To no longer be alone.
“Keep your back straight,” he said instead. “And your elbows out.”
“I am!” she protested. Her shoulders visibly bunched underneath her thin white smock, as they always did when she was about to pick a fight.
“No—” Alaric stepped forward, impatient all of a sudden, eager to shake free of the chains of memory, to distract himself with something that wasn’t the terrible night Sancia Ossinast left Kesath. “Like this—”
He reached out to correct Talasyn’s posture at the same time that she straightened up with an exasperated huff, moving backward as she brought her feet together. His gauntleted hands closed on the tops of her shoulders and her spine pressed flush against his chest.
The world went still.
Mangoes was Alaric’s first coherent thought. That slick, succulent, golden fruit that graced every meal he had here in the Dominion, with its lush perfume of summer-warmed nectar. Talasyn smelled as if she’d been eating them, dusted in flaky sea salt. And that wasn’t all. Orange blossoms and the creamy floral note of promise jasmines wafted from her hair, tempered by cool green attar of lotus and the barest hint of cinnamon bark.
Alaric’s mouth watered. He wanted to bite down.
It didn’t help matters that Talasyn fit perfectly against him, that he could tuck her head under his chin, that her bottom was slotted between his hips and shapely enough to make the pit of his stomach clench. In a daze, he watched his leather-clad fingers spread over her shoulders. Watched his thumbs graze the sides of her neck.
He had never despised his gauntlets more. He longed to peel them off, to touch her sun-kissed skin. His thumbs moved in circular strokes, caressing the elegant slopes they rested against. She shivered, every tremor passing through him, touching off inner chords within him, and what was he hoping to achieve, why wasn’t he moving away, how had he never known that holding someone could feel like this?
The breeze picked up, shaking a rain of white petals loose from the plumeria trees. Amidst all those swirling snow-drop pieces of flowers that drifted on currents of faint perfume, she turned her head to look at him.
Her brown eyes were so wide in the sunlight, her breathing shallow, her pink lips slightly parted.
It overwhelmed him, then—a dark curiosity, a yearning to find out if those lips would taste like the pudding they’d just eaten.
Alaric leaned in. He lifted his fingers from Talasyn’s neck and curled them along the line of her jaw, gently nudging upward. She went willingly, relaxing against his chest, tilting her chin so that her mouth was suddenly so much closer to his than ever before. Petals whirling all around them, his heartbeat tremulous, he bowed his head further to bridge the scant distance. Her eyes slid to half-mast. She waited.
“Excuse me.”
Alaric and Talasyn sprang apart. Neither of them had even noticed Sevraim’s approach.
“What do you want?” Alaric growled at his legionnaire.
“I hate to interrupt—” And, the thing was, Sevraim really did seem abashed, conscientiously looking everywhere but at the two royals. “—but the Lachis’ka’s lady-in-waiting has just come to inform me that it’s time for His Majesty and Her Grace to prepare for the banquet.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The mirror in Talasyn’s dressing room was a polished glass oval framed by carved hummingbirds and squash vines, inlaid with lustrous chips of mother-of-pearl. She sat in front of it, once again laced into a spectacle of a garment, this one sewn from banana-stem fiber that gave it a multichromatic sheen, her neck stiff from bearing the weight of yet another gaudy crown. Jie pored over her with a plethora of long-handled willow brushes, dipped into small golden pots of various powders in order to paint on a face that would befit the Nenavarene Lachis’ka at a formal event.
Like any other day, Talasyn suffered in silence while her lady-in-waiting worked a different kind of magic. Unlike any other day, the inside of her head was all fuzzy with thoughts of Alaric. Of his stupidly large body so close to hers, warm and unyielding. Of his palms engulfing her shoulders, of the ridged leather of his gauntlets gliding along her neck.
By the World-Father’s yellow fingernails, she’d shivered. She’d actually shivered at Alaric’s touch, goosebumps prickling her skin. He’d taken such liberties with her, and she—
She hadn’t hated it.
It had made the oddest sort of yearning bloom within her.
Never mind that he was the cruel Night Emperor, the brutal Master of the Shadowforged Legion. She had, for a few horrifying moments, stared at his mouth, her traitorous body singing as that mouth drew closer. She had leaned back against him and tipped up her chin. She had wanted to be warmed all over. To see where it led.
Sol had liked to hold Khaede that way, Talasyn remembered. He would sneak up behind Khaede and put his hands on her shoulders or around her waist, rasping out a greeting before pressing a mischievous kiss to her neck, in plain sight of everyone.
Whenever Talasyn had seen that—whenever she saw how grumpy old Khaede melted into Sol’s arms—she had always wondered what it would feel like, if it was her and someone who loved her.
And now Sol was dead and Khaede was gone and Talasyn was grasping at straws again, likening the affection the two had shared to that pale parody of it in the plumeria grove which had been nothing more than an unfortunate, inexplicable accident between her and the man she hated, and who hated her.
She felt sick to her stomach.
Alaric had been about to kiss her, hadn’t he? Granted, she could claim no personal experience regarding such things, but it had been heading there, hadn’t it? Why?
Why would he even attempt to kiss her? And why, despite knowing what he was and all that he had done, had she even wanted him to?
Hate is another kind of passion, Niamha Langsoune had said the day the Kesathese arrived. Perhaps it was that. An aberration, like accidentally tapping into a different frequency because aetherwave wires had crossed. It could never be anything more than that, and Talasyn resolved to put it out of her mind—maybe even stab Alaric if he attempted to bring it up.
“You know, Your Grace,” Jie chirped as she deftly ran a willow-stick, the tip coated in ground-up brown pigment, through Talasyn’s brows, “I was just thinking the other day that Emperor Alaric isn’t so terrible-looking for an outsider. In my opinion, as far as physical appearances go, you could have done far worse. I’m serious!” she exclaimed with a slight laugh as Talasyn sputtered. “He’s a bit on the broody side and somewhat frightening, dressed all in black like that, but he’s tall and he has beautiful hair. And his mouth, it’s very—”
“Y-you stop right there!” Talasyn nearly shrieked, her reflection scarlet in the hummingbird mirror.
She couldn’t tell whether Jie’s lack of resentment toward Alaric was simply the girl making the best of a bad situation or genuine disinterest in the threat that Kesath posed to her homeland. Talasyn suspected that it might be the latter. Jie had grown up in a castle with a host of servants attending to her every whim, secure in the knowledge that she would one day inherit the title of daya from her doting mother. She was sixteen years old, incredibly chatty, and seemed not to have a single care in the world.