“I’ve never been in a carriage,” I said to snap free of my thoughts and the growing tension, and to try to slow the pace of my heartbeat at his closeness. I’d have thought the king would materialize us straight to his manor, but I wasn’t about to complain. “Do you usually visit Crustle this way?”
“Your body would not handle materializing over such a vast distance. It takes time to build resistance to the laws of energy that wish to keep things as they are.”
I kept my focus on the wilderness beyond the glass window, all the while knowing he had every inch of it. “Is that why I’ve never ended up far from home?” Each time I’d materialized, I’d found myself in the library at the bottom of our apartment building.
The king didn’t answer.
I could feel his gaze upon me. A weight that called for my full attention. I gave it to him, turning and letting the drapes fall closed.
He watched me for a moment that warmed. “I assume wherever you ended up, you felt safest there.” A statement, but I still nodded. He blinked, then looked behind me to the window. “Yes. Though I’m sure if another place gave you refuge, you’d manage to materialize there just fine, too.”
“No matter the distance?”
His eyes returned to mine, cold and dark. “Distance and energy are no match for desperation.”
Those words hung between us like thawing frosted webs.
I blinked first, my eyes dropping to his chest. He still only wore a light, long-sleeved shirt. Another that revealed a glimpse of his chest. His hands were folded in his lap, his thumb gliding idly across the other.
His soft question brought my eyes back to his. “What happened before you unintentionally materialized somewhere?”
The desire to look away and brush off his question took hold. The knowing darkness to his blue gaze told me lying would be futile.
I adjusted my damp skirts and studied the smooth leather of the boots he’d given me. “I was feeling…” I chewed my lip before settling on, “Overwhelmed, I suppose.”
Florian made a sound of contemplation. “In the young and untrained, the gift of materializing will present itself when one is severely injured, fears for their life, or…” He said with gentle lethality, “Both.”
I swallowed thickly.
“Butterfly,” he urged, low. “Which one was it?”
Rolina’s wailing screams and silent violence threatened to take me back. I wouldn’t go back. I refused to when I was finally going forward. So I said, “Both,” in a tone that conveyed I would say nothing more.
The king didn’t press further. Shifting the drapes aside, I gave my eyes to the landscape once more as we moved through the dense darkness of the woods.
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.