The Centaur Queen (The Dark Queens #7)(13)

So I decided to be honest.

“Yes, Ty, you are very beautiful.”

Most women would get coquettish and simper or laugh. She did neither.

“I often find myself studying your eyes,” she said.

“My eyes?” I wrinkled my nose. I told her she was beautiful and she mentioned my eyes. I almost laughed.

“They too are beautiful.” The way she said it, she could have been talking about anything—the weather, flowers, dirt. She said it as a simple statement of fact and nothing more. I cocked an eyebrow, hating the sudden feeling slinking through my gut.

I would not name it, and not because I’d never felt it before. I had. But I did not like it. Satyrs were a good-time people. We did not mate for life, and we thought rather low of those who did. Life was meant to be enjoyed, and variety was the spice of it.

She flicked her gaze toward the ground. Without thought, I reached into my pouch and pulled out the rolled up mat of woven grasses I’d made for her back in the games. Luckily, when we’d been tossed out, it’d been daytime and I’d managed to secure most of our belongings from the night previous.

A happy smile touched the corners of her full lips. “My rug.”

A nest of butterflies suddenly exploded inside my gut, writhing and flapping their steely, razor-tipped wings all over the place. Gods above. This was Tymanon. A centaur. A bloody centaur.

And yet when she reached for the rug and our fingers touched, I felt burned.

I yanked my hand back and she frowned.

We looked at one another a few minutes longer before finally she unrolled her mat and gingerly sat in the way of her kind, hind legs going down first before gracefully lowering herself the rest of the way.

But rather than tucking all her legs beneath her, she kept one of her front legs extended out. The pose looked relaxed and oddly... pretty.

My brows gathered. Bloody. Hell.

Ty reached for a bowl of soup. “Thank you for cooking this,” she said, tipping her chin at me, and I nodded.

I was filthy and had wanted to eat after a bath, but I was reluctant to leave my spot. So I picked up my bowl and drank.

I would not eat the meat, though I would drink its broth. Tymanon insisted I eat meat, and though I’d never done it before in my life, I could not deny that the protein did actually increase my strength.

Once I’d finished, I passed her my leftovers. She’d need the meat more than I. We’d gotten into the habit of sharing meals for the past month, and I saw no reason for it to stop now. With a soft smile, she took it, lifted out the chunks of rabbit, and dropped them into her bowl.

Tymanon ate the way she fought—with purpose. There was nothing shy or timid about her. She didn’t care if she slurped while she ate. She’d even belched now and then.

I’d thought it repellent first time I’d heard her do it. Nymphs ate like ladies, if they bothered to eat in front of me at all. Taking tiny little nibbles and always pushing their plates away with piles of food still on them, as though it were a shameful thing to be caught eating before a male.

At some point I’d simply stopped caring with Tymanon. Like I always had, I watched as she ate, watched as her strong jaw chewed, as she swallowed. I watched the way her chest inhaled and exhaled, and the way her face glowed with pleasure when she ate.

Tymanon loved her food.

Full lips wrapped around the first truffle—I’d given them all to her—and a throaty moan tumbled through her throat as she sucked it in. Her eyes closed, and she chewed with a look of sublime rapture on her face. The only time I’d ever seen that sort of look was when a nymph had her mouth full of me. I’d never tell Ty that she was positively lewd when she ate, but maybe that was why I liked watching her so much.

My blood stirred like the angry buzzing of a disturbed hornet’s nest, and my pulse thundered in my ears.

“Gods above, Petra,” she sighed soon after swallowing. “Truffles. I do believe you might be my favorite person in the world right now.”

I chuckled, weirdly satisfied to hear her say it, though I knew they were nonsense words. Nymphs had often told me the same after gifting them their fourth, fifth, and sixth orgasm of the night. But I’d never felt the deep-seated warmth of those words as I did now.

Scooping out the rest of them with her finger, Ty continued to chew and moan and sigh, and soon my cock had thickened to the point of pain. Gods above, to go from feeling nothing at all for over a year to feeling as though I might burst? I should have been happier about it.

But I wasn’t.

My thoughts were a jumbled mess of Myra and confusion over my feelings toward Tymanon. Ty was savoring her food, and it was torture for me. I thought the meal rather boring, myself. I’d made far better before, but for an audience who’d neither cared nor eaten much of it.

Burping softly, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand before patting her slightly distended belly.

“Gods, I ate like a—”

“Horse?” I offered with a cheeky grin.

She only rolled her eyes. “I was going to say a pig, but all things considered...” She shrugged, and I found myself laughing.

Being with Ty was so bloody easy. I didn’t have to be a sexual Casanova, didn’t have to chase her, didn’t have to be on all the time. I could simply be me. It was scary how much I liked it.

“So,” she said as she reached into her pouch and pulled out a polished tortoise-shell hair comb.