Page 95 of Falling Princess

“Please,” I begged. I’m not sure what for.

It didn’t matter, because he disentangled one hand from my hair—I realized he liked touching it, and might have been fighting the temptation to run his hands through it the same way I’ve been resisting the urge to touch his. He skimmed his thumb along the outside curve of my breast, through the shirt. That isdefinitelywhat I needed. What I need more of.

I arched into him, panting against his cheek. Lorcan clutched me closer and did it again, bolder this time, brushing the hard bead of my nipple. I flattened my palm against his lower back and pressed him to me. He ground forward. The pressure was so close, so good. I could come without either of us taking off our clothes if I sat on the counter behind me and parted my legs enough to get him into the right place—

“Lorcan?”

Cold, harsh reality sluiced over us. Raina. I forgot she was here. For a few glorious minutes, I forgot everything. Lorcan touched my jaw. His eyes blazed with conflict and triumph. For one moment, he was legible to me in a way he never had been before. He was no more pleased with the interruption than I was.

A sudden chill at my front as my knight pulled away. I hung there in stunned disbelief, trying to remember how my body works when it isn’t wrapped around his.Ifit works. The world had reoriented itself so profoundly in the past few minutes that I was no longer sure gravity would hold me to the earth. Walking felt impossible, but I managed to shuffle a couple of steps away.

“Zosh?” asks Raina, tentatively.

Please don’t let her suspect.

Guilt sliced through my haze of lust and need.

“Right here. Looking for potholders.”

My voice sounded impossibly steady, even to my own ears. All that princess training must have paid off.

Lorcan’s knuckles were white where he gripped the counter, breathing out with closed eyes. I’ve wrecked him. I’m wrecked, too. Raina will know instantly what we’ve been doing if she sees us together like this. I squeezed his arm and slipped past him into the kitchen, heading her off. Giving him a chance to recover his equilibrium.

I did that to him.

Giddiness exploded within me. I want to do it again. More thoroughly, next time.

There won’t be a next time.We can’t.Not only because it would hurt our friend’s feelings. Because being discovered would cause us to be separated from one another at a time when the only place I’m safe is at Lorcan’s side.

“You know there are potholders out on the counter, right?” Raina asked.

“Yes, we were looking for more.”

Raina opened a drawer next to the oven and pulled out a handful, waving them with one arched brow. My face burned. The obvious place to look. Lorcan and I are idiots—or we were looking for something else entirely.

An excuse.

CHAPTERTHIRTY

After our first, stolen kiss, Lorcan and I held to our verbal agreement not to pursue any further physical interactions. At least I no longer felt as though I had to hide myself from him.

On the other hand, he no longer felt the need to pretend he didn’t want me, either. Lorcan’s constant presence became a new form of torture.

Between studying for finals, taking tests, writing papers, and mooning over the impossible situation with my personal guard, I didn’t pick up on Cata’s relative decline. It wasn’t until we were climbing the pathway from the ocean to the Mountain Folk’s passageway that I realized she was struggling.

Cata.

Struggling.

We’ve made this journey together dozens of times. I’m always the one who huffs and puffs, red-faced, from the black sand beach at the base of the mountains up the narrow trail. In theory, it would be easier to get into the country from Oceanside, if there were ships small enough to get through the shoals. Most aren’t. Even if they were, it’s another five or six days of travel up the interior of the island to get to the castle.

Cata, with her silver hair hanging in damp tendrils around her temples, thanked Lorcan for helping her up a particularly tricky section of the pathway. Behind us, porters carried the few belongings we’d brought for the short break on their backs.

“Are you all right?” I asked her. I wasn’t about to comment upon her recent weight gain. She’d adopted loose-fitted garments to conceal it as much as possible. I chalked it up to stress. Her eyes were bright and her manner calm; despite being a touch out of shape, I suppose, after so many hours spent in academic meetings, Cata was happy to be home.

“Fine.”

We cleared the top and rapped. There’s only one place where that strange alloy of stone and metal on Sentinels appears in Auralia, and that is on the gates to the Folk’s underground passageway. When I asked her about it, Keryn told me the formula was destroyed after the last war between the tribes. No explanation why. I believed them. Many records from that time period were burned, along with disassembling the mechanized army and hiding away the pieces.

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