Chapter Ten
When I’d kissed him in the carriage, it had been desperate and clumsy. And when he’d kissed me, it’d been rough and angry, not quite cruel—but far from gentle.
But this kiss, only the third I’d ever experienced in my life, couldn’t have been more different.
Stefan’s lips coaxed mine so sweetly that he could’ve been an adoring lover rather than my detestable husband who detested me in turn.
He pressed his mouth to the corner of mine, teased me open with his tongue, brushed over my lips as softly as if my skin were made of the most delicate silk.
The warmth of his touch soothed me like a drug. I swayed against him, into the tenderness of that kiss and the support of his hands as they slid around my waist and tugged me against him.
He broke the kiss long enough to murmur, “Run your hands through my hair, mess it up a bit,” before he pinned the nape of my neck with one big hand and bent me over his arm.
“Stefan, what—”
He cut me off with his mouth, and this time he kissed me in earnest.
The kiss stole my breath and left me dizzy and barely able to reach up and do as he’d told me, burying my hands in his thick hair.
He tilted his head and somehow deepened the kiss, tongue tangling with mine, a dance as intricate as any he could lead me through on the ballroom floor.
When he released my mouth, I couldn’t help my high, gasping moan, the kind of sound that begged for ravishment.
Stefan bit at my throat, teeth stinging and lips hot, and I gripped onto his hair so tightly that he grunted in surprise and bit down again, this time on the curve of tender skin half exposed by the lace spilling from my corset.
Heat gathered in my belly, between my legs, everything tightening.
I needed, I needed—but it couldn’t be. That slight hardening of a cock that had been stubbornly soft for years could only be my curse making itself known earlier than it ought.
Sometimes mages’ cycles changed over the years. Gods, why did it have to be now?
“My curse,” I choked, and yanked on Stefan’s hair, trying to make him lift his head. “I can’t stay here.”
“Fuck,” he said, and straightened us upright, my head spinning with the motion and my feet both finding their place on the floor—and when had my leg wrapped half around his hip? “Are you usually this careless with taking your potion?”
“I’m not careless! It’s supposed to be the day after tomorrow morning. I don’t know why—I don’t—” Horribly, I found myself breathless and on the verge of tears, stammering into incoherence.
“All right, I believe you, don’t look like that,” he said.
“You mean my limpid-eyed virgin nonse—”
His fierce, sudden kiss took me out at the knees, and I tipped into him, whimpering, the heat in my abdomen blooming into a raging fire.
Stefan pulled away with one nip to my lower lip that sent a sharp, stinging ache down into places that shouldn’t have felt anything at all.
“Stop repeating what I’ve said to you, if you please.
” This time he sounded nearly as breathless as I did, and I might have taken some satisfaction in that if I hadn’t been a heartbeat away from sliding onto the floor and pressing my burning face against the cold tiles.
“I need to get you home. Come on. Try to look more ravished and less ill, if you can manage. Just for a couple of minutes.”
I tried, I truly did, but the bright alchemical lights set in the ballroom’s great chandelier nearly blinded me as we left the dimness of the alcove, and only Stefan’s arm wrapped around my waist kept me on my feet.
The pain of my curse hadn’t started yet, but the fever had, my whole body flushed and damp with sweat.
I wouldn’t have wished a sweaty corset on my worst enemy—and then an image of my father-in-law wearing one flashed through my jumbled mind, and I hitched out a strange little laugh, and Stefan pulled me closer and hustled me up the stairs out of the ballroom, leaving a legion of gaping, snickering faces behind us.
The carriage ride passed in a rattling hell of confusion and mounting fever, curled into Stefan’s side with my face pressed into his shoulder.
He kept his arms around me, preventing me from sliding about, and I wanted, I wanted to climb into his lap, spread my legs over his, feel the power of him between my thighs…
oh, this would kill me, and now I knew why dawn mages had the reputation of being desperate, voracious sluts, because now it hurt, oh, Ennolu, it hurt.
Stabbing pains struck like lightning: in my back, in my legs, between my legs, where my erection strained against the front of these too-tight breeches, a sensation that would’ve been normal for any other man my age, but that bewildered me more than the pain.
“Please,” I found myself gasping. “Please, I need—” You, I bit off before the word quite left my mouth, smothering myself against the silk of his jacket, ruining it with my open mouth and tear-streaked face.
