Claimed by a Demon King (21 page)

“It must have been hard for you.” Hard felt like an understatement as she looked at him, at his solemn expression and the visible strain etched in every line on his handsome face and in his eyes, and then the statue behind him.

Thorne looked back at it too.

“I was not a good king… many said I was too young. I spent the first three weeks here in this room, a weeping and pathetic boy, until my father’s commander came to me and told me I had mourned enough. He pulled me onto my feet, shook me hard, and turned me to face my father, and he told me that I was my father’s legacy and I was king now, and I had to honour my father. I had to make him proud.” Thorne brushed his hand over his father’s right one and then curled his fingers into a tight fist. “I have been trying ever since.”

“Thorne… I’m sure your father is proud of you.”

He shrugged and faced her again. “What of your parents?”

A sore subject. Sable shrugged this time and tried to keep the biting edge of bitterness from her tone.

“What of them? I never met them.”

Thorne’s eyebrows pulled down over incredulous crimson eyes. “How is that possible?”

“They dropped me on an orphanage doorstep when I was a baby, barely a day old.” She really didn’t want to talk about this with him, or with anyone.

Sorrow and compassion coloured his eyes and she couldn’t bring herself to keep looking into them. She lowered her head. Thorne lifted his hand, holding it out to her, and flexed his fingers.

Sable went to him but didn’t take his offered hand or look at him. She kept her eyes on his parents.

“I often imagined what my parents were like. When I started school, sometimes we had to draw our family, and I imagined what my mother would be like. I drew what I saw in my heart… a beautiful woman like your mother… but as I grew older, I began to feel that beauty was skin deep and didn’t reach her heart.” Sable’s dark eyebrows met in a hard frown and she clenched her fists at her sides. “She left me, and I will never know why.”

She risked it and looked up at Thorne where he stood beside her, right into his eyes, drowning in the affection and concern they showed her.

“She didn’t even leave a note. She just dumped me like garbage.”

Thorne raised his hand and Sable didn’t stop him. She needed his touch too much to push him away. She savoured it as he stroked the backs of his claws across her cheek, the soft caress melting her inside, thawing the ice around her heart and erasing some of the pain beating in it.

“I am sorry, Sable. No child deserves such a life,” he whispered, his deep voice laden with tenderness.

Sable shrugged it off and tried to stifle the awkwardness running through her.

She had never spoken about her parents to anyone other than Olivia. She felt weak for spilling her sob story to Thorne, but at the same time, it felt good to share it with him and have him know the part of her she hid from the world.

He opened his hand and cupped her cheek, his large palm engulfing it, and tilted her head back, until she was looking up at him.

It suddenly hit her that he was touching her.

“You shouldn’t,” she said and stepped back, and he frowned, the edge of disappointment and anger in his eyes warning her that he had taken her words to mean something else. That he shouldn’t kiss her. She shook her head and wrapped her hand around the leather cuff on her right wrist. “What if I hurt you again?”

Sable looked down at her arm.

“I thought it was only a tattoo, but what if I was wrong? So many demons and fae have markings… what if this is a marking like that? What if one of my parents was something non-human?” It would explain her gift and her new power, and would make her hate them even more for ditching her, leaving her to fend for herself without a clue about what she was and the world she had come from.

“It is no demon marking.” Thorne wrapped his fingers around the cuff and she stared at their hands. His partially covered hers, warm and strong, steady when hers was shaking. She looked up into his eyes and he smiled. “We will find out all that we can about it, Sable. I swear it.”

She dropped her gaze back to their hands and then down to his right one.

She had burned him but there were no bandages on his fingers.

Sable took her right hand back from him and reached out. She caught his hand gently in hers and raised it between them, and turned it over and tentatively stroked the tips of her fingers across his, afraid of hurting him again. The burns were gone. She had never felt so glad about anything, and had never feared as greatly as she had in that moment on the battlefield. She had thought he would burn away as the other demon had.

She had thought she would lose him.

Heat blazed through her, the intensity of it increasing as she swept her fingers over his. Her awareness of him increased with it, her heart picking up pace and her breathing following, coming faster and shorter as she toyed with his fingers. She should let go.

