hard decisions for their grove and the many, many families who depended on them once upon a time, but for her, Alashiya the Princess of Nothing, it was foreign as another planet.

Taevas had been Isand since he was a teenager. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the days he spent lounging in her bed or watching her work in the garden were the closest thing he’d had to a vacation in his entire life.

They were aware, she thought, that they were living on borrowed time, and so it appeared they were both intent on making the most of it.

If she stopped to think for too long, Alashiya experienced an existential sort of all-consuming guilt for not doing more to help him get back to his people, so she did her best to not think at all.

Instead, she basked in the glow of his single-minded attention, and in the conversation that flowed so easily between them.

He insisted that she didn’t need to work on his commission, but when he told her he’d ordered it as a birthday present for himself, she was determined to finish it for him as quickly as possible. She really didn’t mind, especially when he began to fill the silence with stories.

Taevas was a magnificent storyteller. Almost too good, really. Alashiya often found her needle frozen mid-stitch as she became engrossed in whatever tale he wove. When it happened, he’d give her one of his cheeky smiles and a small nudge.

“Are you going to finish that?” he’d ask, leaning in close to tease her with a kiss.

It always took her an embarrassingly long time to focus after that, but not even his kisses could stop her. She enjoyed his stories too much.

It was her sneaking suspicion that he told them as often as he did so that he could tempt her into leaving.

Taevas loved to tantalize her with vivid descriptions of his homes — skyscrapers, he told her, built to his exacting specifications for luxury and privacy — and of all the faraway places and fascinating people he’d met.

But her favorites by far were the stories of his clan.

The stories about his uncles and his cousins and their children were full of quiet joy.

She could imagine them all vividly, and often found herself mouthing their names so she wouldn’t forget.

He told her all about the people of his Wing, too, which he explained was his elite guard.

Vael, one of those powerful dragons, had recently married — or Chosen, as her dragon always phrased it — Taevas’s cousin Hele.

Hele’s story was one of the few that completely outmatched Alashiya’s embroidery.

She’d had to set it aside almost as soon as the story began.

It was intimately intertwined with the tale of how his cousin Artem had met his wife, which had been engrossing enough, but as soon as Alashiya discovered that Hele was an elemental, her work was put away.

Taevas took great pleasure in telling her how he’d flown in the storm that had created Hele, a being of pure magic forged in the atmosphere, but it was the detail of how Vael had caught her when she fell from the sky that made Alashiya sigh.

It was one of the most romantic things she’d ever heard.

It beat anything she’d ever read in her aunt’s old books by a mile.

“They’re off hunting down elementals all across the continent, trying to bring them all into a new kind of clan,” Taevas told her, smiling fondly.

But that smile faded after a while. In a more somber voice, he’d added, “Though I suppose they’re probably looking for me right now.

They won’t stop. Not until they see a body. ”

Guilt had closed up her throat and forced her to look away from him.

He’d never said it, but she knew he was holding himself back because of her.

Taevas wasn’t the sort of man who gave up on anything easily, so she didn’t believe that he had dropped his insistence that she leave with him.

For some reason, he’d made the choice to spend more time with her.

And that meant that he was delaying his return to his people because of her.

Alashiya tried not to think about it, or at least to not take the blame entirely on herself. Taevas could’ve left at any time, or insisted she find him a vehicle, but he hadn’t. He’d made some sort of choice without consulting her, and so that wasn’t on her.

But that wasn’t how reality worked. She knew he’d delayed leaving because he wanted her to come with him, and she also knew that she intentionally didn’t bring it up again because she didn’t want him to go where she couldn’t follow.

A more selfless person would’ve encouraged him to leave at every opportunity, but after being alone for so long, Alashiya just couldn’t find it in her to do what she knew was right.

With every day that passed, it got harder and harder to bear the thought of being left again. The thought of returning to her silent life of work and watchfulness kept her up late into the night, and so did her guilt.

It came for her whenever she found him staring out into the woods with a dark look on his face, like he expected some threat to melt out of the treeline whenever he wasn’t paying attention, and when he asked her if there was any way for her to get news — even from a radio.

She felt sick with it when she had to explain that she had nothing.

She’d offered to go into town or to the Thompsons’, but he’d merely sighed and shaken his head.

“I won’t let you endanger yourself for me,” he’d firmly informed her. “Not now. Not ever.”

It was easier during the day, when they distracted each other with soft touches and stories and the quiet contentment of a shared task.

Despite his pain, Taevas’s boredom drove him to seek out the old tools in the partially-destroyed barn so he could repair the kitchen door — and find her lost sheers, which were found in a bush near the trough.

With his tools, she quickly learned that he wasn’t lying about being trained as a carpenter.

