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What was this?
I grabbed his shoulder, almost yanked him into the tub, and thrust my tongue with his, suddenly and desperately needing him to erase the taste of Vine and the memory of the fae’s lurid touch.
Devere broke away breathlessly, and that sorrow again darkened his eyes.
“Don’t go,” I begged, not caring how it sounded. “I don’t know what this is—what anything is—but I know I need you.” It seemed as though he might leave, and when he did, it would be final, as though a great battle were playing out inside his mind, behind his sorry eyes. Then the battle was lost, or won, and the next touch of our lips quickly deepened, becoming heady and weighted with meaning. I was wet and hot and naked and didn’t care.
I was safe, and home, with Devere.
ChapterThirty-Seven
Devere
Valentine had been through so much, withstood years of torture of my making, yet he still believed in hope and goodness. He still dreamed we’d be all right. Of course, he didn’t know everything, and that made this moment bittersweet.
I’d come to tell him the truth—how I was the one who had tortured him—but seeing him in the bathtub, head back, eyes closed, the words had lodged in my throat. I was a coward. And as I kissed him now, tasting his tears on his lips, my every touch was a lie, because he didn’t know the horror I’d put him through. He didn’t knowIwas the puppet master.
I couldn’t tell him. I loved him, but loving him was selfish and wrong. The ache of it threatened to swallow my heart, yet still I kissed him.
His warmth drew me to him, and his wonderment and his laugh bespelled me in the rare times I’d heard it. How had I despised him so? Because he’d jilted me as a child?
I’d tried to break him over and over again and only succeeded in breaking myself.
The kiss deepened. He rose onto his knees, water sloshed in the tub, and I dared to touch his hot, quivering body, as though touching the forbidden. I skimmed my fingers down his warm, damp back. The thought of those two fae parasites seducing him with lies boiled my blood—but I was the same as them, seducing him because I needed his love.
He pulled back, breathless and flushed. His gaze danced over my face, reading my every crease and line. A small, careful, yet sly smile pulled at his lips. “Your clothes… They’re wet.”
I looked down at my sodden shirt, then quickly unlaced it and pulled it over my head.
Val blinked wide eyes. His smile grew, and when he lunged for a kiss, I met his assault with my own and threw an arm around him, dragging him close. Chest to chest, where we touched, sparks sizzled. Water sloshed over the side of the tub, down my legs. I didn’t care. I needed more of him. It was wrong and selfish, he’d hate me, but I needed this. For so long, for countless lifetimes, I’d lived with only hate in my heart. There was no hate here.
He clutched at my arm and pulled, trying to draw me ever closer. The bath was between me and getting my hands on a body I’d dreamed of. I pushed him back with a kiss, on my knees now too, and stroked down his hair, skimming his neck. His slight tremors did curious things to me, each hiss and shudder plucking a string low in my belly, heightening my desire and hardening parts that had been neglected for so long.
“I’m not… sure… how we do this,” I whispered between breaths.
“Oh, you haven’t? I mean, with men? Obviously not with men—unless you have?” His eyebrows lifted. “With men, I mean. Or women? Those too, I suppose.” He winced. “I appear to have lost all sense of reason.”
Laughter bubbled up in my throat. “I meant the bath is rather hampering my effort to get to you.”
“Ah, yes.” He swallowed audibly. “Of course. Well, I suppose it’s nothing you haven’t seen by now, so…” He stood in a great gush of water, so utterly without ceremony and so thoroughly male.
I fought not to look and failed. Firm thighs suggested he rode, but I knew he did not. Not horses, at least. He’d certainly enjoyed our intimacy, or the thick length of his cock suggested our kissing had been arousing.
“Are you blushing?” he asked.
“No.” I turned my face away and got to my feet. “Certainly not.”
When I faced him again, he’d climbed from the bath, found a towel, and tied it around his waist, although that didn’t hide the tentlike peak of his erection. Gods, the man had a fine body, muscular but not heavy, and dusted with light brown hairs that held on to water droplets, making him glisten.
“Dev, you have… been with a man?”
“Have I?” My voice had pitched rather high. I cleared my throat. “I mean, I have, but not… recently.”
I’d fumbled once with a tourist, so desperate to feel something in a life devoid of all feeling. The encounter had done nothing for me, and trapped in a town that despised me, I’d known little comfort—certainly not the physical kind.
“Oh, you can’t leave. Then you’ve not had anyone…” he muttered, remembering Minerva was my cage and what that meant. Despised for who I was. I didn’t need to add despised for desiring men too. “Of course, there is no one in Minerva to have. If it er… If it helps, I haven’t really—I mean, there have been a few encounters in Massalia.”
“Encounters?”