“Two minutes, Remi,” he said hoarsely, and tightened his grip on me, holding me off as I tried desperately to press myself closer. “Almost there. Fuck, what the fuck,” and he stroked my back, setting off another wave of sensation, tingles rushing down between the cheeks of my ass.
I writhed and struggled and moaned, and his voice faded into a litany of cursing and what might’ve been attempts at reassurance.
The carriage jolted to a stop and the world spun sickeningly around me as Stefan hoisted me into his arms and jumped down.
“Make sure Aldrich is in Lord Remi’s rooms, now,” he snapped, amidst the cries of concern of the footmen and the blur of torchlight and the cold air on my burning face, and I pressed my legs together, twisting in his arms…
Each thump of his feet as he raced into the house and mounted the stairs jarred me into fresh agony, and I almost screamed as we turned the corner of the landing.
Stefan’s arms tightened convulsively. “Aldrich!” he shouted, and I cringed as it echoed in my hollow skull. “Aldrich, where the fuck are you!”
“Here, my lord, here!” Aldrich sounded as if he’d been running too. A door creaked, and Stefan spun me as if maneuvering me through it. I choked on bile and panted against his chest as waves of chills swept from my scalp to my toes. “Forgive me, I was at my supp—”
“His potion. Now, get it now! Do you know how much he takes?”
“No, no, don’t, please,” I gasped, as Stefan tried to put me down, and clung to him with all my strength, my fingers ripping through his lace cravat. I gazed up at him leaning over me, his face wavering through the blur of my tears. “Please don’t leave me.”
“You need your potion and you’ll be well enough,” he said. “Remi, let go—damn it, fine, Aldrich, will you bloody well hurry!”
He braced a knee beside me on the bed, one arm still around my waist, and reached up to stroke the sweat-soaked tendrils of hair out of my eyes.
The brush of his skin on mine set off firecrackers down my spine, and I arched up, rubbing against him more shamelessly than a cat in heat.
I couldn’t reach what I needed, and I subsided, moaning.
“I have it, my lord, here,” Aldrich said, and I blinked, and Stefan had a glass in his hand, filled with a familiar murky mixture.
The smell of it hit me, mint and earth and magic, nearly making me retch, but I had enough sense left to know I had to drink it down no matter how little I wanted it.
My teeth chattered against the edge of the glass, and some of the potion dribbled down my chin to spatter my bare chest, but Stefan helped me tip my head back so that most of it went down my throat.
For a long, suspended moment, we all waited for it to take effect. Usually, on the rare occasions when the curse had begun to affect me, the potion instantly cleared the symptoms away.
My stomach gurgled.
And a fresh wave of pain hit me hard enough to knock me sideways onto the bed, every muscle convulsing, my mouth open on a rictus scream.
“What have you done?” Stefan demanded, trying to hold me down, and I sobbed and tried to tell him I hadn’t done anything, I hadn’t, I hadn’t… “Not you, fuck, Aldrich!”
“I swear that’s what he takes, my lord, I’m sorry, what do I do? It’s not working!”
“Thank you for that assessment,” Stefan snarled.
“Fuck. Take this. No, I’m not leaving you, Remi, let go—take it to the palace.
” He’d pulled something from his hand. His signet ring glinted in Aldrich’s palm.
“Show it to Captain Venet. Don’t take no for an answer if someone claims he’s not available to see you.
Tell him I need help only an expert mage can give.
Yes, that’s all, he’ll understand. And then hurry back at once, but wait downstairs for me to summon you.
Don’t come in here unless you’re called. ”
If he wanted us to be left alone unless he…that meant only one thing. The potion hadn’t worked. And so Stefan meant to…
“Oh, gods,” I choked out, and turned my face into the pillow, the linen shockingly cool against my fevered skin.
My potion wasn’t working, and I’d passed the point where that could frighten or dismay me; I merely acknowledged it, a fact in the background of the churning agony spreading through every vein, boiling my blood.
But I still couldn’t look at him and meet those knowing dark eyes, share his understanding of what had to happen next.
The door shut too hard behind Aldrich as he ran out in a hurry, and I jumped as the vibration rattled my brain in my throbbing head.