Should but couldn’t.

Thorne’s other hand brushed her cheek and it burned beneath the caress, her breath hitching in her throat. He tipped her chin up and stared down into her eyes, his blazing crimson, scorching her as they narrowed on hers and then dropped lower, taking in her lips and then her body. He raked his gaze back up and lingered on hers, and she melted under his scrutiny, aching for him to speak, to touch her, to do something other than stare into her eyes.

“You are more beautiful than my mother,” he whispered in a thick, gruff voice that sent a shivery ache racing through her. His thumb played on her lower lip, the caress soft and teasing, making it tingle. “Inside and out… more beautiful than any female in existence. My mother would have adored you… and my father too. He liked spirited females… and my female has spirit, and strength, and beauty. You were born to be my queen, Sable. Mine alone. My forever.”

A tiny part of her said to silence him, to make him stop, because he was starting to talk about her as if she was already his again and she didn’t like it. She was too weak right now though. Her defences were down and she couldn’t contain the blush that darkened her cheeks when he stepped closer, bending his head to look down into her eyes as he held her jaw, his expression more beautiful than the one his father’s statue wore.

He earnestly whispered, “You are truly beautiful through and through.”

Sable rose onto her tiptoes, ignoring the small voice that screamed at her to stop, to go back to her room and not do this. It was cruel to lead Thorne on but she needed to forget for a while. She needed to leave everything behind and lose herself in him.

“Kiss me… please?” she murmured and he gathered her against his chest, easily lifting her up to his lips, and gave her everything she desired.

The kiss was soft and gentle, melting her bones and burning away her reservations. She wrapped her arms around his neck and turned up the heat, sweeping her tongue across his lower lip and darting it inside when he opened to her. He moaned and slanted his head, and she mimicked him, deepening the kiss.

Thorne palmed her buttocks and she moaned into his mouth, tunnelled her fingers into the russet-brown waves of his hair and held on to him. She needed more. She wrapped her arms around his head and her hands brushed his horns.

He growled.

Sable groaned and curled her fingers around his growing horns, pulled his head back and kissed him harder.

More.

Wait.

She forced herself back and looked down into his eyes. They burned like fire, scorching her, and she wanted to kiss him again. She couldn’t.

“Why are you stopping?” he husked, a pained and confused look on his handsome face. “Do you mean to slap me again?”

She would have laughed at that had her reason for stopping not been so serious.

“No… just… what if I hurt you?” Her focus switched to her wrist. It wasn’t even tingling right now. It felt normal, but that didn’t reassure her. It had felt normal in the moments before she had burned a demon to ashes with her bare hands too.

“Do you feel now as you did then?”

Sable shook her head. “No. Back then, I could almost feel my death coming at the hands of those demons. Right now… I feel… I feel safe.”

His eyes widened and she was thankful he didn’t say anything about her revelation. He did make her feel safe, and loved, but he also drove her crazy and made her want to punch him at times too.

“You will not hurt me, Sable.” He craned his neck and lowered his hands, so she slid down his body.

The hard ridges of muscle on his torso rubbing against her stomach and breasts wrecked her concentration and shoved her fears out of her mind.

She would stop if her wrist hurt.

And only then.

Sable kissed Thorne again and wrapped her legs around his waist. He turned with her, and she had a flashback of their last vision. She tensed and he stopped with her back barely millimetres from the wall.

“No biting,” she whispered against his lips and he groaned, the sound pained as it echoed around the small stone room. “Swear it.”

“I swear it,” he ground out and kissed her again, pressing her back against the wall with the force of it. He broke the kiss and rested his forehead against hers, his breath hot against her buzzing lips as he spoke. “If you want it though… if you even think about it… I will not be able to stop myself… you understand?”

She nodded. She did. His instincts said to claim her and he could sense her, knew her feelings. If she thought for a moment about the delicious feel of his fangs in her throat…

Thorne growled again, flashing fangs this time. “Sable.”

