Chapter Thirteen #2
He stared at me for a moment, brows furrowing. “I think you—” He shook his head. “Never mind. We don’t need to talk about it. Is your curse satisfied? Or ought I to continue pleasuring you? Last night wasn’t what you should’ve had. I know I can’t make up for it.”
“It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t poison me.
You—I know you tried not to hurt me. You didn’t really hurt me.
I already told you so last night.” Stefan’s frozen, tight-lipped expression didn’t encourage me much, but I soldiered on.
He had plenty of things to feel guilty for, but the way he’d taken my virginity last night simply wasn’t one of them. “I spent when you were—”
“No!” The sharpness of his tone brought me to an open-mouthed, heart-pounding halt.
“No,” he repeated, more quietly—but his eyes blazed.
“If I hadn’t already believed you had no experience of sex or of life at all, I would now.
Remi. If a man ever tries to convince you that your cock giving it up is sufficient proof that you enjoyed yourself and wanted what he did to you, throw him out of your bedchamber and find a better lover.
Have you ever had a physician knock you on the knee to make your leg jump?
Yes? Well, does that mean you enjoyed being knocked on the knee? ”
“I just assumed,” I stammered. “That is, it did feel good. Last night.”
“The release felt good, and the relief from your curse probably felt incredible, but that didn’t have a lot to do with how I fucked you.” His voice deepened to a timbre that vibrated down into my core. “Perhaps you ought to have some basis for comparison, hmm?”
My hands had fallen from his shirt when I reached my climax, and now my fingers twitched against the blanket, desperate to be touching him. But I couldn’t make myself reach out.
Basis for comparison. I had no reason to say yes. That horrible malaise of earlier had passed, and I felt rather stronger.
But…not entirely myself. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to give my curse another couple of days of abeyance before I tried my potion again.
And it wouldn’t be giving in to my unwanted marriage, to the Lord Chancellor’s plans for me, to Stefan’s charisma and practiced seduction, if I allowed myself to enjoy it. Of course I’d enjoy it. Stefan’s well-honed technique would make it impossible not to.
I deserved to spend an hour being pleased by a practiced seducer if I wanted to, didn’t I? After everything I’d been through? Of course I did. And I could let go of any self-recrimination for my weakness, too, damn it.
“Perhaps I should,” I said. “It would be wise. Prudent, even.”
“You won’t be feeling very prudent when I’m done with you,” Stefan replied, grinning down at me like a wolf.
My cock stirred in the damp, sticky confines of my drawers, and that heavy, needy ache had begun to gather again, suffusing everything between my knees and my navel.
He moved down the bed, trying to pull the blanket and sheet with him.
My breath caught, and I grasped at the edge to keep myself covered, mind suddenly whirling with panic. “Let go, Remi.”
My fingers tightened convulsively. Let go? Gods, no!
“You need something to hold on to?” he asked, voice gentler than I’d ever heard it…but with a low undertone to it that had the hair rising on the nape of my neck. “Reach up to the headboard, Remi. Wrap your hands around that carved bit above your head.”
The heavy, polished furniture in my bedroom boasted beautifully turned posts and finials, including a row of them inset into the headboard. Stefan waited. I held my breath, frozen with confusion and fear and anticipation.
And then I did what he told me as if I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, releasing the crumpled, sweaty blanket and lifting my arms, sliding my hands through the bars, wrapping my fingers around smooth wood, cool against my overheated skin.
“That’s good,” he said, eyes flicking up and down my body and going darker. When he pulled the covers off of me at last, I didn’t resist. I couldn’t resist even if I wanted to, because my hands were clutching onto the headboard’s carvings as if I meant to rip the furniture apart by main force.
Stefan tossed the blankets off the foot of the bed as carelessly as only a man who’d never had to clean up after himself would do, readjusting his position to kneel up between my bare, sprawled-out legs.
I’d never felt quite as awkward as I did at that moment.
And then Stefan leaned over, grasped the waist of my drawers, and gave them one quick tug, all the way down to my calves.
I gasped and squirmed, but that didn’t stop him from working them the rest of the way off, getting my feet untangled and flinging the drawers after the blankets with a flourish. My fingers would snap in half if I held on any more tightly.
Only the hem of my shirt precariously preserved what modesty I had left. He’d seen everything from the back last night, but that had been in an emergency situation and in dimmer light and in a hurry.
But now…sunshine poured into my bedroom, and as he lifted the hem of my shirt, I had nowhere to hide.
But I couldn’t do anything about it, because I didn’t have my hands free. Which meant that if he didn’t like what he saw, that could only be considered his own fault for looking—I couldn’t take any responsibility, could I?
No. Stefan had decided to smooth his hands over my hips, staring down with flushed cheekbones at my rapidly hardening cock in its nest of unfashionably coppery curls.
Stefan was the one pushing my shirt up even more, exposing the flat, pale plane of my stomach, trailing his fingers over my skin and making me bite my lip and arch and whimper.
My knuckles ached, the headboard creaked, and the muscles in my arms would be sore later.
A fresh wave of dizziness had my head tipping back, everything going sparkly in my vision.
Through a throbbing echo of my own pumping blood, I heard Stefan say, “Yes, just like that,” and oh gods, but I’d gotten stiff as a post, every slight current of air in the room an unbearable tease brushing over my heated flesh.
The mattress dipped as Stefan shifted his weight. Another breath of air over my cock—and that was all the warning I had before something hot and wet closed around me, a sensation so overwhelming that it whited out everything I’d ever experienced in my life.
That was Stefan’s mouth. His lips wrapped around me, his tongue flicked at the tip, and now his hands were on me: one sliding under my ass, the other fondling my balls, tugging them down in counterpoint to the suction on my cock.
I managed to lift my head enough to catch one momentary, dizzy glimpse of his dark blond head bent down and buried between my legs, broad shoulders framed by my knees—and that finished me, everything tightening and twisting all over again as I spent down Stefan’s throat.
My come, in his mouth, with him swallowing it—another spasm wrenched through me, and I fell back, limp and numb and quivering all at once.
Distantly, I felt Stefan’s hands on mine, unwrapping my aching fingers from the headboard and gently setting my arms by my sides. My eyelids were too heavy to open. Stefan climbed off the bed, the floorboards creaked faintly as he walked away, and I let myself drift.