Forbidden Honor (Dragon Royals #1)(73)

He offered me his arm again and I took it, feeling differently than I had a few hours before. Maybe I had to separate Lucien and Honor entirely. Maybe Honor could lose herself in the company of these men freely, and Lucien could be the one to plot. While I needed to make anyone who had hurt me suffer, it really was a lot of fun to be with Talisyn, when he was being his best self.

The two of us wandered the beautiful cobblestone streets. Flowers spilled over the walls that surrounded each fine city estate. I wanted a respite from my thoughts, and Talisyn offered me just that, telling me quirky and often highly inappropriate anecdotes about the city. If I believed Talisyn, the city was both haunted and depraved.

“This way.” He stopped at the bright blue door of a shop. In the windows to either side of the door were dozens of books. The lantern above the door was dark, though.

“It’s closed, Tal.”

He flashed me a grin so beautiful and mischievous, something in my chest fractured. He was hard to hate. “Not to us.”

“Are we committing a crime?”

“Why don’t you sound worried?” He raised his brows, even as he pushed the door open. “I worry you’ll corrupt me.”

“Give me a chance.” I ducked under his arm and walked into the shop, which smelled of leather and pages.

“Lynx told me about how he failed to impress you in the library, and I thought maybe we could buy some romance novels. The owner opened the shop for us.”

“Maybe I can punish Lynx by reading them to him.” I eyed him curiously. “Would you read one?”

“If you told me I should.”

“Oh, So you’re going to be obedient to my whims?” I teased.

“Isn’t that part of what you’re looking for in a man,” he shot back, and I had to laugh. He wasn’t wrong.

Talisyn followed behind me as I moved down the shelves of the bookstore. The shop owner sat behind the counter on his stool, yawning sleepily from time to time, but smiling contentedly. How much money had Talisyn spent on this whim for the grouchy old man with his bushy white eyebrows to look so pleased to be sitting there at two o’clock in the morning?

I picked up a book, looked at its cover, put it back.

Talisyn leaned against the shelf, his big arms braced over his chest. “You should get that one too.”

“Do you want me to fill up my room? Well, I should say my half of Calla’s room. She was there first, it’s hard not to feel like it’s really still her room.”

“I want you to have everything you want,” he answered.

When I put books back after that, if I looked reluctant at all, he quickly pulled them back out again, and added them to the growing stack on his arm. He vanished for a moment while I was going down one line of shelves, and I frowned at him when he came back without any books.

“I put them on the counter.”

“No, no, I still have to go through those and see which ones I really want.”

“You can do that at home.”

“Talisyn, I can’t own more books than I can ever read.”

“Why not? Don’t you look at books as friends? Why shouldn’t you always have friends ready to spend time with you?”

“That sounds wonderful. But wasteful.”

He shrugged. “Well, I am a lord. We’re generally pretty wasteful, but at least it can be for a good cause for once.”

Talisyn’s coachman came in and began to load the books into the coach.

“He’ll make sure these get delivered to Calla’s room,” Talisyn said.

“But now I’m going to be too busy reading to spend time with you,” I teased.

He scoffed. “I think I’ll take my chances. As much as you might love to read, I think I can offer you some more interesting experiences than even reading.”

“I don’t know, you might find that you’re disappointed.”

“I don’t think I could ever be disappointed by you, Honor.” There, in the midst of the store, he caught me around the waist, pulled me against his hard body and kissed me. His lips moved slowly against mine, taking his time, until my lips parted with a breathless gasp. His hand cupped my cheek as his tongue plundered mine.

The old man at the counter coughed under his breath. Then the coachman said something to him. The two of them moved to the doorway and the coachman said, “We’ll make sure the shop gets locked up whenever you’re done here, your Highness.”

The door closed behind them with the jingle of bells, and I looked up at Talisyn in bemusement.

“What did you just do?”

“I can tell that you’re more impressed by books than you are by me, so I’m winning you over any way I can.”

I laughed. “I’m not exactly playing hard to get. I want you, Talisyn. But I have to warn you, I’m a little bit inexperienced.”

“How inexperienced?”

“I was a virgin,” I admitted, “until last week.”

Jealousy tightened his lips, flared in his gaze. Then he relaxed—but was that an act? He sounded back to his usual self when he said lightly, “I hope he was good to you.”

He didn’t know Jaik and I had sex. Interesting. “Do you want to know who he was?”

He let out a short bark of a laugh. “No, because I might kill him.”