Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz - 29

Nathaniel cupped her face in his palms like water and drank from her lips all the words she had said in their notes and under cover of moonlight, as well as a few she hadn’t yet. Violet gasped, feeling again that great intake of breath from deep within her, the delicate sprouting of an emotion she’d only just dared to expose to sunlight.

This was not a kiss. It was comprehension.

“Is this alright?” he murmured against her mouth.

“Yes,” she sighed, and never had she meant the word so much. “ Yes .”

Her hands roamed his waist, his back, pressing herself ever closer to the hard lines of muscle beneath his clothes. Nathaniel maneuvered them backward until her lower back was flush against the edge of her worktable, and she pressed closer still.

He tasted of mint and rosemary. As Violet kissed him, she was of a sudden mind to grow an herb garden, a constant reminder of him that would drive her wild every time she drew near. But there was no need when he was right here before her, his hands on her body and his tongue demanding of hers.

“You are all I have been able to think about,” he murmured against her lips. “The sound of your voice, the feel of your skin, the taste of your mouth…”

He hissed in pleasure as she slipped a hand between them, brushing her fingers over the fabric of his trousers.

“Violet.” He stilled.

“Mmm?”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to be very direct with me here. What is it you want?”

She pulled back just enough to look up at him through her lashes, and a spark of the Thornwitch buzzed through her just then, devilish, powerful, confident. She couldn’t tell Nathaniel who she really was, and that had started to eat away at her, but perhaps she could show him, just a little.

She smirked up at him. “I don’t want to go slow,” she said carefully, watching the way his throat bobbed and trying to judge his reaction. “Perhaps we should, but…I don’t want to be good right now.”

A matching smile began to form on his features. “You know, I rather think being good is overrated.”

Her heart swelled, and their lips met again. One of his legs parted hers, and she rocked against his thigh, delighting in the friction at her core, her hands winding around the back of his neck to tangle in his thick hair.

No, they weren’t being good , exactly, but Violet struggled to think of a time when she’d felt better than this.

Her head fell back when his teeth nipped at the exposed skin of her throat. “Oh, that is…” Violet’s words rode the low hiss of her breath like a leaf on the breeze, quickly losing track of their destination and fluttering aimlessly in the air.

He chuckled against her neck, and from this angle she could still see the quirk of his eyebrows as he asked, “Is that so?”

She moved against his leg again, satisfaction and heat curling together low in her belly, and greedily reached for the back of his head so his mouth could once again meet hers. “Shush.”

But he didn’t.

“I have imagined us a hundred different ways,” he admitted in a rough voice. His thumb traced the hills and valleys of her knuckles, lingering in a moment’s caress along each one and banishing the soreness in her hands to the furthest reaches of her mind.

“Have you?”

“Mmm.” A press of his lips to the corner of her mouth. “Here in the greenhouse, the other night in your kitchen…” His lips trailed up her jaw until his teeth nipped her earlobe, his whisper rough enough to make her shiver. “You have been endlessly distracting to my work of late.”

His words thrummed through Violet like a surge of electricity after a lightning strike. She was buzzing, she was galvanized, she was recklessly, splendidly alive. She nudged the hollow of his collarbone with the tip of her nose, her hands roaming his arms. “And what, exactly, have you imagined?”

A growl of playful laughter escaped his throat, and his hand slipped between her thighs. Violet had never doubted for a moment that the alchemist would have talented fingers, and yet as he began to move against her, circling her sex through the fabric of her trousers, she gasped, still managing to be surprised.

“I’ve imagined this ,” he said, low and rough in her ear. “You just like this, right here against this table, and touching you just like this, and hearing you make sounds just like—” He circled his fingers again, just so, and Violet moaned. “Yes, just like that.”

Her laugh was breathy and strangled. She grasped his shoulders and threw her head back, eyes fluttering closed as he touched her. “And how does reality hold up to your fantasy?”

Nathaniel nipped at her earlobe again and pulled back until she looked him in the eyes. “Violet Thistlewaite, never doubt that you are a thousand times better than anything I have ever dared imagine for myself.”

