Fantasyland 03 Fantastical by Kristen Ashley Page A

queen
while you play it. You give me an heir, you can name your price, a
bigger house, more land, jewels, whatever you want, by the gods,
it’ll be yours. Just open your legs, convince me you’re enjoying
it, settle a son on me and, before you leave, I’ll hand you the
world.”
    My body started trembling but for a totally
different reason.
    “Before I leave you’ll hand me the world?” I
asked quietly.
    “Anything you want,” he assured me, his arms
getting tighter, his body pressing into mine.
    “Leave you with my son.”
    “ My son,” he stressed.
    “ Our son,” I corrected.
    His teeth nipped my ear again and he
whispered, “ My son, Cora. My heir. My country’s future
king.”
    Dear God. Was he serious?
    For sanity’s sake, I moved to another
subject. “Convince you I’m enjoying it?”
    “Yes.”
    “So I won’t?”
    “You let go, I’ll make you enjoy it. That’s
a vow.” His thumb moved in, stroking closer to my nipple and I bit
my lip. “Let go, sweets,” he coaxed into my ear.
    “Let go so you can fuck me, get me pregnant
and take my child?”
    His head came up and he asked, “Fuck
you?”
    “Screw me. Boink me. Nail me. Tag my ass.
You know, have sex with me, sex with no meaning, no love, fuck
me, ” I explained acidly.
    He turned me in his arms to facing him and
one hand sifted into my hair, clenching gently but making a
statement nonetheless while his other arm caged me in.
    “I take it… in your world … that’s not
a nice thing to say,” he remarked.
    “Nope,” I agreed.
    He was silent but he didn’t let me go.
    Finally he sighed and said, “You’re clever,
I’ll give you that.”
    “So clever, you’d think I was from a
different world,” I noted sarcastically.
    “Now, wouldn’t go that far, love.”
    No, of course he wouldn’t.
    “Whatever,” I muttered to his shoulder.
    “I think you missed it, Cora.”
    “Missed what, Noctorno?”
    I heard him pull a sharp breath in his nose
then he stated, “The part where I gave you permission to play
me.”
    “That’d be hard to do since I’m not a
player.”
    I watched him tip his head back before he
muttered, “Gods.”
    “Got that right,” I muttered back.
    He tipped his head down and his eyes locked
on mine in the moonlight.
    “You know, love, I go to bed and lay awake
before sleep claims me wondering what it would be like to have the
other half of my soul in Rosa.”
    Oh my God.
    Ouch times, like, a thousand .
    “I asked Dash how he felt,” Noctorno
continued. “He said the minute he met her, it was indescribable.
The instant connection. The pull. Now it’s constant. He can barely
stand to be away from her and she feels it too. I know he’s
wounded, bleeding deep somewhere no one can see because he told me
that being separated from her is like what he would imagine it felt
like having a limb removed. You need it there. You can’t live
without it. When it’s gone, the phantom of it remains and when you
notice you don’t have it close enough to touch, it drives you
slightly mad. She can leave him for hours, days, even weeks but any
longer, he starts dying inside. Minerva has her, she has her and
while she does, my brother is dying inside.”
    God, that sounded beautiful. I wished I had
that.
    It also sounded awful.
    Poor Dash. Poor Rosa.
    “We should have that,” he informed me.
    “We don’t,” I informed him.
    “Why?” he asked.
    “I don’t know.” And I sure as heck didn’t,
except the part that I wasn’t from this freaking world!
    “I do,” he replied.
    Really? He did?
    “You do?”
    “Yes, Cora, I do.”
    “Then why don’t we have it?”
    “Because to have that pull you have to have
a heart. You have to be able to fall in love. He fell in love with
her the second he saw her and she the same. And, as you know, the
minute my eyes hit you, I fell in love with you.”
    Whoa! Wait.
    What?
    What, what, what?
    Before I could verbalize my question, he
kept speaking. “But you didn’t fall