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“What happened?” he demanded, gripping me to his chest tightly as his gaze swept the room, looking for an enemy of some kind to rip apart.
I clutched him fiercely. “I hurt you,” I said to him, tears still dripping down my face. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t realize—I didn’t know. I’m sorry.
His body relaxed a little as he realized why I was crying, and he carried me back into the small house and sat down on the floor with me. There was no door yet, separating our balcony from our house, but I didn’t care. “I didn’t give you the book to make you cry,” he said gently.
“You wanted me to understand,” I said, my forehead pressing to his neck.
“No, you wanted to get to know me. The book seemed like the easiest way to make that happen,” he explained. His hand stroked my back softly, calmingly. “Don’t cry about the past, Mariah. We’re here, now. Together. Safe.”
“I should’ve realized sooner,” I said, still leaking tears. “We lost so much time.”
“We have forever.” He continued stroking my back. “All is as it should be, and you are everything I need. I would suffer that pain again in a heartbeat and wait as many more centuries as I needed, to have you here, in my arms. I may not know your favorite food, or what you miss most about Earth, but I know of your quiet strength. I know that you take joy in cooking for the sisters you claimed. I know that your eyes water sometimes, when you read—and that you love books as much as I do. I know that I love you.”
The urge to kiss him, to physically connect with him, became unbearable. I pulled away from him, lifting my mouth to his as his hand slid beneath my tank top, stroking my bare back just as lightly and gently.
Our lips collided, and I dragged my body closer to his, sitting on his lap and straddling him. I wanted tofeel him. I wanted his hands on my skin, his body on mine.
One of his hands pressed into the stone beside us, and I ripped my mouth away from his when I felt the house shake.
His tongue dragged slowly over my collarbone, then worked with his lips as they moved over my throat, making me rock against him as I watched a plank of wood grow slowly over the doorway, until it blocked us completely from whatever eyes were in the forest.
“I want to be your mate,” I told Ervo.
His lips halted on my throat.
His erection throbbed beneath me.
“Tell me your favorite color,” he said a moment later, then sucked lightly on my sensitive skin.
“Blue, like the water in the lake that surrounded the female fae’s island.”
He sucked lightly on my throat again, his hands sliding further up my back beneath my tank top, and making me arch slightly against him.
“I don’t know why you wanted to come to Vevol, outside of escaping your family” he murmured.
“Because I was tired of being worthless. Of living pointlessly. Of meaning nothing to everyone I should’ve mattered to.”
His eyes lifted to mine, burning with anger. Not anger directed at me, I knew, but at the family I had mentioned.
“I want you inside me,” I told Ervo. “Tomorrow, we can talk more about my past. About yours, too.”
His fingers curled into my spine. “I won’t do something you’ll regret, Mariah.”
“I’ll regret tonight, if you don’t take your damn clothes off.”
He chuckled softly, and stripped my tank top over my head, leaving me bare from the waist up. His eyes moved slowly, hotly over my skin. While one of his hands remained on my back, the other found my front and slowly slid up my ribs, over the curve of my breasts, against the tight peaks of my nipples. “Let me take care of you tonight. In the morning, we can discuss mating.”
He slid down my body, and sucked my clit between his lips.
I stopped thinking.
Nearly stopped breathing, too.
And when he made me lose control with a scream, there was definitely no arguing from me.
When we talked about mating, after I came down from my high and returned the favor to Ervo, we agreed that we would wait to become mates until we had spent more time getting to know each other.
He wasn’t willing to risk me regretting our decision—and I respected that tremendously, because I felt the same way, even if I was still willing to take the risk.
