Just kiss me.
Want swam in his peepers, all scarlet and amazing. I knew that look, saw it many times since being in his presence. It set sparks skimming across my skin, each one aiming for my groin.
For a moment, I thought about planting a kiss on those luscious lips. To break the rising tension, to taste him again, to reward him for caring so much about my safety.
What the fuck? Reward him? I didn’t think so.
I backed off, the temperature suddenly plummeting without him so close.
“So,” I rasped. “What, erm, shall we…set off?”
It took him half a minute of staring, making me squirm, until he answered. “Yes. Meet me in the living room in five minutes.”
And just like that, he left the bedroom.
Whoa. Close one there. We didn’t have time for funny business, even if my body screamed at me for not dishing out the lip action.
Yeah, well. The body could take a damn hike.
Five minutes. Enough time for a smoke.
Fishing my mistrock cigs from my pocket, I sparked up and took myself into the garden.
“Hey, sweeties,” I said after the first blissful drag of vanilla smoke.
Lucky flowers, not having the bother of lusting over vampire kings. Unless they did. Unless they endured their own floral dramas we weren’t privy to.
Angst in the flowerbed.
Broken hearts and broken stems.
“Man, you’re such an idiot,” I told myself.
CHAPTER THIRTY
PARIS
We took a short walk down the path, about five minutes, passing through an invisible, humming barrier.
“Magical no-go,” Medusa said.
Here we go…
After another few minutes, we reached the famous cable cars connecting the city to the hills.
Glass ovals with a band of pearlescent metal around their middles, the two cars moved up and down their chunky cables. They were nearly silent apart from the gentle whir of the wheels and the pulley system above the station.
Hmmm. I wasn’t sure about getting in one of these. I’d rather walk. But the walk would take us about forty minutes, this hill seriously high. And Silvanus couldn’t just fly us down to the streets without drawing the attention of all those scanhawks.
Whoa. I’d never seen so many clustered together before.
The king ordered Elio to grab the tickets, the timing perfect. A car arrived just after my fellow elf made the purchase, releasing passengers who went off to South Hill Park, a popularspot further along the hill’s western side. A place Pearl wanted to visit because of its hot springs and climate.
Don’t think about this.
Half the year it was spring here, the other half Autumn. All the domains had their own unique climates. The Human Domain was temperate, cycling through four seasons a year.
It was always Summer in the Mer Domain, with two months of the year reserved for an intense monsoon season.
