Page 40 of Fated Flames: Volume Two
“That’s very kind of you,” I say.
When we finish, we fold the napkins and tuck them back into the bag. It’s easy enough, for there are no leftovers.
“I imagine fighting like you do leaves one famished,” I say.
He leans back on his hands, a mischievous glint lighting in his eyes. “I’d imagine you’d know.”
I try to look perplexed, though I’m sure I fail. “What do you mean?”
“I saw the way you held yourself when I walked into your bedchamber the first night. That’s a grappling stance. Some would call it an island variant, but I’m well aware that grappling originated in the island nations.”
I sigh. I suppose there’s no use denying it. When he appeared from that hidden door, speaking of thanking me and which side of the bed he ought to take, my trainingsimply took over, exactly as it was meant to do. “Mother insisted we girls know how to defend ourselves.”
He inclines his head at this. “A sound requirement.”
“I wasn’t fond of it,” I say, drawing the fur tighter around me.
“Would you consider it a flaw if you were?”
My brows lower. “Of course not. I simply…wished to be doing other things.” I would rather have been combing the beach with Selena or wandering the shoreline in my little canoe, not bruising myself and others in the training room. Soren doesn’t answer, and I begin to suspect the question has a deeper origin, though I’m not sure how to venture further.
I shiver at a sudden wind. It’s little more than a breeze, but the desert night is cooling fast.
“Cold?” he asks, and I can’t help noticing how relaxed his own posture is. Perhaps dragons neither sweat nor feel the cold. I begin to wish I were one myself.
“A bit.”
He rises, and moving behind me, seats himself at my back. When he plants a leg on either side of me and pulls me snug against him, I believe my body delivers all my remaining heat to my flushed cheeks. His wings he wraps around us like enormous blankets, blocking all wind.
“Better?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
It’sheavenly.
A meteor streaks by, one large enough to leave a violet tail streaming after it, and my hand flashes out to point. “Did you see that?”
“I did,” Soren says, his voice low at my ear. “It’s likely a forerunner to the Andrames.”
Ah, the meteor shower he spoke of arriving at the month’s end.
The one preceding our wedding.
My breath catches as his fingers come up to graze my cheek, moving with extra care over the bruising left by Lord Lyken’s wing. He pauses.
“Does this hurt?”
“No,” I say, my heart in my throat.
Silence falls once more, but this time it’s charged and thrumming with nameless things I find myself aching to identify.
“Princess.”
“Yes?”
He presses his lips to my neck, the sensation somehow like a candle bursting to life in a dark room. “I want to ask you something.”
I swallow. “All right.”
