The Girl Who Fell From The Sky - Rebecca Royce Page 0,28

have your battles during this cold season?”

He kissed the back of my neck. “This weather will not last. It will come and go before it finally sets in to stay during the winter. And it is preferable to the heaviness of the long summer. We can warm up easier than we can cool off.”

He wasn’t wrong. Inside the blanket, with him, I no longer felt the cold. Instead I felt, in exquisite detail, the entire shape of him, molded to the shape of me. When I inhaled, my shoulder blades pressed back into his chest, and I slowed the exhale, lingering against the shift in his muscles, the band of his arm encircling me, protecting me. It was everything I could manage not to writhe, just to feel more. Or maybe to provoke him. His heart thrummed against my back, and I realized that even though I had drawn breath, he had not. He was holding it, holding still. Waiting for something?

“You can do that again,” I said.

“Talk about the weather?” There was laughter in his voice, but his body was so still, so rigid.

“Kiss me.”

He sucked in a breath, but it was ragged, uneven, cool at first as it eddied beneath my hair. His mouth pressed against my neck, and I could not resist a groan of pure pleasure.

The wild things were still howling outside. The soldiers were still fighting, probably still dying. Winter was coming, and I was lost here—completely lost and hopeless—yet I could think of nothing but this.

He had bent his arm and had been nestling his hand to mine, but now he moved it, fanned his palm against my stomach, pulling me closer. There was no space for movement, but I turned anyway, to face him. I wiggled, bringing my mouth level with his. There were no lights in here, and underground like this, it was completely black, but I knew what his face looked like.

Maybe it was the darkness that made me so bold, but I couldn’t help myself. “Now, again.”

He obeyed, not moving his hand, which in all my turning and wiggling had ended up cupping my rear. This was the most intimate moment I had ever experienced, and sins be damned, I reveled in it, the thick, languid curl of desire that licked its way through my body.

He kissed me again. Or did I kiss him this time? It wasn’t awkward like before, filled with unshed secrets and fear and dismay. We had talked through all that and were free of it, of inhibition, I guess. This was a man who admitted he desired me, who wasn’t even ashamed of it.

Greedy for more, I nipped his bottom lip with my teeth, pulling his mouth open, and slid my tongue inside. He tasted delicious, like home-brewed wine and mint, and I had a sudden and blazing desire to taste all of him.

Oh, if the holy ones and their inquisitors could see me now, they’d all keel over. But I put all thoughts of them aside, them and their rules and their shaming. This place had different rules, and though I was just learning them, I suspected they might just suit me better than the ones I’d lived under all my life.

“Bianca…” He said my name—growled it really—and rolled to his back, bringing me over the top of his body.

On top of him, I could feel all his hard muscles. Astor might have been the least interested in battle out of all the men I’d met thus far, but he was strong, like he worked out, or in his case, dealt with a hard world that built muscles in all who lived on it.

I studied him as best I could this close and in the dark. It was more about touch than it was anything else. As though I was sightless and needed to memorize him with my fingertips. I’d read people used to do that.

The long scope of his nose, the broadness of his shoulders, the dusting of hair on his chest. He shuddered beneath my exploration. For his part, he kept still, touching me only occasionally on my back, a long stroke of his fingertips from the top of my spine to the place where my hips met my rear—but never further.

Finally, he kissed my chin. Astor was impossibly hard. If I gave into the urges driving me and ground my hips against him, I’d feel the length of him even more acutely. Would he like that? Would that be taking this