Page 4 of Knotting Sleeping Beauty

Like a voice I’ve been straining to hear my whole life and only just now tuned into the right frequency. Here. I’m here. Where have you been? I’ve been waiting. Come closer. Please. Come closer.

My hands are shaking.

My hands do not shake. I have held swords in battle with steady hands. I’ve signed execution orders without a tremor. I’ve stared down enemy kings with rock-solid nerves. My hands do not fucking shake.

They’re shaking now.

I cross the room. Each step feels heavy. Inevitable. Like I’m being reeled in by something stronger than muscle and will. I reach the bed, sit on the edge, and the mattress dips under my weight. She shifts, barely, the tiniest turn of her head in my direction, like even in sleep her body knows I’m here.

Oh, fuck.

Mine.

The word detonates in my skull like a cannon. It’s not a thought or a choice. It’s a fact. Hard-wired, bone-deep, echoing through every cell of my body with a certainty that feels less like discovery and more like remembering.

Mine. She’s mine. She’s always been mine. I just didn’t know it until right now.

I reach out. My hand, massive, scarred, battle-hardened, trembles as I brush a strand of soft hair from her beautiful face. My fingers graze her cheek where her skin is warm and impossibly soft, and the contact sends a jolt through my arm, up my shoulder, straight into the center of my chest. It settles there. Hot. Aching. Permanent.

Her gorgeous lips part on a soft exhale. Her arched brow furrows, like she’s dreaming and the dream just shifted.

I lean closer because my body will not let me do anything else, and walking away now feels like it might kill me. My nose brushes her temple, and I inhale. Deep. Slow. Honey. Jasmine. The warmth of sun-baked skin. And under it all, something purely, devastatingly her, a scent I have no name for but that my body recognizes with a certainty that terrifies me.

Her scent fucking explodes; what was an invitation becomes a detonation. The room floods with it. Honey, heat, jasmine, sex, and want so thick the air shimmers with it. Her back arches off the mattress, her fingers claw at the sheets, her lips part on a sound that’s half moan, half gasp, half something that goes straight to the most primitive part of my brain and yanks.

My rut slams into me like a tornado. Years of dormancy obliterated in a heartbeat. Every nerve ending fires. My cock strains against my trousers so hard it’s painful. My vision narrows to her, only her, nothing else exists. The room could be on fucking fire and I wouldn’t notice.

Her eyes fly open.

Deep brown. So beautiful it doesn’t look real. Like someone poured chocolate into her irises and added lightning for good measure. Wild, unfocused, blazing with years of pent-up heat that just found its outlet.

She stares up at me. I stare down at her.

My heart hammering. Her chest heaving. Her scent falling off her in waves. My hands still shaking.

And Princess Rosalind of Thornhaven, the sleeping beauty, the cursed omega, the fated mate I didn’t believe existed ten minutes ago, opens her perfect, gorgeous mouth and says:

“Who the fuck are you?”

Three

ROSE

There is a man on my bed. There is a very large, extremely large, actually, what the hell do they feed men wherever he’s from, very alarming, very… oh God… very hot man sitting on the edge of my bed, and I don’t know who he is or how he got here or why every single cell in my body is tingling for him.

Also? I think I’m dying.

Something is happening inside me that I have no reference for. It’s not fever heat, not sick heat, but something else entirely, something that starts low in my belly and radiates out in pulsing waves until my fingertips tingle, my toes curl and there’s a wetness between my thighs that I’ve never…

Oh God. Oh no! This is my heat!This is what they were so afraid of. This is…

Another wave hits, and I lose my train of thought in a gasp that sounds obscene even to my own ears.

The man hasn’t answered my question. He’s staring at me with an expression that I can only describe as wrecked. Like I’ve personally reached into his chest and rearranged his internal organs. His eyes are dark hazel, I think, gold and green and brown all mixed together, and they’re roaming my face with an intensity that should terrify me.

It doesn’t terrify me.

It makes my stomach clench in a way that is absolutely, categorically, one hundred percent not fear.