Page 22 of Sky and the Grumpy Troll

We stayed like that. His thumb moved once, a slow arc across the curve of my hip, and I didn’t know if he was aware he was doing it.

“Moerrven.”

“Mm.”

“About last night.”

His whole body tensed again. “Sky—”

“Do you want to talk about what you said last night? About being a widower.” I tipped my head back and looked up at him. In the dawn light, his face was guarded, braced for impact. “I’m not going to push you on that. But can I ask you something?”

“If I say no, will it stop you?”

“That’s fair. No, it won’t, because I like to be clear on things, and this one is bugging me.” I held his gaze. “Do you want to fuck me?”

His ears went blue, an immediate, furious flush spreading from the tips down to his jaw. His mouth opened and closed, and no sound came out. His hand had stopped moving on my hip. His entire body was so tense that each individual muscle stood locked against the others.

“Because I want you to,” I said. “I’m attracted to you. I’ve been attracted to you since you picked me up off a bridge like a sack of flour. I’ve been reading your books and thinking about your hands and the possibility that you may be submissive—”

“Submissive?” He frowned.

“—and having extremely detailed fantasies.” I grinned. “So I’m just asking. Straight up. Do you want to?”

“That is not—” His voice came out strangled. He cleared his throat. “The question is considerably more complicated than you are making it out to be.”

“It’s really not. Well, unless you enjoy complicated sex. I once tried Shibari, and I did not have the patience to spend hours weaving ropes around a guy. I just wanted to pin him down and fuck him, you know.”

He stared at me. His jaw worked. The blush was spreading down his neck now, sliding down over his bare collarbone, and his chest was rising and falling fast. Against my inner thigh, where my leg was thrown across him, the hard evidence said the question was not, in fact, as complicated as he was making it.

“You never ate your pastries,” he said.

I blinked. “What?”

“Last night. You bought an entire packet of pastries from the bakery and you never ate them. You must be hungry.” He was already sitting up, dislodging me, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “We should eat before we leave. The road today is more demanding.”

I lay in the warm dent his body had left in the mattress and watched him pull his shirt on. The muscles of his back moved in the most delicious way under that gray-blue skin, and I could imagine marking him, if only I had my flogger.

He didn’t look at me as he dressed. But his ears were still blue.

“We have a long day,” he said. He opened the door, and the cold air from the hallway flooded in and took his warmth with it.

I stayed in bed for another minute, pressing the heel of my hand against my cock, which had opinions about the way that conversation had ended. Poppy climbed up onto the quilt and sat on my chest and stared at me with calm, unblinking judgment.

“He didn’t say no,” I told her. “He didn’t say yes, but the lack of a no feels like an opening, don’t you think?”

Poppy yawned, which I took to be agreement. I thanked her and scratched behind her ears, spoiling her a little, too.

I got up, got dressed, splashed water on my face from the basin. I grabbed the paper-wrapped packet of pastries from the table and opened it. Inside were two cherry turnovers, two apple, several crisp rolls, some kind of cheese pie, and a note from the baker that invited me to enjoy myself. So I did.

Chapter 8

Moerrven

Sky climbed onto the wagon with a cherry turnover in one hand and Poppy tucked under his other arm. “These are incredible. You should have one,” he said, and held the pastry toward me. I took the turnover, not because I was hungry, but because it gave me something to do with my mouth. It wasn’t polite to speak while chewing on a turnover. And I was a coward.

The morning was cool, the sky clear, and Clover plodded out of Sorrend with her usual indifference to urgency. Sky settled onto his blanket, arranged Poppy on his lap, and ate a second turnover, licking sugar off his thumb, which I tried not to watch.

He made such a slow, erotic production of it that I was certain it was intentional.