Though she was happy to play innocent anyway.
“You did. You did several times.”
“Then perhaps I should say it again, when you know I have all my senses.”
“I don’t need you to. I know you do. And I hope you know it, too.”
“But if I say no, you might let me hear it from your own lips.”
“Sweetheart, there is no might, there is no let. I love you, and as endlessly as you love me. You call and my sleeping feet will march to where you are. I call for you, and I have no fear that you will come. And I am not afraid to say it. You’ve stripped me of every single worry about doing anything like it,” she said.
Then he didn’t wait.
He took her in his arms, in his bed, under the painted stars.
She wanted to wait until he returned with food, before she raised the things they really needed to talk about. But even the food itself was a distraction. For some reason he brought her an entire wheel of cheese, and a huge still-steaming round of crusty bread, and allkinds of pickles and meats and salad items. Fat little tomatoes that popped under the pressure of her teeth. Sliced strips of cucumber that somehow produced the same amount of juice.
She ate ravenously, sitting up in his bed.
Bare from the waist up but uncaring.
“I’ll never get used to just being able to get whatever food I want,” she said, in between bites. “Growing up, we were lucky to get cheese at all. And if we did have it, it never tasted like this.”
Because it was salty and sweet. It filled her mouth with flavor.
She didn’t even need to slice it. You could scoop some out and almost spread it onto the bread. Truly, she thought, this place was the land of excess. A dragon’s horde kept from everyone else. She even said as much, after she’d finished, and he made the rubble vanish with a wave of his wand.
But his response was just a thoughtful look.
Like he was going over something, in his head.
It seemed like a good point to say something. “All right. That’s twice we’ve had sex instead of tackling the elephant in the room. And because the elephant in the room could, at any point, decide to murder us, I think we should at least try to make some more headway on talking about it,” she said, as she brushed crumbs from the bed and made space for him to sit back down.
He didn’t, however.
He took a second to hoist his sweater over his head. He bared his entire torso, from his shoulders to the line of dark hair just about the waistband of his jeans. And even though she’d just spent the last two hours exploring every inch of that broad, heavy chest, it almost distracted her again anyway. She found herself mooning over the glow of his skin in the low light. The steep curve of his back into the bloom of his ass. Then he started on hisbelt, the button on his jeans, and oh, she knew he was doing it on purpose. She knew.
“I don’t even remember where we got up to,” he said, as he let them drop.
She came very, very close to reaching for everything she could now see.
Those thick thighs, the slant of muscle either side of his groin, that heavy thing he’d used to make her beg him for more, barely half an hour ago.Oh god, don’t stop, she’d said, as he held himself over her. Waiting, just like he used to, until the peak she’d almost reached died down.
Before starting all over again.
Partly, she thought, so he could savor everything.
But mostly because it made her come so hard she almost couldn’t take it. It echoed in her now, as she watched him sprawl across the bed. One arm over his head, gaze just a little too knowing. A little teasing.
“You’re not going to win doing that,” she said, and his expression immediately shifted to exasperation. But he settled in to listen when she plucked her notebook from her bag, by the bed, and flicked to the right page. “Okay, so. We couldn’t find any evidence of students who look suspiciously like any of the ones who currently want to kill me. No Sebastian Silly Hair, no Oliver Chinless, no whoever tried to make me plunge to my death. Which leaves us with these professors, patrons, and members of the magical authorities.”
“I amcertainit’s the headmaster.”
“You only think so because of past events.”
“So you mean like that time when the one before Dodson tried to feed the entire school to an abyssal monster,” he said, so deadpanabout it that she couldn’t help laughing. She had to cut it off and replace it with a withering look.
“That doesn’t mean Dodson is the same way. You barely hear from him. He might as well not exist. In fact, honestly, I don’t even think he does. The last announcement he made, it sounded like Kirkpatrick to me. So who else?”
