“No.”
And then he put his mouth on hers, and he tasted like copper and salt and his lips were desperate against hers, and she broke away and said, “Not here, someone will see,” and took him to his room above the stables.
But up there, he only moaned, “I don’t care, I don’t care, none of it matters.” And he pulled her against him and parted her lips with his own and stroked his tongue against hers and she had never felt anything like that, like his mouth against her own, like the tingling sweetness of his tongue.
She gasped and sighed and tried to entangle herself. “You’re bleeding,” she breathed. “You’re bleeding and you need tending.”
“Fine,” he said and he stripped off his bloody shirt like it was nothing, and she supposed she’d seen him without it before. But now, they were so, so close and she still had the imprint of him on her lips and he was all bare and hulking and standing over her, and he smelled like temptation and lust, and she was shaking all over.
She put her fingertips on him, right below his collarbone. She dragged them down over his pectoral muscles.
He shut his eyes and let out one of his groans.
She pulled her fingers away, clenching them into a fist. She moaned, but it was a moan of regret, a moan of worry, because he had always been the one who made sure to hold back, and she could see he was untethered. He didn’t care about anything right now.
She darted across the room to find his wash basin and a towel. The wash basin was only half full. She tutted over his not having any care for washing. “I must go and fill this from the bucket downstairs, I see.”
He was undoing the laces of his breeches.
“What are you doing?”
“He stabbed my leg,” he said, lifting his chin, a challenge. “You’ll have to clean that wound, too. You said you’d tend to me.”
She let out another moan and came across the room, water sloshing out of the wash basin.
He pushed his breeches down and he wasn’t wearing anything under them and she gasped at the sight of him, because none of the male members she had ever seen were quite that large.
And itwasstiff. It was sticking straight out, thick, the head of it swollen, glistening in the light from his fire.
She could not stop staring at it. “Where’s the wound on your leg?”
He let out a laugh and collapsed down on his bed, totally naked. She saw it, then, the place on his leg where he was bloody. She set the wash basin down. She knelt in front of him.
He let out another groan.
She picked up the towel, dipped it in the water and began to wash the blood from the places he’d been slashed and stabbed.
It stung, he gasped and winced. But the stiff part of him stayed stiff. Maybe it got stiffer and bigger, she couldn’t say. She didn’t touch it, but shelookedat it. On her knees like this, she was eye level with it.
“I’m a bad man,” he said at one point, his voice labored. “We should cover up my cock.”
“Cock,” she repeated. She’d heard that word. “It’s beautiful.”
He laughed, but it was an affectionate laugh. “You shouldn’t be on your knees for me, fair elf. It’s obscene.”
“Is it?” she said, dabbing at another of his cuts. “Most of these are shallow, but this one…” She dabbed at it, too. It was on his arm. “It needs binding, and so do a few more. I should go find some fabric—”
“There are rags in the trunk outside the door,” he said. “But don’t go anywhere.”
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“Stay,” he said, reaching out to pick up a lock of her hair, fingering her light-colored curls.
“I thought it was obscene for me to be on my knees like this,” she breathed.
He only hummed, running his thumb and forefinger over her curls.
She went back to looking at his cock and dabbing at the places he was bleeding.
