Total pages in book: 192
Estimated words: 192810 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 964(@200wpm)___ 771(@250wpm)___ 643(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 192810 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 964(@200wpm)___ 771(@250wpm)___ 643(@300wpm)
On the couch.
In the living room.
I turned to my mate.
“So we’ve jumped from taking time to get to know each other in a chill way to surviving assassination attempts to your staff and bots stealing all my clothes, shoes, bags, accessories and toiletries and kidnapping my cats to us sleeping together?”
He grinned, slightly sleepy, still a little grouchy, totally sexy, and all of a sudden, I was sprawled on a mountain of muscle again.
Regardless of how great this felt (and make no mistake, it felt great), I pushed up.
He rolled, and I was trapped under a mountain of muscle.
Wow.
That didn’t feel great.
It felt spectacular.
However…
“Aleksei!” I snapped.
“While Set and Antheme were briefing me last night, you crashed on the couch,” he reminded me about what I’d just reminded myself about.
New discoveries (and all I let filter into my exhaustion before passing out): Set was the commander of Aleksei’s personal detail. Antheme was his second.
“Yes, I did,” I confirmed.
“The future Queen of Night’s Fall doesn’t sleep on a couch.”
“I was perfectly comfortable.” Or, at least, comfortable enough to pass out.
“We could ask Madam Garwah, but I’m relatively certain it isn’t the done thing, darling,” he teased.
I was not seeing good things for my future, learning how he could whip out the sweet and cute to muddle my brain and get his way.
“Stop being cute when I’m taking you to task for taking liberties. Did you carry me here?”
“Guilty,” he said like he didn’t feel any vestige of that word at all.
“How many bedrooms are in this penthouse?”
“Five.”
“Including this one?”
“Yes.”
“So you had four other rooms you could take me to?”
“Why would I do something as bloody stupid as that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because we’ve known each other less than a week.”
“I can’t be certain, but it feels like surviving an assassination attempt together is akin to about two months of courting.”
Honestly?
I couldn’t really argue that.
Even so, I slapped his bare shoulder, and although I didn’t do it hard, the way my hand bounced off his muscle was sobering.
“Laura, bissi.” His gentle tone pulled my attention from his sinewy shoulder to his face. “After last night, you can’t ask me to be apart from you. It just…won’t work.”
What was this?
“Seriously?”
“We can hope this overwhelming…drive to see you safe settles down, but for now…” He shook his head. “For now, Laura, it’s on the edge of my consciousness every waking second, you standing with your arms thrown wide between me, an enemy and a weapon. My beast is riled. He can’t settle either. The only moments of peace he and I have had since it happened was when I stretched out beside you, felt your body against mine, healthy and alive, but unconscious, and I fell asleep.”
That was awful.
And one must pause to consider if this was behind him being such a jerk last night.
Being the one who needed to pause, with a monarch in my midst, I’d have to consider that later.
“But you’re awake and it’s back?” I asked.
“It isn’t as fundamental, pervasive, but it’s still definitely there.”
It seemed like the males definitely got the short end of the stick with this mate business.
“Well, we’ll just have to…play that by ear,” I mumbled.
His big hands moved on me.
Oo.
Nice.
“Would you like to take this time to explore other avenues of getting to know each other?” he suggested throatily, moving to run his nose along my jaw.
Lovely.
I could totally take this time to explore other avenues. His hands felt nice, his weight arguably better, his playful mood was hot, even his seriousness.
In other words, the answer to that was a resounding yes.
But…
Was he mad?
“The king and queen are out there.”
He lifted his head. “Doesn’t count. They’re in my house. They’re only parents in my house.”
I puffed out a breath as his hands kept moving…and feeling much too good doing it.
I squirmed underneath him.
His gaze went hooded…and wicked.
Oh my.
His head started descending.
My body was melting.
But annoyingly, rational thought spiked into my brain.
“People I love are out there too. They all took truth serum last night…for me. And now I have to face the music for that,” I whispered.
I had him there, lamentably.
He sighed so heavily, it felt like my body depressed three more inches into his amazing mattress and the entire hover bed swayed full feet.
But then he dipped in and kissed the hinge of my jaw, rolled off me and out of bed.
The moment he did, I was rethinking ignoring royalty, familial sacrifice and assassination plots, and instead diving deep into exploring getting to know each other better.
And seeing as I was in a much clearer state of mind to process how much I enjoyed the view of the muscles of his back moving as he did, even if he was wearing sleep pants on the bottom, which hid his perfectly formed behind (kind of, the material was deliciously clingy)…