“Fucking Dromos, oh, Ennolu forgive me. Preserve me.” The words I’d chanted every morning and evening rose up, almost enough to cling to, to pull myself from this darkness.
At the abbey, we’d been so certain that our piety would keep us free of this punishment.
“Holy Ennolu, my love is thine, my devotion—”
Stefan let out a sharp, skeptical crack of laughter. “For fuck’s sake, Remi, prayers aren’t going to help! Look at me. Remi, I need you to look—”
“—never ending, my commitment to thy will unwavering, my—”
“Your death is imminent, that’s what it is, no matter how much love and devotion you give the bastard god who cursed you. Look at me!”
I wouldn’t have, except that he took my chin in his hand and forced me to.
Not roughly. But irresistibly. And when my eyes met his, I found all the certainty I’d been terrified of seeing.
“Do you have any idea why the potion didn’t work? Any alternatives to offer?” I shook my head. “And this isn’t how it ought to be? I mean the timing. This seems more sudden than it should be. Am I wrong about that?”
“It’s—this isn’t normal,” I rasped. “No. It hurts!” That came out more of a strangled wail, and another spasm, searing and sudden, had me curling in on myself again.
“Will you last until help arrives? Remi, you need to answer me! I’m sorry, but you have to—damn it,” he said, and then any other words of his became meaningless noise as the pain doubled, tripled, wracked me in writhing misery.
Nothing existed but that, and his face faded in and out as if he’d been pulled to the end of a long, narrowing tunnel, with me falling away from him, falling and falling…
Mixed in with the endless tumble into blinding pain, there were other sensations: I’d been turned and moved, and the sudden release of the corset’s grip gave me an instant of relief before the air hitting my overheated, sweaty torso brought on a new wave of shuddering chills.
I couldn’t stop my tears, or the hitching sobs that tore them out of me, and Stefan had told me more than once not to cry.
He’d be so angry, at that and the way I couldn’t help him undress me, and he probably thought I was fighting him by the way I squirmed and moaned, but I wasn’t, I needed him, the throbbing heaviness between my legs unbearable now, almost worse than the jolts of pain shooting down my limbs and stabbing me in the neck and temples.
But his voice didn’t sound angry, and his touch didn’t hurt me—until he put me on my stomach and pressed my legs apart, and then the bizarre slick pressure of, oh, gods, only his fingers, and that hurt a little but was mostly cold and strange, but getting warmer, lighting me up from the inside.
They went away, and I took a bit of my pillowcase between my teeth to try to cushion them as they clicked together.
His quick breaths and a slapping sound confused me, and I tried to twist around to see, but I only caught a fragmented glimpse of one of his big hands moving quickly up and down before the other pushed me back down again.
The angle of my thighs made them ache as he nudged my knees open enough to fit between them.
A thick, invading thing slid between my cheeks.
Then it hurt. The stretch and a new kind of burn, different from the fire of my curse, spread from my hole to my cheeks and deep into me.
He thrust in and out, and it didn’t feel like he’d gone very far into me, but the friction still made me freeze up, caught there with my ass in the air at an unnatural angle, half-suffocated in the pillow, still crying.
If Ennolu had answered my fevered prayer at that moment, I’d have died instantly, so humiliated and miserable that I didn’t know how I’d bear it if I survived and had to remember this.
Stefan stopped moving and started cursing, and a spurt of hot wetness tickled my insides.
Oh, that felt extremely fucking odd.
And then an irresistible flood of pure, spine-melting pleasure rushed out of my spasming cock, into my stomach and chest, washing the pain away, melting me into the bed, limp and wrung out and whimpering.
I couldn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t move a muscle. My flesh felt like it might simply flow off my bones, except that I didn’t seem to have any bones. My ears rang oddly, and everything under me seemed to be tilting sideways, tipping me with it.
“Fuck me,” Stefan said, and he sounded very unhappy. Had I done something wrong? I wasn’t unhappy. I might be, in a while, once the whole universe stopped buzzing at a frequency that thrummed delight through my legs and my fingertips and even my hair.
When he pulled out, it made an audible squishy pop, and it hurt. Not much, but enough to be a mote of discordance in the golden fuzziness that surrounded my whole being.
I tried to mumble a protest, but it didn’t make any sense even to me, and then the buzz rose up and pulled me inexorably under the waves of a sea of warmth.