Page 44 of Bound to the Shadow Prince

“Are you warm now?” Nemeth asks.

I burrow back a little further, just because I’m clearly the only one feeling aroused at the moment. “This is so much better. How is it you weren’t freezing?”

“I’m not a puny human.”

He is most definitely not. I put my hand over his on my belly, fascinated by the large size of it once more. “Why is it that your hand is so much larger than a human hand?”

“Why are yours so small?” he counters. “Go to sleep.”

“Are they big because you have wings and it’s for gripping? I noticed your feet were big, too.”

He sighs, and his breath brushes over my hair, teasing it. “I do not know. We are two different peoples, thus we are made differently. Are you going to ask why my knees bend in the opposite direction of yours? Have I asked you about your tail?”

“Tail?” I hiss. “I don’t have a tail. Do you have a tail?” Is he hiding it under that kilt?

“Go to sleep, Candra.”

As if I can sleep now. I wriggle backwards against him, hoping that he’ll react. Just a small groan. A hitch of breath. Something that tells me he’s noticing how blatantly I’m pressing my backside against him. There’s no response, though, and I fight back disappointment. He’s not interested, I realize.

But if he’s not interested, why does he jerk off to thoughts of me?

The man is a perplexing mystery, but I’m not going to give up. Not now that I’m warm and wide awake. “Are you tired?” I whisper. “Because now I’m not tired.”

“Candra.” There’s a hint of amusement in his voice. “You are impossible sometimes.”

Am I? I’m clearly not the impossible one. His big hand is a breath away from landing between my thighs, his cock is pressing up against my backside, and I’m the one being unreasonable? I want to laugh at the irony of it. “Want to play our game? We can skip the dares and just tell each other secrets. It’s too cold to get out of bed anyhow.” I blow a breath out and watch it fog in the air.

I wait for him to give me a grumpy sigh or tell me to go to bed. Instead, his weight settles in against mine, his delicious hip heavy against my thigh. His chin presses against my hair. “What do you want to know?”

“Do you have a tail?”

Now I get the heavy sigh. His hand twitches against my belly. “Ask me something else, Candra.”

“I’m going to assume that’s a yes, since if it was a no you wouldn’t be so fussy at me.” I tap a finger on the back of his hand. “But fine. Tell me when your birthday is.”

“My birthday? Do you truly celebrate such childish things?”

“Why not? Birthdays are a celebration of you. What makes that childish?”

“My people do not celebrate birthdays after you come of age.”

I tap his hand again. “Well, I’m human, and I want to celebrate it, so humor me. When is it?”

He’s quiet for a moment. “On the seventeenth of spring, I will be twenty-eight.”

Born a short time after the last people in his family were in the tower, then. “Were either of your parents in the tower?”

“My aunt.” He pauses. “She was never the same afterward.”

Mine neither. My aunt Calliope was older when she went to the tower, and my mother (Calliope’s much younger sister) said that she was never quite right in the head afterward. That she preferred to sit in the darkness and liked a small, quiet room. She moved to a monastery not long after she returned from the tower and died a few years later. My mother rarely spoke of her, and whenever I asked about the tower, I’d been told that it was Meryliese’s duty and not to worry about it.

Now I wish I’d pressed more.

We’re both quiet for a long moment, and then Nemeth’s mouth brushes against my hair. “That was two questions, you cheat.”

Two questions? Oh—the tower and his birthday. “Well, ask me two questions, then.”

“Your birthday?”

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