She drew a shaky breath, unsure of what to say to that, and settled for grinding wantonly against his hand. Her hips jerked when, together, they found a rhythm that made her vision darken at the edges. Nathaniel’s mouth twisted into a smug grin. Violet clutched at his shoulders, pulling him in for another kiss so he could swallow the rather embarrassing cry she couldn’t contain.

“Whatever you do, don’t you dare stop,” she commanded against his lips.

“Sweetheart, I wouldn’t dream of it.”

In the past, Violet had sought her pleasure while in disguise, as well as from people who knew who she was and feared their own attraction to her. Before now, she’d have considered those dalliances satisfying. But here in the greenhouse, still fully clothed as she rode Nathaniel’s hand to chase her release, Violet had the sudden thought that all those times she’d been fumbling in search of something she could not name.

Until now.

When she came, it was with a cry that choked in her throat. Her hands flew behind her, grasping for purchase on her worktable, and she was dimly aware of knocking over a pot of soil. Violet blinked hard, her breath uneven, and found Nathaniel watching her with something like awe. She wondered what he was seeing when he looked at her. She wondered how much she had let her mask fall. How much further she could drop it before he saw all the parts of her she kept hidden.

Her hands went to his biceps and trailed downward, tracing the tendons and muscles of his forearms through his shirt as she gave a self-satisfied little smile.

“Do you want to know what I’ve been thinking about?” she asked then, her expression conniving as she watched the way his eyes grew hooded at her touch. She mapped the line of his shoulder, then ventured down across the plane of his chest. Touching him like this was even better than stolen looks and late-night imaginings, she decided.

“If it’s anything to do with this, then yes, desperately.”

“I could tell you.” She teased him lightly with her fingers, one hand finding his belt. “Or I could show you.”

The sound he made then could only be described as a growl. “Show me,” he demanded, squeezing with the hand he’d wound into her hair, and there was the bossy apothecary she wanted, the one who more and more filled her thoughts and featured in the hazy, pleasure-filled fantasies she had begun to allow herself at night before slipping into a blissfully dreamless sleep.

She made short work of the buttons at his waist, and he let go of her long enough to help slip the fabric over his hips, stepping out of his trousers and underthings until he stood before her, lips swollen, hair a mess, in nothing but a shirt and an unbuttoned waistcoat that had seen better days. He was beautiful, and Violet couldn’t take her eyes off of him.

“This too,” she said finally, her hands sliding up his arms to the collar of his shirt, where she began to undo his buttons. He reached for her as well, unlacing the top of her blouse.

“Fair is only fair,” he said, and she laughed as they shrugged out of their shirts.

Nathaniel’s hands dropped to her waist, quickly skimming over her hips and to the backs of her thighs. He pinched the fabric of her trousers playfully and said, “These will have to go as well, you know.”

She laughed again and repeated his words, shimmying out of the rest of her clothes. “Fair is only fair.” Then he lifted her to the surface of her worktable, right there in the spilled dirt, and she wrapped her legs around his hips, pulling him closer to her until she could feel him everywhere.

To her surprise, he froze, extricating himself from her. “Hold that thought for precisely one moment,” he said urgently as he dashed across the greenhouse and pulled open a drawer in his worktable, riffling through the contents until he procured a slim silver bracelet and slipped it onto his wrist. He returned as quickly as he had promised and drew her legs around his hips once more.

“It’s infused with a contraceptive solution,” he said with a self-conscious smile, showing her the bracelet. “I can get you one too if you like, but they work for either partner.”

“Did you invent this?” Violet caught his hand in hers, gaping at it as he nodded curtly. “Nathaniel, that’s marvelous. You’ll have to sell them in the—”

He cut her off with a hungry kiss that she suspected had as much to do with embarrassment as it did passion. “You can tell me all about how clever I am later, how does that sound?”

Entirely perfect was how it sounded. She smirked. “Impatient, are you?”

