Page 180 of Winter Gods & Serpents

“I’d let you kiss me elsewhere too, but till you make that request I’ll grant you this one.”

I stared at her, long and hard. The unexpected words she uttered, how terribly fast they made my blood rush. Sucking in a deep breath I leaned and pressed my lips over her warm skin. I could not explain how it felt, that touch. It would be like explaining satiety to the hungry, prosaic and scant.

“You know I want you, Kilian, and I have no shame to admit I have wanted you perhaps since the first time I saw you. You are too handsome, and tempting, and smart for your own good.”

“I want you too, Snow.” More than how she wanted me. More than how she could ever want me.

“So to be clear, was that at only at night?”

I laughed over her hair. “You damned woman and those jokes of yours that have me think of you every second of the day.”

“Ah,” she murmured. “So it is at day time now too.”

“All the time. All the fucking time.”

She rose her head again, still sticking tight to me and blinked surprised. “What do we do?”

We. It was the both of us now, not just me. “I would give in but at a price that I don’t wish to pay. What I hardly built with you. I got close to you, and you’d push me away, taking this and overthinking it till you’d blank me out.” I ran my thumb over her eyes and down her nose. “I want the madness, the feisty, the angry, the jokes. Gods, I don’t think I can bear without hearing those lewd, lewd jokes of yours.”

“How do I stop thinking about this?”

I halted my finger over her lips, thinking about everything else besides not thinking about this. “Step one, enough reading that dubious book. Enough with page forty.”

She blinked wide and I noted the blush heating her cheeks. “You have read it?”

I shrugged. “Got me curious, got me extremely disturbed after page twenty.” Miss Hawthorne had a wild imagination.

Her mouth parted open. “Those little comments? Were they yours? I had hid the book between the shelves so it must have been you.” She gaped wide eyed in realisation.

“Yes, I tried to guide you out of her madness.” She laughed hard and I narrowed my eyes on her. “It is lies.” And I was serious.

She frowned. “It is not, how would you know?”

“I cannot possibly ever put you in that position and do what she claimed her lover to have done.” Not denying I had not tried to imagine—I had, much more than that too.

“I thought we were making a list how to stop thinking about it and now all I am thinking is you putting me in every position possible or impossible.”

I sighed, my arms tightening around her. I needed this woman with every grain of my fibre, but I needed her to be well above everything. Well, and near me. Her solution in solving what had her overthink was to erase. “Friends?”

She blinked wildly. “Me and you? Friends?”

“It sounded more ridiculous after I said it out loud. A treaty? Me and you, how we were?”

“Deal.”

“Deal,” I said, sealing another kiss on her brow and she almost melted in my embrace.

“Will you in all honesty not ask?” she demanded strongly, almost upset.

“Ask what?”

“To kiss me, elsewhere.”

“The treaty—”

“Not yet in effect. It is when I say it is.”

I bit my lip, suppressing my smile. She rose a brow and tapped her foot loudly.