She gestures innocently at one of the many platters her attendants left behind. “The apricots are particularly good.”
“Are they?” I pluck a piece up and bite into it, savoring the velvety skin on my tongue as I study her mouth.
On impulse, I reach out and touch the second half of the fruit to her lips. She draws a quick breath, eyes still shut, but her mouth opens and she allows me to slip the bite inside, to drag my thumb down her bottom lip as I withdraw.
“You appear to be blushing again, Princess.”
“Do I?” she says in that breathy voice.
“You seem to do it quite frequently.”
I chuckle as her color only deepens.
“You aren’t being fair,” she grumbles.
“I never claimed to be.”
Delicious tension pulses through the air, and I’m suddenly possessed by the singular urge to drive it higher, to drive her as mad as she has me. I lean forward, ready to claim that kiss I bargained so high for, but she stops me with, “You asked me about your guards. How I bested them.”
I pause where I am. “I did.” Though I couldn’t care less if she convinced them to cartwheel with her right now.
Her eyes open shyly on me. “Like this,” she says.
And crooking one finger, she draws me to her like a hound on a leash.
8
The king’s eyes widen to comic proportions as I bring him within inches of myself. The breath he drags in is sharp enough to ruffle my hair, as if his first form is suddenly here in all its size and power.
“You can draw the water within someone,” he says, his voice hushed. Awed. He looks as astounded to be controlled as I am to be doing it.
Mother would say I’m losing my head, that I’m lowering all my defenses like a fool. I agree, and still I barrel forward.
“Yes, I can.”
My pulse, already racing, quickens further as he searches my eyes, for what I don’t know.
“You could make someone do anything you like,” he says.
“I could.”
To my surprise, his mouth curls with delight.
Water drawing is a gift—those words are ingrained in my heart and mind. It’s a gift that also needs protection, and reluctant student that I sometimes was, I honed the ability to do so to a razor-sharp edge under my mother’s tutelage. Never, since my power awoke, has someone been able to wrest control from me.
The king does it as easily as snapping a thread.
One moment, I hold him firm, and the next, his hand is reaching behind me to grip the back of my neck
“How did you—?” I gasp.
But he’s already silencing me with his mouth on mine.
Every thought, every word I would have said flies from my head, leaving only him, his lips forceful and hungry, his hand searing as he draws me nearer.
More than once I wondered if my own lips would know what to do when the time came, and thank the Maker of the Stars, they do. Desire—heady, intoxicating, and completely foreign—throbs through me as his lips slide against mine and my mouth moves in rhythmic answer to his demand.
When his tongue finds mine, a moan escapes me, wholly without my permission, and I pull away, mortified.
