Page 21 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
I gawked at him. “I would have tried to tell you sooner, but…”
“I’m glad you told me now,” he said, his tone full of composure and reassurance. It made me question his sanity. “I was growing concerned for you.”
Had he not seen what I’d seen?
Maybe I’d convinced myself it was Wrenlock back in the House because he was a nicer option than my snarky blond escort, but the visions were as clear as day in the dungeon. Lucais was being tortured in my mind, and I’d just given him a front-row seat.
“You were?” I arched an eyebrow because I was growing concerned forhim.
Lucais’s shoulders moved with a sigh, and he slipped his hands into his pockets. “Aura,” he began with a stern look, “I’ve wanted to know about your nightmares since the very first time I learned you’d been having them.”
I blinked at him in a stupor. That was…monthsago. My mother had spilled the beans in front of him in our kitchen, after he saved her life during the caenim attack and sat upon our antique washing machine like it was a throne, talking about how the High King of Faerie was the most handsome and clever person we’d ever met—
Oh, isn’t hindsight a bitch?
I chewed on my lower lip. “Why didn’t you ever ask?”
The High King blew out a long breath, filling the chasm of space between us with the echoes of magic and a place to call home. My stomach clenched with desire at the sight of him relaxed against the wall, his clothes and hair dishevelled by myhands, his mouth swollen and plump with the effects of what it had done with mine.
I felt a tug, like he was trying to call it back on his end, and so I slapped the feeling away.
Disowned it.
“I wanted you to come to me with them when you were ready,” he confessed, glancing up at me through long lashes. “You made it quite clear that they were private, and you wanted me to have nothing to do with them in the first place. But I figured out that, at the very least, they involved me somehow.”
I frowned, and the corners of his mouth twitched.
“You woke up screaming my name in that cottage like you were dying,” he explained, and I remembered how he had come rushing in to comfort me when I woke up in a confused, petrified sweat, only to drop me onto the hard floor when I’d ordered him away. “Based on that alone, I imagined that what you were dreaming about was pretty gruesome because that’s certainly not the way you scream my name when I make you come.”
I pulled a face. “You haven’t—we haven’t had sex—”
“Yet,” he interrupted, inclining his head suggestively. “I was referring to when we do it in my head.”
My heart thudded, but I rolled my eyes. “That will absolutely never happen,” I vowed, trying to make my expression resemble a deeply rooted sense of disgust. “You’d die trying.”
The colour in his eyes flickered with heat. “I do love to prove you wrong, don’t I?”
“You’ll be waiting a while. Alongwhile.”
“Will I?” he challenged. “Because you were halfway there with only my mouth on yours. Imagine what I could do when I put it elsewhere.”
I scoffed, but I felt my saliva thickening in my throat. “You’ve been misinformed.”
“You should close your legs then because that’s where my informant lives.” He paused, surveying me with a feline gaze. “Unless the scent of your arousal is lying to me, and you’re thinking about someone else when I’m kissing you.”
My thighs squeezed together as blood flooded to my cheeks, igniting them with a toxic concoction of shame and desire. I hadn’t been thinking of anyone else, but there was some merit to the argument that perhaps I should have been.
“I really thought you didn’t care about the dreams,” I admitted, offering up a different truth for the sake of changing the subject.
Lucais hesitated as if he didn’t want to speak the next thought that came into his mind. “Why didn’t you try to tell anyone else?” he wondered. “Like…Wrenlock?”
Is that jealousy in his eyes?
“It won’t let me,” I confided. “What happened then… It happens every time, and I didn’t trust any of you. I still don’t trust you now, but when I first arrived here, I didn’t know who anyone was or what they wanted. Thanks toyou.” I glared at him, and he held his hands up, palms facing me in mock surrender. “None of you were worth it. Not even…” I trailed off, unwilling to say the High Lady’s name.
He rolled his eyes, half-shrugging as he pushed away from the wall. “Fair call. Stupid, but fair.”
A sense of fury reared its head in my chest again, taking the place of the heat from his touch. “Don’t call me stupid!”
