“Wonderful,” she said.
19
Sita
“Tell me what you want.”
Femi’s voice curled like smoke into her ear, the words winding their way into the fruitful garden of her fantasies. Sita had tended it in secret for years, but she’d only begun to taste what grew there.
She lay on the soft woolen rug in her bedchamber, and he knelt before her like a supplicant. They’d just started and already he’d begun to sweat—his moist skin glistening in the moonlight streaming in from the window. She watched a single bead of perspiration roll from the hollow of his throat, down his bare chest and stomach, and along the deep trench of his pelvis. Sita couldn’t resist darting forward to lick it away.
Femi inhaled sharply at the touch of her tongue to his skin.
That sound, that gasp—it was teeth biting into ripe fruit, it was honey-sweetness dribbling down lips. It threw open the gates to her secret place and invited everything inside.
Sita reached out and pulled him to her, cupping the back of Femi’s neck with her hand, wrapping herself around him until his heavy body pressed her into the floor.
“This,” she murmured as he kissed her neck, her collarbone, her shoulders. “This is what I want. What I need.” There was something about the weight of him, the way his bulk held her fast to the earth, that made her feel safe. Like she was grounded, no longer in danger of being caught up in the swirling maelstrom of her life.
She felt his heart quicken at the sound of her words. Helooked up and met her eyes, his pupils dark and full of adoration.
She wondered if he loved her.
She worried that he did.
Femi was no fool. Certainly, he must know the folly of a palace guard imagining a future with a princess—but that might not stop his heart from dreaming. From breaking.
Perhaps his resistance to lovemaking wasn’t only for her sake, but for his own. Perhaps he was doing everything he could to keep her from imprinting on his soul.
Still, she wondered how much longer either of them could resist the temptation.
She wanted to stop.
She couldn’t stop.
How many lives will I destroy along this cursed path?she wondered.
Instead, she held him tighter. Dragged her nails across his broad, sweat-slick back, and spilled herself into him until they were both drowning, gasping for breath—
A ragged wail split the night.
Sita pulled away, mid-kiss. She waited, dread dropping like a stone in her belly. Her fingers still dug into Femi’s back, but now it was for a different reason.
“What was that?” Femi whispered.
Then they heard it again. A woman’s voice. A cry of such total despair that it sent a bolt of terror down Sita’s spine.
She was on her feet in an instant, pulling a robe around her body and running out the door with Femi at her heels.
“Sitamun, wait!” he said quietly, grabbing her wrist. “Someone might see!”
“I don’t care if they see,” Sita said, and jerked her hand free. “We’re going.”
Femi’s expression changed when he heard the commandingtone in her voice. “Allow me to go first then, Princess,” he asked. “In case there is danger ahead.”
“All right. But we must hurry.”
The intimacy between them was gone. It existed only within the confines of her bedchamber—it couldn’t survive anywhere else.
