Page 69 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
The heat building in my core intensified to the point of discomfort as he nipped my lower lip. Using the hand knitted in my hair, fingers pressed with gentle but firm pressure against my scalp, he tilted my head to the side to gain better access to my mouth.
I might have melted.
I was so hot, and I was so wet—
I am fucking melting.
My fingers reached for the waistband of his pants.
“Aura,” Wrenlock growled softly, tearing his mouth away. He rested his forehead against mine, panting quietly. I could practically feel the urge to undress me coursing through his body, triggering the tiniest flinch of his muscles or pulse of a vein. “We’re in the middle of a very crowded room.”
Fuck.My hand froze, and then found a resting place against his hip bone. “Why does this keep happening in the most inappropriate places?”
Slowly, he slid his mouth across my face until his lips brushed the point of my ear. “Because I haven’t fucked you yet,” he murmured. The bang of my heart hitting my chest was audible. He heard it and sighed. “Baby, I don’t think we’re going to be able to focus until my cock is buried inside your sweet little cunt and you’re sighing foreign curses into my mouth.”
There was a glitch in my brain—a momentary malfunction where I could have sworn I blacked out and would have fallen to the floor if it had not been for his arms locked around my waist.Holy fuck.My head swam with the heady scent of his cologne and the even headier impact of his words.
He wasn’t my soulmate.
But he was honest. He answered my questions. Heapologised.Wrenlock never held back when he had the choice, and I felt a pull to him strong enough to realign the stars.
Glancing around the room, I saw Batre and Morgoya watching us from the sidelines. They were too far away for me to catch their expressions, but a thought slid into place in my mind, instantly establishing roots.
Do we appear to them as they appeared to me?
They were not fated to be together, but they were perfect, and it was enough to challenge the notion that an Oracle knew our hearts better than we knew them ourselves.
Do I know my heart?
“I need to focus,” I whispered shakily. “Take me—take me somewhere else.”
His breath hitched. “Aura?”
“Wrenlock,” I returned sharply. “Please. Take me somewhere else. Take me outside. I just need to get out of this room.”
“Okay.” He lifted me into his arms, and—
In a blur of colour and the whoosh of wind, we evanesced.
I pressed my nose into the crook of his shoulder and tried to breathe through the vertigo.
We stopped moving.
The air fell still around us, and the sounds of music and laughter became a distant clink between closed doorways. I opened my eyes, blinking rapidly to correct my eyesight. We were in a large stone hallway illuminated only by moonlight pouring into the palace through tall, arched windows. I could discern nothing more than the shadow of nightfall, which graced the tops of a tree line through the fog coasting by the palace.
Wrenlock moved to release me from his grip, and some raw form of insanity took hold of me.
Grabbing his face in my hands, I practically jumped back into his arms, pushing off the ground from the balls of my feet and claiming his mouth in a desperate, clumsy kiss. Stumbling forwards, his arms snaked around me and I fell back against the nearest wall. I felt a twinge against my spine as he opened his mouth to let my tongue explore him again, heard a splintering crack as a picture frame fell and he hitched one of my legs around his waist. Wrenlock released a moan so deep I felt the reverberations of it reach my chest.
He trailed hot kisses adorned with gentle bites and flicks of his tongue all the way along my jaw and down the column of my throat. I tilted my head to the side for ease of access as his mouth brushed my collarbone. One of his canines scraped my shoulder, and the sensation sent a wave of unbridled pleasure rolling out across my body.
Everything that had ever been started and left unfinished came racing to the surface, tackling my nervous system with violence and desperation.
“Please,” I found myself saying.Fuck, I am begging. “Please, I need you. I can’t think straight. I can’t take it anymore.”
He groaned. “Aura, I don’t mind waiting. Until you’re ready, until you’re sure—”
“I do,” I insisted. “I mind. You said that if I had asked a third time…” I took his face in my hands and brought it up to mine again. It was ghosted by moonlight and shadow. We locked gazes. “This is me asking you.”
