“Sleeping and eating,” Selena says firmly, bending down to kiss my forehead. She smells like blossoms and budding leaves, and I wonder if this is what it feels like to have a mother who loves you.
“How’s Hades?” I ask before she goes.
She gives me a significant look. “Virile. As always.”
I smile. I get it now. “Give Cerberus a pat.”
She arches one sculpted eyebrow. No one pats Cerberus. Selena and I are the only ones who even go near him. He terrifies everyone else.
She squeezes my fingers before rising. “Cerberus didn’t guard the circus until you came. He hasn’t been around since you left.”
It takes a moment for her words to sink in. Hades may be her lover, but Cerberus is my watchdog. My eyes blur, and my nose stings, and I’m not really sure why. I press my lips together, holding a flood of emotion at bay.
Selena leaves with Carver after delivering a series of grisly threats to Griffin. I don’t hear everything, but I hear enough to know he’d better not let anything happen to me.
Taking a slow breath, I turn to the man I love. He’s been standing off to one side, hovering, protective and extremely male. “She won’t carry through.”
He looks dubious. Selena must have been pretty convincing. “You mean she won’t personally rip my beating heart from my chest and string my innards from one end of the Underworld to the other?”
I make a face.
“Or lop off my head and give it to Cerberus for a chew toy?”
I mash my lips together to keep from smiling. “That would be a terrible waste of a handsome head.”
“Or have a Cyclops pummel me with its meaty fists until my bones are splinters and my organs ooze out?”
I grimace. “Ack!”
Griffin grunts. “More like ouch.”
I laugh, clutching my aching middle, and in that moment, I don’t care that Griffin has all but vowed to uncover everything I can’t bear to confide in him, that he wants to take over the realms, that Andromeda is coming for me, that I have thunder and lightning in my veins, or that I am destined to end the world as we know it. But when my smile dies, I close my eyes for the briefest of seconds and see war and crumbling kingdoms and me in the middle of it all, and I can’t help wondering how fleeting my happiness will be, and how many people will suffer along with me.
I open my eyes and meet Griffin’s steady gaze. “I love you, and I’m so glad you love me, too.”
His eyes widen at my admission. He stops mid-breath, his whole body going utterly still. “Live together, or die trying?” he asks, his voice a deep rasp.
I nod. “Us. Together. Forever.” I speak instinctively, trustingly, and this time magic whips through me, acknowledging the unbreakable promise even as fate whispers in my ear that my forever might not last long.
I hold out my hand. “Make love to me.”
His gray eyes ignite. “Are you sure?”
“I want you. In me. Around me. Always.”
He’s by my side in an instant, achingly fierce, terrifyingly gentle, afraid that I might break. With each caress, each softly spoken endearment or sensual drag of his lips over my skin, Griffin heals me in a way no magic ever could. And when he rises above me, filling me completely, he’s a rock and a wall—my shelter, my home. He wraps his arms tightly around me, thrusting slowly to drive my pleasure to new heights. He kisses my shoulder when I shudder beneath him and then joins me in completion, offering me his strength as his head drops to my neck and his powerful body quakes and trembles. When he shifts to the side, he cups my jaw and feathers his lips over mine, murmuring words of adoration and praise that sweep aside my fear of the confrontation between us I know is yet to come.
I kiss him back and touch every part of him that I can reach. And when he makes love to me again, I don’t cry at his tenderness even though I feel like I might, and I don’t tell him that if I were going to break, it would have happened a long time ago.
The series continues in Book 2 of The Kingmaker Chronicles, Breath of Fire!
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HERE’S A SNEAK PEEK AT BOOK TWO IN AMANDA BOUCHET’S RIVETING KINGMAKER CHRONICLES TRILOGY
BREATH OF FIRE
Dawn breaks over the Ice Plains, turning the icicles lining the mouth of the cave into fiery daggers. Around us, a landscape of white, gray, and glacial blue slowly emerges from the night like a cautious beast leaving the shadows—still, monumental, treacherous. In the silence of daybreak, Griffin takes steel to flint, lights one of our two torches, and then hands it to Kato.