“Sorry,” said Will for what Lette was pretty sure was the four hundredth time.
“Look,” she said, “I understand your desire to play the gentlemanly card as much as possible, it’s a good look for you, but if you’re going to apologize every time your foot brushes the glassware, I think it could get tired pretty fast.”
Could. Ha.
“Erm…” said Will. “Sorry?”
“Oh shut up.” Lette was glad it was dark inside the chest. She couldn’t quite help the irresponsible smile that crept up onto her lips.
“You’re smiling,” Will told her.
Bastard.
“Only at the thought of the noises you’ll make as I feed you your fingers.”
If eyebrows made a noise when they were raised, Lette imagined she would hear that now. But all there was was silence. Silence, darkness, and heat. And the increasing awareness of Will’s body close by.
“I’ve got to say,” Will said then, “the angry and violent look is pretty good on you.”
She let that lie there. Almost ignored it, because she didn’t trust herself to respond to it. He was bold in the dark, was Will. She shifted her weight, brushed a foot against something.
“Sorry,” she blurted.
Will laughed. Too late she realized that she had grazed the glassware.
“Shut up,” she told him again, but couldn’t quite muster her usual bite. She cursed again, more to herself than to him. He just kept on laughing, a low, steady chuckle.
It wasn’t helping that it was so gods-cursedly hot in this chest. She shouldn’t have put on her mail. Though the thought of lying in wait for Dathrax completely unprotected lacked any appeal whatsoever.
She shifted her weight again, felt her foot brush against something else, managed to hold her tongue.
“Actually,” said Will, “that was me.”
“Well, actually,” said Lette, “I’m not sorry.”
“I think I’d be sorry if you were.”
Cois’s hex on his balls, he was flirting with her. She was waiting to be plucked from the earth by a fire-breathing, death-dealing lizard, and he picked now as the appropriate time to finally find his confidence and start flirting with her.
She wasn’t sure if it was guile, luck, or some innate savant tactical genius that allowed him to pick the perfect moment when her defenses were down. She closed her eyes. It made no difference. She was sitting in the bloody dark. She opened them again.
This was ridiculous. She was a mercenary, for crying out loud. She was the veteran of a hundred battles. She had killed far more than a thousand men. She had left a bloody trail through three countries on her way to this gods-hexed valley. Stories were told in hushed whispers of the destruction she had wreaked. If she wanted something, she took it.
Will made a sound, the beginning of some verbalization. He never got to finish it.
She uncoiled out of her cramped, cross-legged pose, unfolded past the glassware, to him, on top of him. Her lips pressed against his. They were soft, and his skin was rough, his stubble pricking her cheeks. She pressed up against him harder, swallowing his gasp.
Then, for a moment, her heart sank, as he lay there, momentarily stunned beneath. She was not worried that he wouldn’t respond, simply that this was as breath-stealing as his response would be.
Then he rallied with force, his large, rough hands finding purchase on the back of her neck, in the small of her back. Her tongue snaked between his lips.
She had gotten his shirt unbuttoned—feeling the rough tautness of his chest, the hard nubs of his nipples—when something heavy slammed into the chest. The whole world rocked. Glassware shuddered. Gravity clutched loosely at her, and her gut flipped.
Will sucked in a breath.
“If you make a single comment,” she said, “about the earth moving then this is all over.”
He was silent as the chest rocked rhythmically. Could she hear wings flapping?
“I wasn’t going to say that,” Will said, sounding disappointingly nervous. “Though,” and suddenly there was some life in his voice again, “I was going to introduce you to my dragon.”
Lette decided she was going to enjoy this more if she shut him up with a kiss.