“Sorry.” She captured his mouth in a kiss and drove all thoughts of biting from her mind, her hands shaking against his shoulders as a small sliver of fear snaked through her.

Thorne kissed her harder and palmed her bottom, his fingers pressing deep into her flesh. She moaned and ran her hands over his arms, quivering over the feel of his muscles beneath them, all hard and straining. She wanted to kiss and lick every wicked inch of him.

He snarled at her when she broke the kiss and it became a moan as she licked his lips, teasing them. She kissed her way along his strong jaw, his whiskers scratching her lips, and then down his throat. The temptation to bite was strong but she denied it, afraid that it would only coax him into biting her and that would lead to him doing something far more damaging.

She swirled her tongue in circles instead, working her way downwards and then across his shoulder. She did bite now, little nips that tore growls from her demon king and made him hold her harder, clutching her against him and pinning her to the wall with his body.

Sable kissed over his shoulder and slowed as Thorne mimicked her, each delicious lick and nip of his teeth making her tingle. He lifted one hand from her backside and brushed the strap of her tank top aside, and paused.

“You wear no other garment beneath this top,” he murmured against her skin, his moist breath fanning the flames already burning within her. She smiled at how antiquated he sounded, so noble and kingly, and oh so hot for her.

“I was in bed.” She couldn’t resist adding, “
Naked
.”

He groaned and ground against her, and bit out something harsh. Leather trousers could be a pain. She had thrown her combats on for comfort but he evidently didn’t have looser fitting clothing.

Sable squeezed her hand between them and ran her hand over the bulge in his leather trousers.

Thorne dropped her like a hot potato and was three feet away from her in a heartbeat.

It hit Sable like a tonne of bricks.

He might be wicked in her dreams, a man made for wild nights between the sheets, but in the real world, it was a whole different matter.

So much for her worries about the court whores.

Thorne breathed hard and fast, his chest heaving with the exertion. His horns curled, flaring forwards, and his nostrils flared as he compressed his lips.

Sable sauntered over to him, swaying her hips a little for effect, luring his gaze down to them. He swallowed hard.

There was only one way she was going to do this.

Metaphorically speaking, she was going to push him in the deep end.

CHAPTER 13

S
able took hold of Thorne’s hands, slipped them under her little black top and placed them over her bare breasts.

A bolt of heat lanced him and he growled, his lips peeling back off his fangs, and palmed the soft warm globes. His already aching shaft throbbed against the tight confines of his leathers, pulsing with need that pushed him, relentlessly driving him towards desperation and a point when that need would overcome him and all restraint would shatter, leaving him a slave to his baser hungers.

He wanted to see her breasts, to kiss and lick, and devour her creamy flesh and rosy buds until she cried out his name and pleasure wracked her.

He wanted to please his female.

He grabbed her around the waist with one arm, eliciting a squeal from her, leaned her backwards and shoved her top up with his other hand. His lips claimed her left nipple and her squeal became a moan as he pulled hard on it, swirling his tongue around the bud.

He had wanted to hide it from her, but the knowing look that had flickered in her golden-brown eyes when she had tried to touch him and the rigid control he had sworn to maintain had shattered beneath the weight of his inexperience, told him that she was aware of it. He cursed himself again for succumbing to the jolt of fear that had shot through him, sending his heart leaping violently into his throat and him leaping away from her.

He was inexperienced in this world, lacked knowledge that she possessed, but he would show her that he could make the dreams they had shared into reality. He would prove to her that she had no reason to doubt his abilities as a lover and as a male.

Thorne pressed his fingers into her side as he suckled, each hard tug pulling a moan from her delicious lips. He wanted to kiss them again, savour them for hours this time, but he also didn’t want to leave her breasts.

Sable ran her hands over his shoulders and wriggled against him, her frustration coming through the growing link between them, a connection that they had created in their last vision. He hadn’t thought it possible to claim her, not in a dream, but he had come close to doing just that. He had begun the mating process. They had begun it. She had hungered for his bite and he had been all too willing to give it to her, to penetrate her sweet pale flesh with his fangs and taste her.