Page 40 of The Last War We Ever Fought

“I am not scared.” Her chest rose fast. “Maybe just a little.”

Chuckling, he pressed his face to the crook of her neck, inhaling her and groaning. “Rowan, Rowan, Rowan.”

His warm breath sent shivers down her spine, the way he chanted her name made her breaths stutter, his tight body against hers something else entirely. A myriad of things she had never felt before. Let alone all at once.

“Elijah?” she quietly asked, lifting her arms to wrap them around his neck, testing all the ways one could hold another.

“Yes, little thief,” he answered, pulling her to him closer, her body melting against his hard, muscled one.

She could feel every ridge of his body, every little detail. Rowan had entirely forgotten her question. Rowan had sort of forgotten he was a man as well—well, for the most part, at least. “I…I can’t remember what I wanted to ask.”

A strange sound left her mouth when he kissed her neck, and yet again when he chuckled against her skin. Her thighs clenched and she felt a strange wetness gathering between them.

“I think I’m going to pull away now,” she said, starting to feel her body warm up unusually so.

He nodded. “I think it would be better.”

“Really?”

“Unfortunately,” he said, stretching his neck.

Awkwardly, she pulled back and fixed her shirt as she took a few steps away from him and spun to sit back on her bed.

“Who are you writing to?” he asked as she was about to fold the tenth letter back into its envelope.

“The queen.”

“So many letters?”

“And her court.”

His brows rose up. “What would you want all of them to know?”

“What they need to know from me. Reports.”

“Reports, huh?” he asked, attempting to stretch in his tiny stool and almost falling from it.

She scooted back to one edge of the bed and pointed a finger to the other end. “Sit there.”

Attempting to contain his amusement, he stood and sat where she had told him to sit. “Pity doesn’t feel so bad.”

Rowan smiled as she sealed her last envelope and placed the whole stack of them inside her bag before stuffing it under the bed. When she got up to get the map she needed to mark before handing it to Adam tomorrow, he groaned, forcing her to look back at him.

“Just sit with me. Deal with your little evil plans later.”

“They aren’t little evil plans.”

“I’m sorry,” he crooned, urging her back to sit down, closer to him this time. “Not little evil plans.” He leaned in, brushing his lips on her cheek and then down her chin. “Big and bad evil plans.”

She stopped him just as he was about to reach her lips, her fingers pressing to his mouth. Embarrassment burned over her cheeks. “I don’t know how to do that.” There was much Rowan was not taught, much she had not experienced, much she’d denied herself despite her age.

“I’m a very good teacher,” he said, kissing each one of her fingers and pulling them away from his face to place them on his shoulders. “Have you ever danced, Rowan?”

“No.”

“I will teach you that, too. This is also very much like a dance. One leads and the other follows,” he said, leaning in until their lips were only a hair away. “It’s just a dance, my little thief, you can breathe.”

When she parted her lips to take a deep breath, he pressed his mouth to hers. Her eyes drew shut like his had, and her chest tightened, nerves pooling on her stomach. Unusual nerves. Nerves that turned something fierce as he sucked her bottom lip, as he breathed all of her breaths, as he shared his with hers. He groaned in her mouth as she began kissing him back, his skin shivering and pimpling with gooseflesh under her fingertips as she ran them up and down his nape.