Kiss the Fae (Vicious Faeries, #1)

by Natalia Jaster

Don’t answer the wind, the trees, or the water. Or they’ll hear you.

Cerulean throws back his head and chuckles with them, his lips peeling back to expose sharp canines.

“Are you real or purely a nightmare?” He leans in, his warm breath coasting across my cheek. “By all means, touch me and find out.” “You mind if I use my whip to do it? Men like that.”

Whatever he sees causes his fingers to choke my weapon. “What an accessory, this whip,” he compliments, his molten accent pouring into the room. “When we met, I underestimated its appeal. Tell me, mortal. Have you ever tied a man up with it? Have you ever held a man prisoner while fucking him into a stupor?”

After a pause, Cerulean debates with our winged spectators. “What do you think, precious ones?” he asks them while focusing on me. “Does she know the rest?” I plunk my hands on my hips and sidle toward him. “The mystical Nightingale sang but received no answer.” Cerulean swaggers backward, but not in a submissive way. It’s a come-hither kind of way, luring me up a hill nestled between the trees. “So the bird shifted, using magic to grow larger, knowing its call would be heard at a vaster distance across Faerie.” I mosey after him. “For days, the bird remained taller than the trees and sang its melody. Still, it received no reply. For Faeries, mating is fated. But for the Fae fauna, many must search high and low.” Cerulean crests the hill and inverts his palm, a feather materializing midair. With a few deft rotations of his wrists, the quill pirouettes. “Thus, the Nightingale failed to notice another bird waiting quietly in the underbrush.” The plume disappears as he wiggles his fingers like an illusionist. Then he murmurs conspiratorially, “For the Nightingale had shifted too largely to inspect its surroundings. It did not realize its mate had indeed followed the song and was there all along.”

Cerulean’s attention drops to my mouth, the same way I fixate on his. “This doesn’t make sense,” I push out. “No, it does not,” he rasps, stalking me across the hill, across the blooming grass, and backing me up against a rock wall that appears out of nowhere. “Why do you spurn me to viciousness as much as admiration? Why do your words insult yet invigorate me?” “Why can’t I feel just one thing around you?” I ask. “Why do I feel many things around you?” he replies. “Why do I hear a hundred different words in a single one?” “Why does a single word inspire a hundred different reactions?”

Migrating outside, I see that Cerulean hasn’t moved. He faces the boulder with his head bent and forearm cranked against the hard surface.

Ok the way he is described is doing it for me

He slinks toward my ear and does his worst, his whisper licking across my flesh. “You’re an unfortunate priority.” I gasp as he dips his head, his dark lips abrading the column of my throat and charting a path up the center. “A rather troublesome—” then to my chin, “—tiresome,” then to the crook of my mouth, “—meddlesome one at that.”

“Your eyes are the pale gray of a storm. Your laughter is a swift current of air that I can’t stop hearing, no matter the hour. Your voice is mist, intangible yet penetrating, filtering into my dreams and raiding my slumber. Your name is an addiction, soaking itself into my tongue, nesting itself into my throat, so that every other word I speak threatens to slip, to utter that name.” Cerulean blows humid air into my ear. “Lark.”

I’m kissing him. My thoughts dissolve. The world turns to smoke. I’m lost. I’m found. His mouth is a mistake, and each of my whines is a failure. And it’s intrusive, and it’s intoxicating, and it’s unfair, and it’s fatal. And it’s safe. By some calculating twist of magic, it’s safe.

That’s what this kiss is—it’s madness and mayhem, mischief and magic.

Cerulean’s blue eyes haunt me. I can’t get over the metamorphosis, all that hunger and wonder. “It’s you,” he says, gazing at me with bright eyes.

I shake my head. “Be polite.” Standing in between my limbs, Cerulean braces his palms on my scarred knees, sketching them with his thumbs. Then he bends his head to those marks. “Please,” he entreats against the mangled flesh. “Please, let me.”

“Dammit, don’t say that. You’ve got kin to save! You’ve got a mountain to preserve!” “And I’ve got a mortal to love.”

“We Folk are fickle beings,” Cerulean says, his outline rippling over blades of grass. “You’re my exception. You always have been.” He clasps the sides of my face and leans in. “You’re my weakness, inspiring me to break my own rules. You’re my strength, granting me the fortitude to endure without you. Oh, but it’s a cruel paradox, yet there we are. You’re worth…” he sucks in a tremulous breath, “…every crack in my soul. You’re worth the loss and longing.”

Cerulean crashes onto the platform. He lands in front of me, hunched on bended knee, his right palm planted on the ground in a battle stance that shields my body from them. His wings cleave several posts before slipping into the slots of his coat.

Wounded treachery contorts their faces. “Why?” the female demands, her throat filled with gravel. “Why, Cerulean?” “Because I love her,” he confesses.

He cradles my hand in his and tells me, “I want you to fill this room with everything that’s you. I want this tower to be yours as much as mine, if you want that, too.”