Page 52 of Queen of the Underworld

“I am thinking you have had too much ambrosia.” Those teasing words leaving her lips, spoken in a light tone, one that was warm and familiar, had him casting a black look at the violet bottle.

“I was thinking the same.” He huffed at it and how deeply it had affected him, chastising himself for taking too much and allowing it to addle his mind. Right now, he didn’t feel like a god-king, much less a god-king of the Underworld.

Persephone smiled, her soft lips curling into a faint one that lasted only a moment before she caught herself, but the damage was done.

It hit him in the chest like a spear, lancing his heart.

“By the gods, you are beautiful,” he uttered in the language of the Underworld, an attempt to keep his feelings concealed from her that he feared had failed as the words came out soft and almost breathless.

A crinkle formed between her scarlet eyebrows and her green gaze grew shrewd again. She was trying to understand the language, picking out the words and probably filing them away to ask his servants about later.

“What does that mean?” She drifted a few steps towards him, leaving the balcony behind, and that handful of steps and her desire to learn from him instead felt like a victory to him. He had tried to draw her towards him all night, and she had resisted. If he had known he only had to pique her curiosity by speaking the tongue of his realm, he would have been speaking it from the moment he set foot in the room. She glowered at him. “You spoke like that before. It is not a language I know.”

“Ask me to teach it to you and I might just be foolish enough to do it, little queen,” he murmured in the tongue of his realm as his gaze drifted over her, taking in how strikingly lovely she was when she was facing him without fear, staring him down and looking ready to plant her hands on her hips and put him in his place. Odd that he almost liked the thought of her ordering him around. He nearly smiled too. “I tell you that you are beautiful in this tongue and you cannot rebuff me, for you do not understand these words that pour from some deep place within me, one that had been buried in darkness before your sweet voice caressed my ears and your beauty enchanted my soul.”

Some part of him expected her to pick him up on the words he had used that she had learned from his servant, but instead she attempted a ruse, as if his servant wouldn’t have immediately informed him of her questions and what had transpired between them. His little queen was devious, or at least thought she was. She hoped to fool him into telling her more about his language, when all she had to do was ask him to teach her it.

Her lips flattened. “It is not fair that you speak in a tongue I cannot understand. If you want to be cruel to me, then you can leave.”

She turned her back on him again and tipped her chin up.

He growled as she snatched her beauty from him, her punishment cutting him deeply, but not as deeply as her order to leave. He vaulted from the bed and was across the room in an instant, his hands closing over her shoulders as her heat enveloped him and her scent of lilies calmed him.

Warmed him.

Hades stilled and pulled down a breath to steady himself as he realised how close he was to her now, and felt the softness of her skin beneath his callused palms. She was trembling. Fear. She feared him again. Or she feared something perhaps.

He gazed at her exposed nape and frowned as he lifted his hand to her crimson hair. It was damp, fashioned into a plait that circled her head like a crown. Her fair skin was clean and almost as alluring as the thought she had bathed before he had arrived. He wanted to ask her about that, if only to see the blush that would stain her cheeks.

Hades almost scoffed aloud at that.

If her cheeks reddened, it would be with anger before she ruthlessly compared him to males far more worthy of her attention.

He didn’t want that, but some reckless, desperate part of him desired to see if she would indeed blush over something he said, overruling the sensible one that said to remain silent on the subject.

Hades dropped his head and murmured against her skin, “Did you bathe nude?”

She tensed and whirled out of his grasp, coming to face him, her luminous green eyes enormous.

And filled with banked heat.

Her mouth flapped open and then closed, and her brow furrowed, and her heartbeat ticked a fast rhythm in the tempting column of her throat, making his lips itch with a desire to trace the line of it and feel that fluttering pulse against them.

A reaction he had caused.

But not quite the one he wanted.

He thought for a moment she would remain in control and deny his dark desires to see the effect he had on her, and then a hint of rose climbed her cheeks and she didn’t know where to look. Her gaze left him, darting everywhere as it avoided him.

After a few seconds of struggling, she finally found her footing and snapped, “It is none of your business.”

She had bathed nude.

“By the gods,” he uttered in their common tongue this time as he turned towards the beaten gold bath and scrubbed a hand down his face as his shaft swelled at the image of her in it, the milky blue water barely concealing her naked curves. “You shall be the death of me.”

He looked back at her. A mistake. His gaze instantly dropped to her body, hungrily raking over those curves, his mind running amok and taunting him with fantasies of stepping up to her and seizing her waist in his hands to pin her to the wall so he could take his fill of her and sate this need that was only growing more and more agonising each day. The way her small hands balled into fists had him pulling back on the reins of his desire, driving awareness through him. If he attempted to kiss her, he would frighten her and would undo all his hard work. He had to be patient.

He had to make her want him so fiercely that she would readily submit to him.

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