Hunter's Season (Elder Races #4.7)(22)

Her breathing hitched again. She picked up the cheese and turned away to start setting things back on the shelves. “I keep telling you, I don’t mind in the slightest. Believe me, I have bunked down under much worse conditions many times.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better.” He handed her the onions to set back in their place, and as she turned around again, he handed her the tin of tea. “I propose that I begin to help with the chores around here.” When she opened her mouth to argue, he forestalled her. “I will only do what I feel capable of doing, and each day I will increase my activity. That will help me regain my strength much faster. I simply cannot laze my days away and watch as you shoulder the burden for doing everything. I don’t have it in me.”

She sighed. Increasing his activity each day would help him heal. She also knew some stretching exercises that he could do to help keep his body limber. He was going to carry scars, and those would stiffen if he wasn’t careful. “That makes sense.”

“And as soon as my back muscles have healed enough,” he said, “you and I are going to start taking turns on that pallet.”

“No, we’re not,” she told him.

“Yes,” he said implacably. “We are.”

“I won’t budge on this,” she warned.

His mouth quirked. “What a coincidence; neither will I.”

If they grew stubborn about this, they might both end up sleeping on floor pallets. She clapped a hand over her nose and mouth as a snort of laughter escaped her.

If anyone had told her a sevenday ago that she would be arguing with a barefoot Chancellor of the Dark Fae, she would have thought them deranged. Shaking her head, she turned away from him again to set the tea tin on the shelf.

Then she sensed rather than heard him move up close behind her. She stood frozen, the skin at the back of her neck tingling as she felt the heat of his body along her back and thighs. He was very close, perhaps a scant finger’s breadth away. She turned her head slightly, her attention consumed by his nearness.

She could see him, just barely, out of the corner of her eye, standing there like the shadow of her most secret dream. He tilted his head and put his lips near her ear, still not coming in physical contact with her anywhere.

He whispered, “Am I really the most handsome man you know?”

His warm breath caressed the thin, sensitive area just behind her jaw. She folded her arms around her middle, shaking. A daring stranger took over her voice. She closed her eyes and heard herself whisper back, “Do you really think I’m pretty?”

Pretty. It was a word used for Dark Fae ladies, with their fine clothes, long pale, soft hands and large, lustrous eyes. It didn’t belong to her. Her hands were callused, her skin lightly speckled by the sun. Her feet were callused too. She could kill a man with a single, well placed kick of her bare foot.

The slightest touch stroked along her hair, following the line from her temple, back to her braid. Was that his finger? The end of his nose? It was so light she could almost have believed that she imagined it, yet it sent an intense shiver rippling over her skin. It was—almost as though he nuzzled her. The thought took all the strength out of her knees.

At the nape of her neck, he breathed, “I think you grow more beautiful each time I lay my eyes on you. It’s happened every time I woke up to find you there, helping me in some way. All I want to do is look at you, to experience it again.”

The moist warm heat of the words felt like a brand. The shiver settled low in her abdomen, and a liquid heat bloomed between her legs. Surely he would not notice if her hand trailed stealthily down her torso to press at the sharp, empty ache.

“Don’t play with me just because you’re bored.” The words were meant to wedge some kind of distance between them and allow sanity back into the room, to cool the insane heat that built so that she could not focus for wanting to tear off all her clothes. Instead they sounded pleading.

“I would never dream of treating you in such a self-indulgent and cavalier manner.” He stroked her back, another feather light touch that explored the contour of her shoulder blade and the indentation just underneath where her ribs curved to her spine. “Xanthe, I have not heard you say my name yet.”

The same pleading she had heard in her own voice was in his too.

Her regard mattered to him.

Her knees weakened further, and her lips trembled.

She whispered, “Aubrey.”

He was silent. She could hear him breathing. Then another brush of sensation at the back of her neck—those were his lips. He had kissed her.

“Thank you, my dear,” he whispered in return as he pulled away.

Chapter Six

Sacrifice

Aubrey backed from Xanthe, his emotions more unruly than ever. Arousal coursed through his body, more powerful than the lingering aches and pains. He had grown hard, and his swollen cock, surprised into life after a year of dullness and disinterest, demanded attention most urgently.

The sensation of her soft, warm skin lingered on his lips. He licked them.

He wanted to lick her so much more.

Restlessness, irritation, his growing awareness of her as an attractive female, it had turned into an all too potent cocktail. Teasing her had been impulse. Pursuing as she retreated had been instinct. He had not thought through any of it; it had just happened, and that was unlike him as he was usually thoughtful and deliberate about everything.