Chapter 432: Chapter 431- I am not your Wife!?

Gwen’s mouth opened.

“Bastard.” The word came from her with a flatness that was not actually flat—it had too much breath in it, too much awareness of the heat radiating off the body pressed against her side. “Don’t you dare touch me.”

His arm moved.

It curved around her waist with the slow, deliberate certainty of something that had already made its decision three sentences ago. His palm settled against her stomach over the borrowed cloth of her borrowed clothes, warm and wide and heavy, and he drew her back against him in a single smooth pull—her back to his chest, her hips to his hips, the full length of his body against hers in the close, enveloping darkness of the cot.

She felt it immediately.

The heat of him through two layers of fabric. The steady, unhurried thud of his heartbeat against her shoulder blade. And lower—the dense, impossible, unmistakable weight of his cock pressed against the curve of her lower back through his pants, not fully hard, but absolutely present in the way that certain things are simply present—heavy and warm and interested.

Gwen’s lips trembled.

She did not push him away.

The reason for this was something she would have refused to examine directly if pressed, but it was this: she had watched him all day. She had watched him work beside Cobb without condescension and crouch in the dirt beside children and carry beams that should have required two people, and she had watched every woman in this camp light up incrementally from wariness to something much warmer, and something old and involuntary and deeply inconvenient had happened in her chest over the course of those hours. Something that felt uncomfortably close to pride.

She was away from everything she knew. Her territory, her people, the structured, familiar rhythms of elven life. Every face in this camp was a stranger’s face. Except his.

She breathed out. Slowly. Her pointed ears lay flat against her hair.

His hand moved.

It traveled upward with the patience of a tide, palm dragging warmly along her ribs over the fabric, until his fingers found the weight of her chest. He cupped her—both hands now, her back pressed fully against him—and squeezed with the slow, proprietary thoroughness of a man reacquainting himself with something he considered his. The soft, full flesh of her breasts yielded under his palms, her nipples stiffening against the fabric even through her reluctance, and a soft, helpless sound built in the back of her throat that she swallowed before it could escape.

His thumbs moved in slow circles.

She felt herself going warm in places the cool forest night had no business reaching.

He leaned down. His lips found the shell of her ear—the pointed, hyper-sensitive elven architecture of it—and his breath, warm and slow, moved against the skin just before his mouth did.

“Once all this hassle clears up,” he murmured, his voice so low it barely registered as sound, more as vibration along her jaw, “can we have sex?”

Gwen’s face became approximately the temperature of a forge.

“Viktor—!” The word came out strangled, pitched three notes higher than she intended, her elbow driving back toward his ribs.

“I heard that.”

Lyra’s voice came from the other side of the tent. Flat. Precise. Carrying the specific quality of a woman who had been standing exactly where she was standing and had heard every single word.

Viktor’s chin rested lightly on Gwen’s shoulder. He looked across the cot at Lyra with complete equanimity. “Then why don’t you just leave us couple alone?”

The word ’couple’ dropped into the tent like a stone into a well.

Lyra stared at him. Her jaw worked. The lamplight was doing something unreasonable to the angle of his face at that moment—the dark eyes finding hers across the narrow space with that infuriating, unhurried calm—and the visual combined with the day she’d had and the specific, ridiculous, untenable situation of standing in her own tent while a sex demon propositioned an elf in her cot.

“I will not,” she said.

The words came out before she’d decided on them.

What happened next she would blame, for the rest of her life and with complete sincerity, on the particular combustion of pride, outrage, and the day’s accumulated frustration. She crossed to the cot. She lay down.

Specifically: she lay down on the opposite side of Viktor from Gwen, facing away, with the aggressive dignity of a woman who had made a tactical decision and was fully committed to it.

She regretted it in approximately one and a half seconds.

The cot, built for one body, was now occupied by three. Lyra had perhaps six inches of space between her own back and the canvas wall, and she used all of it. But physics was indifferent to dignity, and the mattress was thin, and the angle was what it was—her back was pressed against his.

Viktor had gone very still.

She could feel him. Through her vest, through her shirt, through the specific density of a man who had spent an entire day doing physical labor and whose body ran, apparently, at the ambient temperature of a small hearth. His shoulder blade was against her shoulder blade. The back of his arm lay against the back of hers.

And then—there was a small, sharp intake of breath from Gwen’s side.

“What are you doing?” Lyra asked, her voice a taut wire.

Viktor’s response, when it came, was accompanied by the soft, wet sound of his lips finding Gwen’s ear again. She could hear it—the delicate, deliberate press of his mouth against elven skin, the slow drag of his breath.

“Just trying to prepare my wife,” he said, with the warm, satisfied inflection of a man narrating something pleasant, “for a good fuck.”

“I am NOT your wife!”

Gwen’s yell was somewhat undermined by the simultaneous moan that preceded it—a soft, broken, involuntary sound punched out of her by whatever his teeth had just done to the curve of her ear.

Her heels dug into the mattress.

Her silver hair fanned across the pillow in a shimmering mess. Her hands came up to push at his forearms and then didn’t, fingers curling into the fabric of his sleeves instead, gripping.

The cot shifted.

Lyra felt the motion transfer through the mattress, through the warm solidity of the body pressed against her back, through the whole ridiculous, overheated, overcrowded situation.

She became acutely aware that the movement had redistributed weight in a specific way—his hips had shifted forward, toward Gwen, and the corresponding motion had pressed him more firmly against Lyra’s spine.

She felt the twitch.

It went through him like a current—a single, unmistakable pulse of arousal, transmitted through fabric and proximity and the basic, indifferent physics of three warm bodies in a too-small space.

Lyra’s breath stopped in her chest.

“Viktor—!” Gwen’s voice, breathless now, pitched somewhere between protest and plea. “There is someone right behind you—!”

“I know,” he said pleasantly.

“She can feel—!”

“I know.”

Lyra’s hand shot backward, fingers finding his arm in the dark. “You move that—that thing one more centimeter toward me and I will remove it from your body,” she said, in a voice of such controlled, murderous calm that it almost disguised the slight shake in her wrist.

Viktor’s tail, which had been doing precisely nothing and was simply resting coiled at his side, chose this moment to flick. It brushed the back of Lyra’s knee with the idle, warm curiosity of a cat testing a doorknob.

The sound she made was not a scream. It was a very controlled, very dignified, very short sound that she would deny under all subsequent questioning.

“Accident,” Viktor said, with perfect serenity.

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