His thumb moved across the back of my hand in one slow arc, and his eyes didn’t leave mine.
“You have no idea,” he said, “how many times I almost...” He stopped, then started again, his voice lower this time. “Every time I held you. Every single time.” The words came out rough, scraped clean of any pretense. “I wanted to kiss you, Guin. I wanted to pull you in and not let go.”
The shutter moved again in a small wind, and somewhere below us, a door swung shut.
“I wanted the same thing.” The words left me without the careful hedging I’d spent years wrapping around this particular truth. Instead, they came out plain and clear, and I didn’t take them back. “Every time.”
His chest rose and fell once.
“Then why didn’t you—”
“—why didn’tyou?”
He looked at me as something shifted in his eyes, some last careful restraint dissolving like frost off morning glass. He smiled and then shook his head. “I guess I was a fool.”
“Well, why don’t you make up for lost time then?”
“That sounds like the best idea I’ve heard all year,” he answered with a smile.
He moved over me slowly, one hand bracing beside my head, and I had one breath to register the weight of him above me before his mouth found mine.
The kiss wasn’t gentle. And it wasn’t the careful, tentative thing I’d imagined in the dark, in all the times I’d spent imagining this happening between us. Instead, it was certain and deep, and it pulled the air straight from my lungs. I made a sound against him, low and involuntary, swallowed immediately by the press of his mouth, and I felt him react to that sound. I felt his breath change, and the kiss sharpen.
His hand moved into my hair as his fingers threaded through it slowly, drawing it back from my face, and then his mouth followed the line of my jaw, the curve of my throat. I dug my fingers into the fabric at his shoulders as he came back to my mouth, and this time his tongue moved against mine, slow and searching, with the patience of a man who had no intention of rushing.
I wrapped my legs around him, and his breath hitched in a sharp, fractured sound he didn’t bother to contain. His hand tightened in my hair, and something that had been restrained in the kiss broke loose entirely, becoming deep and demanding, his body pressing mine down into the thin mattress.
I felt his cock against my stomach. And it was so hard, undeniably so, the evidence of everything unspoken between us that was finally being made real and solid.
He pulled back just enough to look at me, both hands framing my face, his eyes moving over it the way they had in the forest, like he was memorizing every line.
“Guin.” My name in his mouth sounded rough, stripped of anything performative.
“No more talking.”
-ARTHUR-
The dragon knew.
That was the thing I couldn’t say aloud. That was the thing I’d never say to any of them: not to Lance, not to Bedivere, the head of the Guard, a man who’d served me long enough to know when to stop asking questions.
The forest floor was soft with leaves, and Cabal moved through it without complaint, his hooves leaving darkimpressions in the mud. Around me, the riding party kept their distance. They always did when I went quiet like this. Twenty years of watching a king’s moods teaches a man things faster than any tutor can.
She runs. We must hunt her. We must find her. We must bring her back.
I pressed my heels in, and Cabal picked up his pace without protest.
The trees thickened, oak and ash crowding the path until it ceased to be a path at all and became instead just a suggestion of open space between trunks. My knights and my guard filed in behind me, one after the other. I heard the creak of armor, the soft jingle of bridle rings, and someone cleared his throat.
Once the road opened enough, Lance rode up alongside me just as he always did. He still hadn’t learned that some silences weren’t invitations.
“The trail’s gone cold,” he said.
I said nothing.
“‘Arthur.” His voice had dropped to that particular register he used when he wished to speak plainly without being seen to overstep. “How do you know where she went?”
The trees opened briefly onto a ridge. Below, the valley spread gray and green in the morning light, a river cutting through it like a scar. I could feel her; that’s how I knew. It was the dragon’s awareness of her, which had bled into mine over years of the creature’s slow occupation of my body.