They moved around each other with the ease of long-familiarity. When they bickered, it was good-natured and almost always ended in a kiss. They slept wrapped up in one another. Every meal was eaten sitting beside each other, and their evenings were full of stories.

Intimacy was slow and indulgent. They flirted relentlessly, and Taevas’s eager fingers always seemed to be somewhere on her body.

His tail, too. If they were within touching distance, his tail was looped around some part of her.

She got used to its weight around her wrist or waist or ankle.

The only time it wasn’t holding her was when he used it to sneak under her skirt or blouse.

Alashiya wasn’t ignorant to the fact that Taevas wanted her. He made it very clear. Every part of him made it clear. The power that gave her was heady. To have a mighty dragon so used to being in charge watching her, waiting for the word to pounce…

She often debated with herself over whether she was squandering their time together with games and petting and teasing him until he came in her hands.

An invisible clock ticked down their time, no matter how much she tried to ignore it.

Shouldn’t she take the opportunity to enjoy sex while she had him?

But everytime she thought of rushing it, just getting it out of the way, she recoiled.

The precious, fragile thing they’d begun to build together deserved more than that.

They deserved more than that. And what was the harm in keeping things as they were?

She certainly had no complaints about learning that Taevas enjoyed having his face ridden, or discovering that she hadn’t lost her skills when she took him into her mouth in the middle of the garden.

He’d been a begging, leaking mess on her tongue, his hands fisted in her curls as she knelt there in the dirt.

She could hardly breathe around his girth and didn’t care at all.

With the air heavy with humidity, surrounded by the hum of life all around them, and drunk on the power his pleasure gave her, she’d never felt more alive in her life.

Every twist of her fist on the base of his cock had been an indulgence. Every hard, sucking pull of her lips and tongue was a treat. To watch his expression contort in pleasure as he whispered thank you over and over again was an experience she wouldn’t trade for anything.

And when he came on her tongue, her name a deep, resonant prayer on his lips, she didn’t feel like she was missing something. Everything they did together as an exploration. Every kiss and whisper and giggle and orgasm was another brick added to the foundation they’d laid ten years ago.

Sex would happen when it was meant to happen, but neither of them were in a rush. Because rushing anything, even pleasure, edged too close to confronting what they both knew was coming.

Alashiya perked up at a dismayed sound from Taevas.

“What is it?” she asked from her place by the stove, where she’d been frying some eggs.

He turned to show her the old tin where she kept her coffee. There were only a few specks of dark coffee grounds caught in the seam at the bottom of the tin. “There’s nothing for tomorrow,” he told her.

“Oh. I don’t normally run out this fast.” She wrinkled her nose, teasing, “You use too much!”

Taevas gave her backside a swift tap with his swishing tail. “I use exactly the right amount of those terrible quality beans, metsalill. You just prefer your coffee as weak as tap water.”

“I do not!”

“You do,” he insisted, rattling the tin at her. “This is barely even real coffee. I can’t wait to show you what it should taste like.”

Alashiya rolled her eyes. “Well, that’s all I can get at the store that isn’t instant. Would you prefer that?”

That earned her another swat. “I’ll accept instant coffee over my cold, dead body.”

“Then I don’t want to hear any more complaints.” She batted at his tail, which had decided to curl around her hip, all affection now. “I’ll pick up totally fine coffee from Debbie’s today.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Taevas’s sudden stiffness. His tail tightened around her hip, drawing her attention to the way he’d stopped stirring sugar into her mug in favor of watching her closely. All the levity had left his voice when he asked, “You want to go into town?”

He can’t come with me.

And just like that, the invisible clock stopped ticking.

Alashiya quickly looked away from him. “Yes. I have to, don’t I? We’re out of more than just coffee,” she answered, her tone carefully neutral.

A tense silence descended on them. The atmosphere, which just a moment prior was soft and warm and cheerful, darkened. Even the air felt a little heavier in her lungs, making it harder to draw a breath in.

“Shiya, you can’t.”

She flipped the stove’s dial, extinguishing the flame before the yolks were overcooked. “I did it before.”

Taevas, the softer version of him she’d come to adore so deeply and so quickly, disappeared.

The dragon, the Isand, took his place when he bit out, “That was before we knew there was a dragon and an unknown group of men searching the woods. It’s too dangerous for you to leave here by yourself. I won’t allow it.”

“What am I supposed to do? Just never go to the store again?”

Taevas turned to her with a hard look. “You and I both know that’s not the answer. You’ll never have to think about going to the store again when we leave.”

She stepped back from the stove. A clammy sort of panic shuddered over her skin in awful little lurches. He wanted her to jump off a cliff with him, but her feet were stuck to the ground. All she could do was stare over the edge.