Page 94 of Crowned By the Fae King

His fingers slid between my stockings and panties, then started tracing down along my thighs as he slid my stockings down. Cass lingered, his warm palms dragging across my skin with worshipful appreciation.

My panties were teal lace-top cotton. Not what I would have chosen to seduce a man, but perfectly respectable. Thank goodness.

The rough pads of his thumbs skimmed across the backs of my knees in time with another luxurious taste of my skin, and I nearly fell over. Cass laughed, a low rumble full of wicked satisfaction.

Two can play mean, I thought to him, and slid two of my fingers into my mouth.

"Fuck," he groaned. His open mouth pressed against my spine, every panting breath leaving my body begging for more. The heavy throb of his pulse in his groin left my core aching and mouth watering. It wasn't my fingers I wanted on my tongue. Do it again, sunlight, he begged me through our bond, a plea matched by a hard twitch of his trapped cock.

The door opened.

Cass froze and I jumped, almost falling down from the grip Cass had on my calves. Dani stared at us like a deer in headlights.

"Uh," she said. "I, uh." She blinked several times. "Should I go?"

Cass recovered first. He got gracefully to his feet, body falling back under his control, and took a step back. "No, that's alright," he said, emotion roughening his voice. "I should change. And wash. I'm covered in blood."

He fled before Danica or I could say anything, vanishing through the door that connected to our theoretically-shared room.

I crossed my arms over my chest and flattened my mouth at her. "Your timing leaves something to be desired."

She grimaced. "Yeeeaaaah," she said, drawing the word out. "I got that."

"Cockblocker," I said.

Her lips twitched. "Yeah, I got that part, too."

I made a face and crouched to take my stockings off the rest of the way. "Maybe it's for the best," I said with a sigh. "Having sex right after a bunch of emotionally-taxing events is a recipe for morning-after regrets."

"Or a very happy soulmate," she said helpfully, giving me a bright smile.

I made an exaggerated frown at her.

Dani only laughed and came in, taking a seat on one of the spindly breakfast-table chairs. "Well, while I do wish my timing had been significantly later, do you want the report?"

I opened my mouth to say yes, then paused, reconsidering. "Let's wait until Cass gets back," I said, my brows pulling together. He and I had gotten into the bad habit of me doing everything, but so had everyone else. It would take some purposeful attention to undo that. "He's the King, after all. He should know what's happening."

She blinked in surprise. "Does he want to know?" she asked after a moment. "The impression I got was that he's been doing his damndest to live his normal life and leave the running of the Court to you and the bureaucracy."

"He has been." I picked up my heap of clothing and started laying it over the rack for cleaning. Maybe the dress could be saved. "I think that's going to change, though. I think it has to."

"Well, alright." Her mouth slanted up, and Dani laced her fingers behind her head. "If Cass is stepping up, I'm not going to stop him. Want to tell me more details about what happened once those walls went up? Vaduin didn't get much out of Cass."

I was struck, again, by how lovely she was. It was no surprise that Vaduin looked at his soulmate like she was the most beautiful woman in the world. The wonder was that Cass looked at me like that, even when someone like Danica was in the room.

"Yeah," I said, a beat too late. "I can do that."

Aftermath

Ifilled her in on the details as I got dressed, and then while sitting in the main room of the monarchal suite, eating a dinner that should have been stone cold and instead was at the perfect temperature, without any indication that it had been sitting for six-plus hours. Dani's expression grew more and more troubled as the story went on, but she didn't have any particular critiques of how we'd handled Faerqen. Coming out of an attack by a goddess alive and with a powerful (if terrifying) ally was probably pretty close to a best-case scenario.

Cass joined us maybe twenty minutes after he'd vanished, with his damp hair braided back and dressed in black combat leathers of some kind. Dani gave him an appreciative sidelong look that had every one of my soulmate-bond-issued possessive hackles raised, and launched into her recital of the state of the union.

Cass gave me a raised brow that told me he'd seen that flash of jealousy on my face. I very studiously focused on Danica instead of meeting his eyes, but I couldn't escape the self-satisfied purr of pleasure curling through our bond. He might not have liked being the center of attention, but he definitely liked me being jealous over him. Maybe he'd wear something like that coronation revel outfit again if I got possessive about it.

I gave myself a mental shake and refocused on Dani's words. It was a lot less pleasant than thinking about Cass in body-chains and leather. The two fires Cass had put out were the two fires that hadn't been smothered yet, not the only ones. Before they'd left, Paloma and about a third of the religious administrators had done their best to leave devastation behind. Every one of the record rooms had been set ablaze, as had a number of important offices. Our quartermaster Killaren had tried to stop a small group from torching his office, and had been badly beaten and left in his burning office to die.

Under ordinary circumstances, he probably would have died, but he was in the Clement Palace, and the palace answered to Cass. Even without Cass' purposeful intervention, his reflex healing was affecting more than the landscape. Like the slow healing of the ground when Cass slept, Killaren's wounds had healed in time for him to wake and crawl out of the burning room—and he'd been fully healed by the time the palace guard had found him, save for fresh burns from rescuing what he could from the flames.

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