Page 36 of A Court of Hearts and Hunger
When I look down, Clara is there, blinking drowsily up at me.
Clara.
I exhale a long breath. “Dearest.”
“Sugarplum.” She pets my ankle and my foot, and something about the soothing gesture and her sleepy expression makes laughter well up in my chest. She is so fucking adorable.
I bounce down onto the mattress, cross-legged. “I half-suspected I would wake in chains. Did Opal lock us in?”
“I don’t think so. She and I talked last night, after you passed out. I think she will let us leave today.”
What I wouldn’t give to have witnessed that conversation! “What did you say to her?”
“Something about the power of art to change the observer. Also I may have threatened to fight her.”
“God-stars, Clara.” I rub a hand over my face.
“She changed form. Turned into something like a very thick snake, or a caterpillar.”
My eyebrows rise. “That means she considered you a serious threat. A worthy opponent.”
“Really?” Clara sits up, preening a little. The look of proud satisfaction on her face is so cute I have to lean in and kiss her. Several times. Her chin needs a kiss, also both her smooth temples, her soft cheeks, the space right between her eyebrows where the frown lines go—and then the delicate skin of her eyelids.
She laughs and tumbles back onto the bed as I keep kissing her. The tender skin beneath her ear. The smoothness of her neck. That hollow between her collarbones.
I’m desperate now, raking her clothing aside in a passionate frenzy, and she stops laughing. When my mouth finds her clit, a trembling sigh breaks from her.
If I were Unseelie, I might bite her, just here, because she tastes so exquisitely good, because this sweet, tiny bit of flesh is so tempting.
What am I doing, taking her into that wretched kingdom with me? Why would I let her follow me into the darkness that stained my soul so deeply?
I nibble Clara’s flesh, and she whimpers. My tongue swirls through her folds, sweeping up all the delicious evidence of her desire for me, and still more wetness is slipping from that opening, from the space that aches for me.
My cock is out in a second, and I’m nudging inside her when she stops me.
“Fin, before we do this, I have to visit the privy.” Her cheeks are scarlet. “Unless you want me to piss all over you when I come.”
I shrug. “I might not mind.”
“Hush.” She hops off the bed and hurries to the door in the corner of the room.
When she returns, she’s naked, and I sigh with delight, cupping those warm, full breasts in both my hands. I slide my hands up the curve of her smooth back, squeeze the plump cheeks of her ass.
“I love every part of you,” I tell her.
“Would you love me if I wasn’t pretty?”
I grin, pushing her down onto the sheets. “I am not purely Seelie in my affinities, precious. I don’t value their rigid ideas of the aesthetically perfect. No, I can see the beauty in what others might define as ugliness. I can glory in the unusual, the asymmetrical, even the grotesque. And I can tell you with perfect certainty that no irregularity or difference in your body would keep me from doing this—” I thrust my cock into her, one fluid motion— “as often as possible.”
She gasps, her eyelashes fluttering. The row of piercings along my length must be doing wonderful things to her.
“Do I love your face, your form? Oh yes.” I rock my hips, surging into her, concentrating on her reaction to keep myself from coming too soon because she feels—by the god-stars, she feels like honey and wine, like silk and velvet. “But what I love even more, dearest, is the part of you that I can never quite touch. The closer I am to you, the deeper I am inside you, the nearer I come to it—to pressing my whole self into your beautiful soul.”
Heat is building low in my belly, pounding in my cock, thrills chasing each other toward the final climax—every time I thrust, my cock piercings shift, twitches of keen pleasure shocking every nerve I own. I can’t speak anymore, because Clara has reached up and she’s playing with the little gold bars in my nipples. My wings shudder, stiffening.
“Fuck,” I gasp, and then a bolt of searing bliss shoots through me, and I release, flooding her with my cum. The throb of my thickness inside her is usually the last bit of prompting she needs to tip over the edge, and this time is no different. She comes, squealing and panting, clutching my biceps.
When we’re soaring together, just like this, I feel so perfectly aligned with her. The best feeling in all the realms.
