Echo nodded, brisk and efficient, but when she tried to pry Jasper from Dorian’s arms, he lurched, clutching at Dorian with desperate hands. Jasper coughed up water on both of them.
He shook violently between bouts of heaving gasps and hacking coughs. Echo asked him if he was hurt, but he either didn’t hear her or he wasn’t interested in sharing. Dorian bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood. Jasper clung to him with weak hands, taking short, shallow breaths.
Jasper’s shirt clung to his chest, and for the first time, Dorian noticed how slender he had become in recent weeks. He felt like he could wrap his arms around Jasper twice. He carded his fingers through the feathers on Jasper’s head, smoothing them down, almost without thinking. He snatched his hand away when Jasper’s golden eyes opened. There was a tiny, flickering spark in them. Then Jasper slipped his mask back into place, piece by piece. It was rather like watching a master craftsman at work.
“You’re cute, Echo,” Jasper croaked, voice raw and pained. “But I think I’d rather have the mouth-to-mouth from Dorian if you don’t mind.”
Dorian’s strangled laugh was filled with more relief than he would ever admit to.
“Good to see you’re feeling better,” he said. Echo watched them with raised eyebrows. Her hands were trembling, but she curled them into fists when she noticed Dorian noticing.
Jasper managed a weak smile before spasms of coughing seized his body once more. Dorian held him as he calmed, tremors dying down to a more manageable shiver. Echo hovered beside the two of them, but Dorian ignored her.
Jasper peered up at him, droplets of water clinging to his blue and purple lashes. “My hero,” he whispered.
And then he winked.
Not even a near-death experience, it seemed, would prohibit Jasper from making light of just about everything.
Dorian choked out a small laugh. His chest still burned. Despite the direness of their situation—Caius was still here, still waiting to be found, or so Dorian hoped—he couldn’t fight the giddy feeling that bubbled up inside him. Half of him wanted to attribute it to the recent lack of air, but the other half—the smarter half—knew it for what it was: pure, unadulterated joy, made stronger in the face of unfavorable odds.
He couldn’t help it. He didn’t want to.
He kissed Jasper, selfishly stealing the breath from his lungs once more.
And unbelievably, Jasper kissed him back.
For weeks, Dorian had been an absolute wretch, tormenting himself with guilt and overwhelmed by his sense of duty to his lost prince. But Jasper kissed him as if none of it mattered. As if he had already been forgiven. A hand came up, ran through Dorian’s hair, catching in the wet strands. It was divine.
He had never kissed Jasper in front of anyone else before. Had never shown him even the slightest crumb of affection when others might see. There was a tangle of reasons, centuries in the making, for his reticence, but now not a single one mattered. Dorian pulled back just far enough to rest his forehead against Jasper’s. Damp feathers tickled his skin, and he sighed as he felt Jasper relax into him.
None of it mattered, because Jasper was his and he was Jasper’s.
And today—on this miserable excuse for a day—that was enough to save them both.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Nothing else troubled them as they crossed the moat via the rickety wooden bridge that should not have held the weight of three people but somehow did. Jasper suspected it was a magic bridge. It was always magic. Nothing in their lives was ever mundane.
The bridge led them to an equally decrepit wooden door set into moss-covered stone, which deposited them in a small antechamber. Damp seeped through the cold stone walls, settling into Jasper’s already-wet skin. He shivered and Dorian pulled him close, rubbing warmth into his trembling arms. Echo politely looked anywhere but at them.
Jasper curled into Dorian, luxuriating in the warmth he radiated. The memory of their kiss played in his mind on a loop. It wasn’t their first, and provided they both got through this temple alive, it wouldn’t be their last. Not if Jasper had anything to say about it. But this kiss had been different, though no less monumental than the first, shared in a musty wine cellar deep in the belly of Avalon Castle. It was as though every strand of artifice had been stripped away, made flimsy by the urgency of the moment. Contained in that kiss were all the things Dorian never said, all the things Jasper never let himself believe. And to think, it had taken a gaggle of man-eating mermaids to bring that about. When he thought about it, he could still feel the frigid water closing around him, the unfathomable strength of the nix as they carried him down, deeper into the abyss, the burning of his lungs as he tried to hold his breath, the searing pain of water rushing into them when he failed.
Jasper had nearly died.
Not for the first time, and probably not for the last. But on the short list of maladies and disasters Jasper feared, drowning surpassed them all. He had never learned how to swim, his fear of drowning had been so great and so deeply ingrained. He and water simply did not get along, and so long as he kept his feet firmly planted on dry land, it wasn’t a problem.
Right up until it was.
As if sensing the course of Jasper’s thoughts, Dorian tightened one arm around his shoulders while his other hand kept rubbing soothing lines up and down Jasper’s bare arm.
“Are you all right?” Dorian asked, the timbre of his voice low and soft, meant only for Jasper despite Echo’s presence. She was valiantly trying to make herself as unobtrusive as possible as she studied the stone slab opposite the door through which they had entered the antechamber. Another room full of nasty surprises, Jasper guessed. They’d catch their breath and then move on, but Jasper was nothing if not a selfish creature, and in that moment, all he wanted, all he cared about, was basking in the feel of Dorian’s arm around him and the wonderful, radiant heat he produced.
Jasper rubbed his cheek into the coarse fabric of Dorian’s shirt. He turned his head so that he could rub his cold nose against the warm skin of Dorian’s throat. The touch elicited a squirm that was sinfully delightful.
“I’m okay,” Jasper said. “That would have been an ignominious end.” He tried to make light of what had just happened, but he couldn’t suppress the shudder that ran through him at the thought.