Page 64 of Heart’s Rescue

Rowan

Literally the Only Man Around

Oh, by all the beasts and whispers of the void, this woman! This woman could kill me, and I’d die happy. I’d die the happiest man in the Lands Below.

I’d thought the sight of Arryn coming apart in my arms was the hottest damn thing I’d ever seen in my life, but here she is riding me, the firelight casting her skin in bronze and gold, the sounds coming out of her mouth enough to make my throbbing cock ache and, by the voids, I’m going to be ruined for life. She’s driving hard against my hand, her sex tight and hot around my cock, her thighs clenched around my waist, and voids help me, this is it. This is the hottest fucking moment of my life—

Arryn screams. Her body closes around me, pulling me into her, and damn, I’m right there with her. My own climax rips through me, pleasure wrung out of every part of my body, my hips lifting us both off the furs as my seed pulses into her. And I come so hard I swear I can see those mythical stars.

Arryn collapses against my chest. I’m half asleep, and I feel half-drunk, breathing in her scent, running my fingers along her back. I’m going out like this, I think, as pleasure curls my insides. I’m falling asleep inside her, this glorious, brilliant, beautiful woman. This lady from the Worlds Above.

Something cold brushes through my mind, like a tail dragging through the snow. My eyes snap open. Arryn’s curled up on my chest, her breath soft and steady against my neck. I reach out to my magic, feeling my way through the forest around us. It’s quiet out there, desolate and lifeless and dark. There’s no one else, no soft, magical creatures, not even a void beast stalks these trees.

No, that something cold must have come from my own mind. I frown and shift in the furs, rolling Arryn to one side as our bodies come apart with a sound like a soft kiss. She sighs in her sleep as the fire casts flickering shadows across her dark skin. Voids, she’s so beautiful. She’s more beautiful than anything in the Lands Below.

Because she's not from the Lands Below, some horrible part of me answers. Because she so obviously is not part of this dying world. And even if she was, even if she’d been cast down here after the war like all the rest of us, she still wouldn’t be a part of my Lands Below.

She’s high-born. Arryn is a lady. Everything about her screams it. The dress she’d been wearing when she arrived. Her impractically long hair. The tutor she’d mentioned. We could both have spent our entire lives down here, in what’s left of the Kingdom of the Fall, and she still wouldn’t be part of my world.

My chest aches like I’ve been punched in the ribs, and suddenly I’m thinking of Phaedron. He’d been so convinced Shenarah was the woman for him. We’d both been young and stupid, of course, back in the days when it was still warm enough during the glowsoft cycles to grow hardy crops. Back when, occasionally, people still got married.

Shenarah was a lady from the Crystal City, but still, I liked her well enough. She’d had more sense than the rest of them, and she’d even had some spirit. She’d come to the World’s End with her friends on some sort of grand trekker adventure, and Phaedron had fallen for her. Fallen hard. He’d joined her on her trek, and when they’d returned, he’d told me they were going to be married. We’d go live in the Crystal City, he’d said. He’d even started packing.

Poor idiot.

Looking back, I think Shenarah believed it too. She’d told us both we’d go live with her parents in the Crystal City. She’d looked at my brother with those big, stupid doe eyes, just like he’d looked at her. I think she’d honestly thought there was room in the Crystal City for two low-born scumbags like us.

Phaedron left with her. He said he’d send for me once things were set up.

One day later, he’d kicked open our front door, thrown his suitcase across the floor, grabbed one of my bottles, and gotten horribly, puking drunk for the first and last time in his life. Somehow, over the course of mopping up his vomit and wiping away his tears, I’d gotten the gist of the story.

Shenarah’s folks hadn’t been thrilled with the match, surprise, surprise. No one was having babies down here, but high-born ladies were still high-born ladies, and marriages still meant alliances. Especially back then, when there was still talk about what would happen when King Galan brought the barrier down and we all went skipping back into the Worlds Above. Shenarah’s family’d been hoping to pair her with someone high-born, or maybe even that grade-A asshole Orryen, the one and only Captain of the Royal Guard. Shenarah’d put up a bit of a fuss about the whole arranged marriage thing, and apparently her father had given her a choice.

Fine, he’d said. Marry whomever you want. And lose everything.

No more life in the Crystal City. No more fancy clothes, no more royal parties, no more family. No more anything. Marry Phaedron and you get… Phaedron. Oh, and his dumpy little shack at the World’s End, where you can live with his freak magic brother.

Obviously, she’d come to her senses pretty quickly. Phaedron got dumped on his ass, got drunk, and then got the fuck over it. And he’d been a little more cautious after that. He still showed the ladies a good time, of course, and occasionally one or two of them stuck around long enough to start making noise about moving in. But Phaedron knew it wouldn’t last, and it didn’t. Sooner or later, the sex got old, and they all went home. He’d learned his lesson.

Something snaps deep inside the fire, sending a cascade of sparks through the hole in the roof, and I shiver. Phaedron had to get his heart broken to teach us that particular lesson. I wasn’t going to make the same stupid mistake.

I pull my arm out from under Arryn’s neck. She sighs a little in her sleep, soft and sweet, and my chest aches like an old bruise.

No. I roll onto my back, cross my arms under my head, and stare into the murky gloom on the other side of the shelter’s smoke hole. This is a temporary thing, what just happened with me and the lady from the Worlds Above. She wanted to blow off some steam, and I am literally the only man around; if we’d been in the Worlds Above, Lady Arryn wouldn’t even look at me. This is a fluke, a stupid accident, and I’d have to be an idiot to forget it.

I’m many things, but I’m not an idiot.

“Oh!”

Arryn gasps, and I spin toward her, my heart already rising in my throat, my magic snaking beneath the snow, searching for threats. There’s a void beast ahead, I know it, but has it moved? Has it threatened her?

Arryn’s holding a mitten to her lips; her eyes are sparkling like she’s just seen something amazing. I realize my heart is racing like a rabbit’s and try to calm the fuck down. She just made a noise, that’s all. She made one tiny sound and I panicked like the barrier was coming down. Voids, what is wrong with me?

“Yeah?” I ask.

My voice is harsher than I’d intended. Some of the sparkle leaves Arryn’s eyes, and my chest starts up its stupid, dull ache again. She’d looked at me like that this morning too, when I’d pulled away from her soft, sleepy embrace, despite the very loud objections of my idiotic cock, and started to take down the shelter before she’d even gotten out of the bed roll.

Yeah, well, we were low on food. It didn’t make sense to spend the morning fucking when we should be heading toward Fringe. And the teleportation hubs. And the Crystal City, where we’d find the only thing in either of our worlds that could stop the spread of that deadly infection on her arm.