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Yet I wanted to do just that.
“Stop touching me,” I said again, this time putting more command into my voice.
“I can’t. ”
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sp; I lifted my hands to push his away, but the moment I had more skin-to-skin contact, my train of thought vanished. Why was it important I move his hands? Didn’t they feel good? I liked it when Holden touched me. I liked the way his lips felt against mine, the gentle caress of his tongue in my mouth eager and adventurous.
The soul-crushing ecstasy of his bite—something I’d only experienced in dreams.
What would be the harm in letting him touch me now?
I’d never been a religious person, but something in the back of my mind kept repeating, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…
But what fun was life without giving in to temptation every now and then?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The fairy king was fucking with me.
He’d managed to turn my boyfriend into a slobbering beast then turn me and a two-hundred-year-old vampire into horny teenagers. All in the span of an hour. If this was his way of testing my mettle, I must have been failing hard.
I’d experienced some weird shit in my life. My memories had been stripped away from me once, taking with them any awareness I had of who Desmond and Lucas were. But the feeling of knowing I should know someone, yet not having the faintest clue why… It was nothing compared to this.
The violation I felt would have been one thing if the emotions being toyed with were complete fabrications. Had the fae invented a lust between Holden and me, I might have been better able to fight it because I would know it was wrong. In my head, I’d be able to recognize what I was feeling wasn’t real. The emotions and desires weren’t mine.
What made this so much worse was the feelings were mine.
My yearning for Holden was being played against me like a skilled poker player would abuse an obvious tell. The king must have known or seen more than he let on, because he had found and exposed all my weaknesses in less time than it took for The Real Housewives of New Jersey to get into a catfight.
“Holden…”
“I’m sorry. I can’t. ”
My fingers were clasped around his wrists, and I could feel the strain of his muscles as he fought to pull his hands away from my face. He wasn’t hurting me, but the effort he was making was evident. I wasn’t the only one here fighting a losing battle against the fairy king’s forces.
“It’s a spell,” I told him, though I wasn’t sure that’s what it was.
What good was it to know the rules of a dimension when none of them seemed to apply? We hadn’t had anything to eat or drink. We hadn’t thanked anyone or accepted any gifts. Certainly the room couldn’t count as a present since we were being forced to stay under the terms of the king’s agreement with me. I didn’t know if the fae had lawyers, but that couldn’t be a loophole, could it? I doubted Calliope would send us off without saying whatever you do, don’t stay at the castle, if it was a sneaky backdoor way to entrap us.
But what, then?
By simply entering into the arrangement with him had I opened myself up to being played? He’d said he wanted to observe me, and I’d agreed. Maybe he hadn’t planned to observe me like I was a creature at the zoo. Maybe he wanted to see how I did in action, like a mouse navigating a maze under the watchful eye of scientists.
If this was a test, I didn’t know what the goal was. Did he want me to give into my deeply felt urge to make love to Holden, something I’d been fighting against for over a year? Or was I supposed to fight against the spell and reject the sex?
Weighing the different options was making my already addled brain fry itself worse than ever. I no longer knew if there was a way to logic my way out of this. Applying human logic to the fairy world was like trying to solve a quadratic equation using a Shakespearean soliloquy as your guideline. Iambic pentameter could only take you so far in solving for X.
“We need to get out of the room,” I told him.
“I don’t want to. ”
“It’s a spell,” I repeated. “We need to get out of the room. ”
Holden licked the palm of my hand, and I shuddered, struggling to remember what I was trying to do. “I don’t care if it’s a spell. ”
His phrasing nagged at me. “You do care. ”