“Little witch, you’ve no idea,” he rasped against the skin of her throat, drawing a delighted laugh from her.

This, now, was entirely new to Violet. She had never laughed so much during sex. Playfulness and fun, so closely interwoven with pleasure that they became one and the same. The tension between them was as tightly wound as ever, but now instead of caustic banter in chalked messages, they exchanged touches with fingers and mouths and tongues, counting each other’s shivers and gasps like points in a game that was all their own. She had never wanted so badly to win. She had never wanted so badly, full stop.

She let out a moan as he cupped her breasts, his thumbs circling over her sensitive flesh. “You’ve been hiding these under all those oversized shirts of yours? All this time?” His voice was mildly scolding as he dipped his head to appreciate them further.

“You’re one to talk,” she teased on a gasp, running her hands over his forearms like she’d been wanting to do for weeks. “Besides, a woman’s allowed some secrets.” He peppered her with biting kisses that had her grasping at his shoulders to ground herself.

“I want to know all your secrets.”

He sensed the change in her, lifting his head until they were eye to eye once more. He cradled her jaw, thumb brushing the jagged scar that reminded Violet every time she looked in the mirror of the dangers of trusting someone.

No more , she decided.

“I want you to know my secrets too, I think,” she told him, struggling to keep her voice steady. She wanted to take him at his word. She wanted to trust that he wouldn’t feel differently about her if he knew she was the Thornwitch. But this version of Nathaniel, the one who spoke to her like this and held her like this, was still too new. There would be a time and a place to tell him, she decided then and there. Her secret would not stay a secret for much longer, or it would salt their soil before they ever had a chance to see what could grow between them. But that time and place was not now. Not here. She couldn’t bear it if he stopped looking at her the way he was now.

So she shoved away the guilt and pressed her cheek to his, delighting in the slow rasp of his stubble on her face as she said low in his ear, “But we’ve got more important things to be doing right now, haven’t we?”

With one hand, she reached between them, wrapping her fingers around him and stroking, guiding him toward her.

“Much more important,” he agreed, leaning into her touch.

He kissed the edge of her mouth where her scar pulled at her lips and kept his eyes on her as he entered her, making Violet feel once again exposed. She forced herself to look right back as their breaths grew staggered and they began to move. The table beneath them rocked and creaked until Violet used her magic to strengthen its legs.

“Clever, clever woman,” said Nathaniel, breathless.

“Don’t you dare stop,” she responded before he could inspect her handiwork.

“Impatient, are you?”

She beamed against his lips and repeated his words from before: “You’ve no idea.” A tendril of something she could not name grew between them, grasping for his heart like the reaching corkscrew coils of ivy climbing a wall, seeking a place between the cracks to bond, begging him without words not to cut her down when the weight of what she carried grew too heavy.

As they moved together, discovering the turns and play of yet another new game between them, Violet reached back to grasp her worktable for purchase. Her hands in the spilled soil, she felt another release begin to wind tight within her. With Nathaniel inside her and his hands and mouth on her, she came again, and dimly, amidst the pulse of heat and the tunneling of her vision, she felt her magic release as well, flowers sprouting from the dirt beneath her hands, the drawers of seeds on her worktable suddenly bursting with color and sharp, floral scents. Chrysanthemums and peonies, lilies and orchids—suddenly, she and Nathaniel were lost in a jungle of her own making, and Violet cried out a laugh as she sank her fingers into the dirt, feeling the tender roots that were beginning to form. Nathaniel’s thrusts became quicker and more erratic, and as he followed her into bliss, the greenhouse continued coming to life around them. Her eyes glowed green, but for once she didn’t care, because this wasn’t dark or evil; it was magnificent. Violet let go of all control and allowed the energy within her to sprout as it pleased, and she was amazed to find no thorns grating against her skin.

There was only life and color from her magic.

Things that grew.

Things that blossomed.

Now this , she decided as Nathaniel grew still and leaned against her, their breaths loud within their shared space, his body sweaty against hers and his heart beating hard against her chest as they held each other close— this was magic.