The Divorced Military Queen Awakens (by Sadie Baxter) novel Chapter 692

Chapter 692 Lingering Heat

His whole body went rigid, and only then did his mind seem to swim back to the surface.

“Quinn?” His voice was a bewildered murmur in the dim room.

“Yes, it’s me,” she answered. “If you’re trying to be close to me, to narrow the distance between us, I don’t object. Just not like this.”

“I’m not…” he began, shaking his head.

“Then are you sleepwalking?” Quinn pressed.

Julius pressed his lips tight. Sleepwalking? That didn’t feel right.

He had been dreaming so deeply that for one reckless heartbeat after waking, he could not tell the dream from the world around him.

“You’re on top of me–could you move, please?” Quinn pushed gently at his chest.

Only then did Julius look down and see the tangle of limbs they had fallen into.

He straightened, freeing her. Quinn reached over and pressed the switch on the bedside lamp.

A pool of honey–colored light spilled into the room at once.

In that dim glow, Julius saw the scattering of scarlet marks on Quinn’s neck and collarbone, clear evidence of what he had just done.

Most of the buttons on her pajama top hung open, revealing pale skin that flashed in and out of view, and the sight drew every muscle in his body painfully taut.

A hot, restless tide began to roll through him.

Julius frowned. How could this frail body ignite such raw desire in him?

He even imagined pinning her beneath him, kissing every inch of her until she wore nothing but the marks of his possession. Then no one else would dare to cover her again.

Feeling the weight of his stare, Quinn glanced down at her half–open top. A soft blush climbed her cheeks as she sat up and quickly fastened the buttons.

Quinn stood barefoot on the cold wooden boards, nightshirt clinging to her frame, while the hallway lamp carved long, wavering shadows between them. “Care to tell me what on earth is going on–why you decided to show up in my room in the dead of night?”

“It’s nothing. Merely an accident.” Julius pivoted, as if aiming to retreat before the question could land. He made it exactly one step before her fingers locked around his wrist, thin but unyielding, halting him mid-

stride.

Quinn lifted her chin, defiance flashing in sleep–blurred eyes that now burned clear and hard. “Start

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talking. Why my room, and why the kiss? While you were pressing your lips to mine, you told me not to love anyone else–only you. Did you mean every word?”

Julius‘ brows knit, a silent knot of tension. He stared at the hand clutching him–skin stretched tight over knuckles, fragile as bird bone–yet her grip felt stronger than steel. He could’ve shaken her off, but he couldn’t bring himself to. It was as if he almost wished she could hold on to him harder.

His head jerked up, confusion cutting across his features. “I said that?”

“You did,” she answered, voice even, almost gentle. “You added that if I stayed with you, everything else- whatever I wanted–would be mine.”

His frown deepened. Memory offered him nothing but scattered ash. He could not, for the life of him, recall any of it.

What he did remember was a dream–vivid, savage, and wrong. In it, Quinn stood beside Harlan, her hand wrapped around the other man’s arm. She looked at Julius as though he were a stranger at the door. “Julius Whitethorn,” she had said in that nightmare, cold as winter glass, “let’s end this. You don’t love me, and I don’t love you. The man I love is Harlan.”

Harlan. Impossible. She was meant to love me!

A tremor yanked him from sleep, and instincts–old or primal–drove his bare feet down the corridor to her room, to her warmth, to the kiss that tried to tear the nightmare in half.

Dream and reality now tangled like two lengths of thread, indistinguishable each time he blinked. He no longer trusted what illusion was or what truth was.

“I-” He drew a shaky breath, eyes dark with half–remembered terror. “I had a dream that unsettled me. Barely awake, I wandered in here.” His voice broke, then steadied. “Quinn, don’t fall for someone else. It would ruin you. It would ruin me.”

She arched one brow, amusement glinting at the edge of her concern. “So the nightmare that rattled you was me loving another man?”

Color rose along his cheekbones. He turned aside, as if her accuracy left him suddenly naked.

“Then tell me,” she pressed, voice low, “when you promised to give me anything if I stayed–were you serious?”

He forced his shoulders back. “Stay with me and you remain Mrs. Whitethorn. Half of everything the Whitethorn family owns is yours by right.”

Half the Whitethorn fortune–words powerful enough to drown most people in possibility.

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