Page 63 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion
Only this warning was different. Different than just a lord with a fey. This was blood. Verr and Kysillian. Two creatures that had torn the world apart.
There is no worse fate than a girl who lures demons to her bed.Only those warnings couldn’t turn me from the memory of him. Reaching for me across that cursed earth. Calling my name as if he’d want it to be the last thing on his lips. He’d come for me, even knowing that darkness would take him too. He’d kept vigil at my bedside. Driven himself to madness to see me well, fighting the Council at every turn – even thinking I wouldn’t want him like this. That his darkness would be too much.
He was giving me a choice. Even now.
‘It’s where you are,’ I answered without hesitation. I’d made my choice in this very room. It hadn’t changed. ‘I’m not afraid, Emrys. Not of this.’
Not of him. Not of the things that came before, or what I’d done. Iwasmy choices, my mistakes.
I’d always choose this delicate thing between us. No matter the punishment. No matter what came next.
Only in the tense silence an odd vulnerability overcame me as I stood before him in nothing but thin cotton and disarray. Worry made me bite my lip. Shrink slightly inside as I dropped my gaze. ‘Unless you—’
Only for him to catch my chin between his thumb and forefinger. Demanding my eyes, seeing that his were now pitch-black.
My breath caught. ‘Emrys.’
His other hand slipped around my waist, tugging me closer until I fell into that bed with him. As he gathered my face between his hands, dark veins spread across his skin with how close that magic had risen.
‘I thought you were a dream.’ He pressed those words against my pulse. The confession so soft as his fingers curled into my nightgown, desperately. ‘You’ve ruined me, Kat.’
’You sound entirely too pleased about that.’ I wanted to tease but I was too breathless with that strange desire that only he could stoke.
He answered with a kiss. Gentle but commanding. My fingers curled into his thick hair, greedily. Relief making me sink into him, deepening that kiss, as I quickly found myself pressed against the pillows with the warm solid weight of him on top of me.
I arched closer as my nails dug into the strong contours of his back. Sliding greedily over him. Needing more.
A crazed sound slipped from my lips. Emrys responded to it with his own low hum of hunger in his throat as his hand curved around my waist, pulling me into the hardness of him. His lips drifting to my neck as I arched desperately for more of his attention, gasping wildly for breath.
My hands running over the strong lines of his bare chest as I’d hungered to do last night.
The stutter in his breath. The torment I’d caused him broke my heart. So I tugged his hair, bringing his lips back to my own.
Real. We were real.
There was a craving in it. A desperate need to be devoured. His hand ran up the thin fabric to brush my breast, lips tracing the curve of my jaw. Drawing another wanton sound from between my lips as his tongue dipped to trace my collarbone.
I panted, driven mad by the drag of his stubble across my sensitive skin. My nightgown slipped down, almost exposing my breast and his lips followed.
I curled my fingers into his hair, keeping him in place. My thighs brushing his side as I brought them up to cage him. He took the invitation, his rough hand cupping the back of my bare thigh. My skin too hot and too tight. Wanting the thin cotton gone. Needing nothing but him.
‘Emrys,’ I pleaded before he tortured me with another deep kiss. A sound of desire rumbled in the back of his throat, making my stomach swoop with anticipation as his hand found its way between my thighs.
‘Bloody fucking saints!’ The frantic, too-high-pitched words cut through the room, making Emrys go rigid before he whipped around towards the door. Cold dread washed over my skin. Shame burning my cheeks as I clung to Emrys’s biceps, hiding beneath the sheer size of him.
‘William!’ Emrys snapped, detangling from me in a blur of movement. The covers thrown over me as he got off the bed.
This couldn’t be happening.
‘You could have locked the bloody door!’ There was a crash and a bang, as if William had run head first into the wall in his desperation to escape.
‘It wasn’t there to lock,’ Emrys answered through his teeth.
Flustered, I tried my best to untangle myself from the bed sheets, stumbling out of the other side of the bed, trying to fix my nightgown where it was tangled around my hips. Twisted around my body with the insistence of Emrys’s touch.
Emrys’s bare broad back blocked the doorway. The creaking of the wood of the door frame telling me the house was beyond amused.
‘Bloody bastard,’ I muttered as I grabbed my robe from the foot of the bed, pulling it on as I went to the doorway to save William from Emrys’s annoyance. Where the boy sat stunned on the hallway floor
