Page 77 of Healer to the Ash King
“You’ll ruin it!” I gasp.
A growl is my only answer. He rips the weakened fabric, tearing my gown wide open down the center. It’s a thicker material, so I didn’t wear a corset under it, and now my breasts are bared to him, peaked with sudden, illicit need. I suck in a sharp breath, my core tingling and heating in spite of my fear.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“Shut up.” He shoves me back, and my shoulders crash into a cupboard door. The King lunges forward, crushing me to the wood, raking up my skirts. Frantic and rough, his fingers catch my underwear and drag it down. He parts his robe, his erection jutting through the opening.
He pauses for two seconds—just enough time for me to protest what he’s about to do. When I don’t object, he seizes one of my legs and pins it up, arched, against the cupboard, exposing my opening to him.
“Not that I’m complaining,” I whisper, wrapping my arms around his neck, “but what is this about?”
He grabs one of my wrists and slams it against the wall above my head. “Don’t fucking touch me,” he snaps, eyes flaming brighter.
Shocked, I pull back my other hand. I’m pinned against the cupboards by my wrist and thigh, splayed open for him, and despite my fear of his new mood, I’m violently aroused.
He drives into me without warning, and I voice a tiny shriek. He grinds his brow against mine, skull on skull, so hard it hurts. “Shut. Up.” He’s shaking. Whatever emotions are rolling through his body, they’re overpowering him completely.
His hips jerk forward, ramming his length deeper inside me. “I’m going to drive the memory of his cock out of you,” he hisses. His body slams against mine, over and over, dark velvet and hard muscles burning like heated iron. “You won’t remember it. I’m the damn king. I don’t fucking share, Cailin.”
“Heartsfire… is this about Rince? The artist?”
He vents a guttural sound of rage, brimming with ruinous promise, and he batters into me, a frenzy of hard thrusts. I can barely think through the vicious onslaught, through the lewd wet sounds his body is making with mine. I’m flushing, liquefying. Exquisite lines of tingling pleasure snake through my belly, twining, twisting, tightening—
The Ash King releases my wrist and grips my face, glaring into my eyes, his face contorted with passion. Nothing elegant or controlled about him now. “Don’t think about him,” he growls.
“Youneed to stop thinking about him.” In spite of his order, I reach for him, cupping his head in my hands. “Listen—I didn’t sleep with that artist today.”
The Ash King shoves himself up me, so deep and brutal that I gasp, because he hit some tremulous glowing spot inside me and I’m poised, quivering, pinned in place by a scorching, suspended ecstasy I can’t quite reach. I desperately want him to thrust again, but he stills for a moment.
“The guards heard you,” he says darkly. “They told me.”
“It was fake. I used to sleep with him, back home, and I was going to today, but then—I couldn’t go through with it. I faked those sounds so he wouldn’t be embarrassed.” I never intended to sleep with Rince this afternoon, but it’s the only plausible excuse for him coming to my room.
The Ash King holds me to the wall with his cock and hips, still clutching my jaw. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not.” I twist my head, jerking free of the face grip. “I promise I’m not.”
Slowly he pulls back a little and thrusts into me again so hard I squeal, shivering on the verge of a climax. “Swear it.”
“I swear on the Heartsfire of my home mountain.”
“A stupid vow.”
Savagely I dig my fingers into the muscles of his shoulders. “That’s our most sacred vow, bastard.”
He catches my thighs and hooks my legs over his hips. I’m losing my mind to the heat of his hard flesh surging deep inside me, and I whimper, helpless, needy, hitching myself farther onto his length.
“Still hate me?” he whispers, with one more slow slick thrust, deep, so deep.
“So much—I hate you so—gods, I’m coming… I’m coming…” The tingling blaze of the orgasm floods through me, and I convulse around him, gasping. He cries out, too, his heart thundering against my breast. I can feel the rhythmic spasms of his release and mine, synchronized.
I can’t kiss him. I won’t. I want to.
He has to kiss me first.
I press my cheek to his, relishing the smooth warmth of his skin. I breathe him in, the sweating, panicked, passionate heat of him, the dark essence of his jealousy. Nothing has ever tasted sweeter to me.
But he’s unfair too. Expecting me to be only his, while he belongs to the other girls, to the Favored.
