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Everyone shook their heads. Luz’s trio clapped hands with us and then split off. Elisa joined my side again, the alluring sweetness of her scent filling the air. Sai offered me his hand, and I grabbed it. “Be careful,” I whispered.
He clasped my grip tighter. “Aren’t I always?”
“No. But this time you need to be.”
“I will, Neia. Honestly.”
“All right.” I stepped back and bobbed my head at Lira.
Elisa and I turned, leaving Sai and Lira standing alone in the dark together.
CHAPTERTHIRTEEN
MARGO
The man—I’dforgotten his name already—ran his hands down my bare sides so that his thumbs grazed the outline of my breasts and brushed against my nipples. I moaned. Oh, fuck, he knew what he was doing. I hadn’t expected someone so delightful in a town like this. I pulled his mouth to mine and lifted my hips to grind against the hardness of him.
He gripped his hands into my hair and rolled us over on the coarse blankets. That was a drawback of the troupe waiting several days in this mud-flecked town. There wasn’t a scrap of silk in the place outside our dresses and accessories. Meals consisted mostly of tough loaves of bread and brothy soups.
At the next city I was having a steak, medium-rare, with mushroom cream sauce, garnished with olives and a sprinkling of dried dill next to a glass of red wine so rich it would only take two glasses to make me light and heady. I’d return the glass to the silk tablecloth and—
The man plunged a finger into me and curled it to hit a spot that pulled me out of my contemplations. Fuck the future. This was good enough. I kissed him again, dragged his lip between my teeth, hooked a leg around his back so that the warmth of both of us met, and he released a groan of his own. A grin slashed across my face.
He wasn’t the only one who knew what he was doing.
Oh, to feel the heat and length of him inside me. I was going to edge him until he begged to come.
The door flew open.
The man jumped back and clutched a blanket against himself. I shifted my eyes with annoyance towards the door. Palaria stood silhouetted by the hall lights. I propped myself on my elbows. “With respect, can whatever this is wait?”
“No.”
The way she spoke, how her eyes widened and her voice trembled snapped me out of the sex-infused haze.
“You’ll leave now,” she sang to the man who rose, pulled his clothes on, and walked out of the room.
“Fuck.” I jumped off the bed and dragged my shift over my head. “He actually knew what he was doing.”
“You’ll find another. This is important.”
I kicked the pile of my clothing to dislodge the tangle of them. “What is it?”
“I can’t find Lira.”
I pulled the dress over my head and laced up the front. “She’s probably just taking some time to herself. She wasn’t happy about last night.”
Palaria’s ivory hair glowed like gold in the lamplight, and she leaned against the rose-printed wallpaper. “I expected that, of course. It was her first time and—”
“It definitely wasn’t her first time.”
Palaria shot her eyes up to me. “What?”
I bit my tongue as I busied myself with tying ribbons to avoid speaking. Shit. I shouldn’t have said that out loud. Lira trusted me with her confidence, and even though we were as different as ice to flames, I liked her. She had an honesty and kindness that was rare in our band. Not that the other sirens were malicious exactly, they just put their own well-being and desires first. Lira didn’t. She’d more than a few times given up her precious reading hours to spend the night with me when I fell into one of my dark moods. She didn’t have magic to fix it, but she would sit with me and let me know someone cared that the world felt upside down.
Some girls avoided her because she was the leader’s daughter, others avoided speaking to her for fear of accidentally sharing things Palaria didn’t want her to know or because she was so skittish about our magic. The last time we’d truly tapped into our powers during a performance farther south—each of us using a ripple of magic to heighten the pleasure of the crowd so we could refuel our energy—Lira had refused to take to the stage. Still, that wasn’t Lira’s fault. She hadn’t grown up around us due to Palaria’s choices. Lira didn’t lord her status over anyone, either. In fact, she did the opposite. I don’t know how many times she’d told me in half breathed whispers she wished to give it up. Now I’d just blabbed to her mother that she’d had sex before. Damn me and my mouth.
“Apparently it wasn’t uncommon for girls at the boarding schools to have the odd tryst.”
