2_-_court_of_mist_and_fury_a_-_sarah_j._maas

at him,” I breathed, “if he had tried to hurt you.”
I hadn’t even admitted that to myself.
His eyes flickered. “I know.”
He finished eating, placed the empty tray in the corner, and faced me on the bed,
refilling my glass before tending to his. He was so tall he had to stoop to keep from hitting
his head on the slanted ceiling.
“One thought in exchange for another,” I said. “No training involved, please.”
A chuckle rasped out of him, and he drained his glass, setting it on the tray.
He watched me take a long drink from mine. “I’m thinking,” he said, following the flick
of my tongue over my bottom lip, “that I look at you and feel like I’m dying. Like I can’t
breathe. I’m thinking that I want you so badly I can’t concentrate half the time I’m around
you, and this room is too small for me to properly bed you. Especially with the wings.”
My heart stumbled a beat. I didn’t know what to do with my arms, my legs, my face. I
gulped down the rest of my wine and discarded the glass beside the bed, steeling my spine
as I said, “I’m thinking that I can’t stop thinking about you. And that it’s been that way for
a long while. Even before I left the Spring Court. And maybe that makes me a traitorous,
lying piece of trash, but—”
“It doesn’t,” he said, his face solemn.
But it did. I’d wanted to see Rhysand during those weeks between visits. And hadn’t
cared when Tamlin stopped visiting my bedroom. Tamlin had given up on me, but I’d also
given up on him. And I was a lying piece of trash for it.
I murmured, “We should go to sleep.”
The patter of the rain was the only sound for a long moment before he said, “All right.”
I crawled over the bed to the side tucked almost against the slanted ceiling and
shimmied beneath the quilt. Cool, crisp sheets wrapped around me like an icy hand. But
my shiver was from something else entirely as the mattress shifted, the blanket moved,
and then the two candles beside the bed went out.
Darkness hit me at the same moment the warmth from his body did. It was an effort not
to nudge toward it. Neither one of us moved, though.
I stared into the dark, listening to that icy rain, trying to steal the warmth from him.
“You’re shivering so hard the bed is shaking,” he said.
“My hair is wet,” I said. It wasn’t a lie.
Rhys was silent, then the mattress groaned, sinking directly behind me as his warmth
poured over me. “No expectations,” he said. “Just body heat.” I scowled at the laughter in
his voice.
But his broad hands slid under and over me: one flattening against my stomach and
tugging me against the hard warmth of him, the other sliding under my ribs and arms to