He leaned forward and let his lips graze my jaw.
I sucked in a breath, relishing the pressure of his soft mouth. The sparks were there but subdued, the barrier of the glamour keeping him too far away from me.
“Hold it,” he murmured, his fingertip tracing the scalloped neckline on my gray dress. Without warning, he tugged the material and peered beneath.
I waited with bated breath for him to touch me, to quench this fire burning a path across my aching breasts.
“Dammit, Aveen. Where are your nipples?”
My what? I glanced down to where he still held my dress out from my skin. Sure enough, my glamoured breasts were there, small and perky, but missing something important. “I highly doubt the Queen or anyone else will be checking my body for nipples.”
“That’s not the point.” He let me go with a curse and resumed his pacing along the dent he’d worn in my rug. “You need to think of everything.”
We’d been practicing for days, and I was still barely able to hold a simple glamour for more than an hour. “This is so unfair. I shouldn’t have to hide who I am.”
He glanced sidelong at me.
What was I complaining about? Rían knew exactly what this was like. The man had lived most of his life beneath a bloody glamour.
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “No, you shouldn’t. But you do. Try again.”
I was sick and tired of trying and failing. “I want to see you do it.”
In a blink, Rían was no longer himself but Ruairi, from his shoulder-sweeping raven hair to the length of his canines, he looked exactly like the pooka. Everything except his eyes.
I wonder… I reached for the buttons on his white shirt.
Rían shirked back, his broad shoulders curling in on themselves. “What are you doing?”
“You checked my chest, it’s only fair that I get to check yours as well.”
Although a muscle in his jaw worked, he didn’t stop me from unbuttoning his shirt, revealing a toned chest dusted with dark hair, a taut abdomen, and a line of hair that disappeared into the waistband of his low-slung breeches. He had nipples too. Not that I’d seen Ruairi’s to be able to assess for accuracy.
Moving on…
A wicked thought sprang to my mind, and I found myself stepping closer. My hand fell to the buckle of Rían’s belt.
His fingers wrapped in a death grip around my wrist. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I distinctly remember you saying that you could fuck me sideways while glamoured. I want you to prove it.”
“That’s enough.”
I smiled at him. “All talk.”
“I could if I wanted to. But I don’t.”
“Liar.” I could see the yearning in his eyes. He wanted this just as much as I did.
Rían’s eyes darkened to an almost desperate hue. “I’ll not touch you with someone else’s hands. Kiss you with someone else’s mouth. Fuck you with—” He clamped his mouth so hard his jaw pulsed.
“Then drop the glamour and do all of those things as yourself.” Perhaps I should’ve been embarrassed, throwing myself at him like this. But I didn’t care. It had been far too long since he’d touched me. Since he’d loved me.
Rían’s glamour vanished, leaving a prince whose gaze locked on my lips.
One kiss.
We could stop there.