Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 127722 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 639(@200wpm)___ 511(@250wpm)___ 426(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 127722 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 639(@200wpm)___ 511(@250wpm)___ 426(@300wpm)
“Oh, get over yourself.” She gave me a smack.
I chuckled and pulled her back into me. “Alright, I’ll go first.” My arm hooked around her waist, and I anchored her to me so she couldn’t roll away. “The first time I kissed you, I stopped. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“I stopped because I didn’t expect to like it. I don’t kiss women. They kiss me—on their knees. But when our mouths came together…I felt fire.” I remembered that night so vividly, and now it had new meaning after everything we’d been through. When I’d slept with her, I hadn’t realized she was the last woman I’d ever sleep with, that it was the first time I was bedding my future wife. “Your shirt came down…and I liked those tits. Small but firm, with nipples perfect against my tongue. Soft against my lips. Warm to the touch. They pebbled every time I came close, every time I exhaled a breath. I love staring at them when you’re at the foot of the bed, your nipples so fucking hard they’re sharper than my ax.”
Her breathing had quickened a bit, and the paleness to her cold cheeks had tinted to a beautiful rouge. The embarrassment was long gone, replaced by a look I’d seen more times to count. “I thought you had a really nice dick…”
That’s my baby.
“A big dick.”
I already knew all this, but it was still fun to make her say it.
“Now that dick is all mine, and I’m not going to share.”
When she thought she’d caught me with another woman, she’d stabbed me with a dagger and twisted it to make it hurt. But I loved it. I loved the way it drove her crazy. I loved the way it forced her hand. And I loved that nothing had changed since. “Quinn was never good enough for you.”
“Quinn?” Her eyebrows furrowed in genuine confusion.
“The guard you snuck out of your room.”
It took her a couple seconds to catch up. “He was a nice guy.”
“Scrawny.”
“He had nice eyes.”
“Not as nice as mine.”
A slow smile came on to her lips, the kind that reached her eyes. “Look who’s jealous…”
“Not jealous. Just judgmental.”
“You can’t get mad about a guy who was before your time.”
Before my time. It was hard to remember when that time existed. It was hard to remember the whores who slept in my furs at the outpost because Ivory had erased their memory. Her presence was so large she filled my past as well as my present, became a memory that I never actually had. “It’s hard to believe there was a time when you weren’t mine.”
Her hand moved to my face, her fingertips brushing along the coarseness of my beard. “It’s weird, isn’t it?” Her soft eyes were locked on mine, and with a lover’s touch, she caressed me.
My arm tightened around her back, and I tugged her into me, bringing us together as a single person under the blanket. My face rested against hers, my eyes down on her lips. We lay that way, cocooned by the rock in eternal silence. I missed our nights in a bed, but I forgot how hard the rock was when she was with me. I forgot about the frost on the walls. The yetis in the snow. The Teeth who wanted blood.
I forgot it all.
The snow shone so bright in the sun that I couldn’t look directly at it. Heat bounced off the surface and hit me right in the face. The air was cold, the snow was two feet high, but I was burning up inside my coat.
“Ugh.”
I glanced over my shoulder.
“I hate it down here.”
“You’re a Rune.” I moved ahead, scanning the horizon for tracks in the snow, for weathered branches, for any signs of the Teeth waiting for the next lottery winner. “You better get used to it.”
“I’m a Rolfe, not a Rune.”
“They’re the same thing.”
“Technically, you’re a Delacroix, so you aren’t a Rune either.”
I turned back around. “Water is thicker than blood. The Runes are just as much my people as the ones at the top of the cliffs.”
She lagged behind me because the snow was a bigger obstacle for her small stature. She tried to step in the places I’d already trod so she could keep my pace, but that didn’t make much of a difference.
I kept going.
“How did you guys survive the fall?”
The fall. The boot to my back. The wind in my face. Clouds in my vision. Moisture so cold it made my eyelashes freeze. And then the snow spiraling up at me. “We landed in a lake.”
“A lake? I haven’t seen a lake over here.”
“It’s still there. Just can’t see it.”
She caught up to me, winded as she tried to keep my stride, but she had too much pride to ask me to slow down for her.