Page 60 of Dare

The prince and I trailed the cords. As lapping water struck our ears, we sped up. Hiking through a cluster of bromeliads, we climbed a small knoll.

At the crest, my breath caught. The hill led to a wide lake, along with a crumbling rocky bridge that was no longer passable, with a chunk of the platform missing. Intricate statues of fauna balancing atop one another towered on either side of the bridge. Beyond the water stood a structure covered in dripping shags of foliage, with countless levels rising into the trees, verandas and colonnades lining every story.

“The fuck?” the prince uttered next to me. “What is this?”

But he knew as well as I did. Although this ancient palace didn’t exist in the written or spoken legend, anyone with eyes and a knowledge of the continent’s hidden enclaves could guess.

Wonder filled my voice. “Ruins.”

23

Jeryn

All I could concentrate on was her throaty sigh, which led to images of her railing my cock last night. Present sanity fled my mind, as it had less than twelve hours ago.

This woman on my lap, the hot temperature of her skin obliterating my restraint like a wrecking ball. The taste of her nipples. Her legs splayed open on my lap, her ass gyrating in my face, the trench of her pussy ramming into my cock as we rutted like animals in heat. Both of us leaking crimson from our wounds. Convulsions assaulting her body and how I’d almost fucking passed out when she climaxed onto my pants.

The despicable triumph of making her come. The aggravation because I hadn’t been able to watch her while it happened.

Finally, the indefensible self-disgust. Un-fucking-forgivable.

Discovering a palatial structure at the center of a rainforest failed to overpower the memory. With supreme effort, I refocused. The fortification rose into the canopy, its uppermost level shrouded from view. Based on the deteriorating bridge and plants choking the edifice, whoever once lived here had since passed.

This abandoned structure had to be centuries old. Colonnades and verandas were commonplace in Summer’s architecture, but the statues depicting a hierarchy of rainforest fauna dated this relic to an ancient era. Back then, perhaps this rainforest hadn’t been a legend so much as a pitstop among the kingdom’s islands, if not another official stronghold of this court.

The beast and I swapped ambitious glances. Shelter. Tools. Weapons. Many objects would have decayed or corroded by now, while others might have withstood the test of time. The ancients knew how to construct items that lasted, which justified why this building remained upright, dilapidated though it might be.

The beast stepped around me and pointed to the trees. The rope conveyor snaked through the branches, extended over the lake, and disappeared into one of the colonnades.

“They used rigging to transport resources across the forest,” I murmured. “Ingenious.”

“Marvelous,” she said with a grin. “Except the ropes are too brittle to work. They won’t hold much now.”

“We will fix that.”

Her head veered toward me. Those gold eyes blazed with hesitancy.

I twitched, registering my reply. I had said we.

Venturing a dozen feet across the platform, we reached the first obstruction. Pausing at the threshold, I braced my hands on my hips and contemplated the eight-foot-wide chasm between us and the rest of the suspension.

The beast and I measured the distance, then craned our heads over the ledge. The lake glistened as clear as glass. My brow furrowed with distrust. The waters of this realm could not be vouched for.

And that was even before my eyes landed on the skeleton. Stretching along the sandy floor, the curved vertebrae of a sea dragon lay amid stalks of swaying kelp. The lattice of gills, broad skull, flared wing bones, and row of teeth revealed enough. Swimming to reach the ruins was out of the question.

Naturally, the beast had already stepped toward the banister. With a hiss, I wheeled in front of her. “No.”

Her face scrunched, as if ordering her around had ever worked in my favor. “Oh, come on,” she argued. “I thought you were a scientist. Sea dragons are extinct, so that beauty and the rest of its kin have been dead for a while.”

“Which is sufficient enough time for them to have evolved into something else.”

“Are you always this determined to expect the worst from every situation?”

“I’m determined to be logical,” I ground out. “There’s a distinction between vigilance and neurosis. I’m not fearful of anything.”

She tilted her head, those eyes shining like brass. “I didn’t say you were. But if that’s true, I pity you.”

Pity me? Why the fuck would she pity me?

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