Nectar of the Wicked (Deadly Divine, #1) (30)

A stroking touch of the strands of hair down my back startled me.

I looked over at Florian as he curled a lock of my hair around his finger. He rubbed it with his thumb. “Satin soft.”

That light touch was felt everywhere. The rapt focus he gave to something I’d never paid much attention to evoked a strange curiosity to know what he saw when he looked upon me.

A wide-eyed, soft-hearted, and woefully naive female whose ignorance of this cruel world fascinated him? A creature ripe for manipulation due to a disturbing lack of experience with much of anything?

As he took his hand away and studied his fingers as if their encounter with my hair had somehow changed them, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

The shadowed woods sweeping past us eventually brightened into dawn-washed towns.

I soaked every small and towering home in with my forehead glued to the cold glass of the window. Every shop and snow-flooded dirt road. Every fleeting glimpse of vibrant life that did not exist within written words or pictures.

I was here.

“What is this town called?”

Florian didn’t respond. I wondered if he’d fallen asleep and looked behind me.

He was wide awake and watching me. His elbow perched upon the covered window next to him, and his thumb rubbed over his lower lip. “Glennaya.”

“Glennaya,” I repeated, and stared back out the window as we neared a farming region. “How long will it take to reach your manor?”

“We should arrive in time for dinner.”

I settled back into the seat, but I was still unwilling to part with the views beyond the window.

I kept the drapes open, watching night bleed into morning. The colors of sunrise were the same in Folkyn—just as stunning and sparking with hope. I didn’t know why I’d expected the sky to be different when Mythayla watched over us all.

Florian told me the name of the next town we encountered before I could ask, and I gave him a grateful smile. But before I could gaze back at the stone dwellings in the distance, he said roughly, “Come to me.”

We were no longer in the Lair of Lust, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from him now. Nor had I had the time to ponder it. Then I remembered.

I was to be his wife.

I didn’t think that meant I had to do whatever he wished, but ignoring his request when I didn’t want to was asinine.

I moved closer to him, and he said, “Take a seat.”

Knowing what that meant, I climbed onto his lap, carefully and awkwardly in my coat and boots. He pushed the coat off my shoulders and draped it over the seat beside us. I supposed it was warm enough in the carriage that I could do without it.

It didn’t matter.

Ice could hang from the wooden ceiling. For when his hands cupped my hips, my entire body flooded with heat.

He leaned close to rumble against my mouth, “Never thought I’d envy a town.” The whisper of his lips expelled a fractured breath from me. “Nor the fucking snow.”

“And why would you?” I asked, lost to his harsh grip on my hips and how it contrasted with the barely-there gentleness of his kiss.

“The wonder in your eyes.”

Splaying my hands over his hard chest, I leaned back to better look at him. I laughed when I realized he was indeed envious.

The eruption of sound parted his lips. His eyes darted all over my face. My smile fell at the storm gathering within. “I need to touch you.”

“You already are.”

His ticking jaw warned not to toy with him.

I leaned forward to press my lips to his. “Then touch me, Majesty.”

A throaty growl left him, and as though I’d handed him the blade, the hold on his restraint snapped. My dress was pulled from my body with an aggression that tore the skirts and made the coins tucked within the pocket clink.

If Florian noticed I’d brought them when he’d made it clear I would want for nothing, then he didn’t let it show.

Left in only my slip, I shivered, but not from the cold.

The king’s impatience had faded, his gaze upon my breasts. He traced the hardened peaks of my nipples through my slip in a lazy and stomach-snatching circle. “I want to see them.”

The idea of being naked in a carriage did not exactly fill me with excitement. But the driver’s window was closed and covered, and the look in Florian’s eyes gave me the confidence to pull my arms from my slip.

I pushed the worn satin to my waist, suddenly self-conscious.

Florian was a king.

He’d likely seen more breasts in his existence than the number of times I’d left Rolina’s apartment. Yet the way he stared at mine, with his lips slack and his hands molding to my ribs beneath them, erased the insecurity.

As my anxiety fell, my curiosity climbed. “How old are you, Majesty?”

“Florian,” he grunted.

I smiled. “Florian.”

“One hundred and thirty-seven years,” he said absently.

I’d have thought him older, which did not bother me. Age was not something faeries worried about in the way mortals often did.

His hands squeezed my waist. “And in all those years, I’ve never seen...” His thumbs brushed the curving swells of my breasts. “Never touched anything so divine.”

I trembled. “And have you ever entertained someone in a carriage?” A foolish question, for he certainly had.