Page 126 of A Pact of Blood

Even with the rush of lust, I can’t shake the impression I got. Willing down my hunger, I cup her cheek and peer up at her.“Are you sure?—”

She frames my face with her forearms. “I need you.”

Those three words undo me. Then she’s kissing me harder and I don’t know how to do anything but answer the plea she’s making.

I trail one hand down her side to caress her ass, and she rocks against me with torturous pressure. When she tears her lips from mine next, her voice is so ragged it nearly undoes me. “Lorenzo, can we— Do we have time?—?”

Before the others get here? The bells have only barely rung ten. But I don’t know if I could refuse her even if I expected my foster brothers five minutes from now.

“Take whatever you need, Rell,”I say, and groan as she rubs herself even more emphatically against me. It manages to occur to me through the growing haze of desire that I should probably clarify something else.“I’ve been taking mirewort, so you don’t need to worry about those potential consequences.”

For a second, her stance over me tenses. “It’d have been fine anyway—it should be too late for anything to happen this time around.”

I reach up to caress her jaw.“Maybe it already has.”

Her smile looks sad, but then she dives in to kiss meagain. I tangle my fingers in her hair, wanting to give her everything I can.

Through our ravenous kisses, she hitches up the skirt of her gown around her waist and fumbles with the fastening on my trousers. I help her loosen them and take the moment to stroke her through the dampened silk of her drawers.

Aurelia’s breath quavers against my mouth, and then she’s tugging my cock free from my own underclothes with a glorious pump of her fingers around the straining length. Before the pleasure of her touch has finished sweeping through me, she’s yanked her drawers to the side so she can guide me up into her.

The feel of her hot, slick channel closing around my cock brings another groan to my lips. I kiss her again and again, fondling her breast through her gown, massaging her ass, bucking up to meet the rocking of her thighs.

Aurelia whimpers. The needy sound somehow spurs my desire even farther. I lock our mouths together, thrusting up to meet her.

“I love you. So fucking much. No matter what happens, no matter where you have to go or what you have to do, you’ll always have me.”

The swaying of Aurelia’s body becomes more frantic, her kisses wilder. “Love you too,” she mumbles in the fleeting breaks for breath. “Always. Everything.”

What voice she has left breaks into a moan she tries to stifle against my jaw. I buck into her harder, faster, and then she’s shuddering over me, gasping and clamping around my cock with a bolt of bliss.

I clamp my teeth against the groan of my own release. As I spill myself into her, our swaying slows to a halt.

Aurelia lowers her head next to mine, her lips brushing my shoulder. I hug her close like I did when we were only cuddling, but suddenly the gesture feels hollow.

What have I really offered her with this act? How does fucking her fix any of her problems?

I’ve told her I love her again and again, promised to be here for her, but what have I actuallydone? WhatcanI do?

It hasn’t been enough. She wouldn’t be faltering under the weight of all her troubles if I’d managed to give her what she actually needs.

The familiar gloom that’s so often haunted my mind settles over me, dampening the afterglow of pleasure. I hide it as well as I can, but an ache forms at the base of my throat.

When Aurelia rolls off me after a few minutes, I set my clothes in order and grab a cloth from her bathing room to clean her up. She thanks me with the tenderest of kisses, and damn if I’m not half-hard again by the end of it.

But the uncomfortable sense that I’ve failed dogs me even as she smooths out her dress.

It doesn’t help that a melancholy cast has returned to her face as well. She drifts over to the window and eases back the curtain, gazing out at the darkened grounds and the glittering lights of the city beyond the palace walls.

“There are so many peopleright there, but it feels so hard to reach them. Nothing I do really matters until most of them are happy to see me on the throne.”

I slide to the edge of the bed, not daring to join her when someone might spot me from outside.“If the three of us could realize how wonderful you are even with all our reservations, they will too.”

“Not if Marclinus has his way.”

Before I can decide how to answer that remark, the temple bells throughout the city start to peal for the eleventh hour. I motion for Aurelia to close the curtain.“We should have company in a minute or two.”

I go to open the hidden panel so my foster brothers don’t have to wonder whether it’s safe to reveal themselves. As itwhispers to the side, I make out the scrape of footsteps farther down the passages.

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