Chapter Fourteen
The faint sounds of water running and cabinets being opened in the bathroom told me that Stefan had gone out of sight for the moment, and it allowed me time and space to recover my breath, if not my equanimity.
And to tug my shirt down to cover myself, shivering as I remembered how I’d gotten so damp and well-used.
My stunningly handsome, arrogant husband had taken me into his mouth and…
my cheeks burned and my fingers curled into balls.
Did he do that with his lovers? Did he pay other men to do that to them?
I’d have expected him to receive that act exclusively, especially given that Abbot Junius, in the conversation I wished I could forget, had strongly hinted that men like him never bothered to give anyone pleasure.
Stefan couldn’t possibly have done that because he wanted to do it for me, in particular. What an absurd idea.
Would he expect me to do it for him next? I still couldn’t decide if I’d want to for anyone, let alone Stefan, and I hadn’t even seen his cock yet, and what if it revolted me?
He’d be back in a moment. After bringing me off twice in a row, he’d want either my mouth or to take me.
In the daylight. With Aldrich probably lurking out in the corridor.
Oh, Ennolu help me—not that he’d done much of that lately, the old bastard.
A shift in the room’s air currents and the prickling of my magic warned me that Stefan had come back a moment before he spoke.
“How’s your curse?” His tone had that careful neutrality that always concealed something else, but this time I had no idea what answer he wanted from me.
Oh, how I wished lying came more easily to me than simple honesty. My curse…seemed to be in abeyance, oddly, given how my magic had surged with need when Stefan came to my door. Or had that been not my curse, but…oh, bloody bloody hell.
Desire.
It had been desire. And my magic and my body seemed to be entirely complicit in their betrayal of my common sense.
Well, even my stringent honesty had its limits. Telling my unwilling husband I’d simply wanted him to touch me exceeded them by a mile.
“My curse seems to be satisfied for the present,” I said, my voice coming out thready from the dryness of my mouth. Perhaps he wouldn’t ask how in the world that could be possible when he hadn’t spent in me.
“How’s that possible?” he demanded. Damn it. “I don’t know everything about dawn mages, certainly, but I do know one specific act is necessary. And I didn’t come anywhere near fucking you.”
Reluctantly, I forced my eyelids to lift. As I’d feared, Stefan had come to stand directly beside the bed, frowning down at me, hair damp and finger-combed and mouth distractingly red.
From sucking my cock.
My breath came faster again. A sharp twinge arrowed through my lower belly and between my legs.
“I see,” Stefan said after glancing up and down my body. The frown smoothed out. And the warmth kindling in his eyes set off sparks inside me in places only he’d ever touched. Our eyes met again, his now dark and molten. “I think I understand.”
He did, gods preserve me, he did, I could see it in his expression and hear it in the timbre of his voice. He knew, and my attempt at dissimulation had done nothing but make me look foolish.
“Remi, I already promised I wouldn’t use it against you.
” He set a knee on the edge of the bed, leaning down slowly as if I might startle and break for cover like a hunted hare.
“It’s all right. I understand why you wouldn’t want to tell me the truth, but I give you my word again. You’re safe with me.”
I bit my lip just in time to turn my bubbling laugh into a strange, strangled eep.
Stefan raised his eyebrows. I forced out a cough.
Oh, thank Ennolu after all. Or Dromos. Or one of the minor deities who hated them both, perhaps.
Why in the world had I imagined Stefan could read my mind?
I’d had such a clearer head when I’d been celibate.
Of course, I didn’t really need him to take me now. My curse had gone dormant. If Benedict’s assessment had been correct, and I saw no reason to doubt his expertise, my potion would work again well before I needed it next.
Stefan never needed to take me again, let alone now.
But how could I contradict his incorrect assumption without exposing myself? Figuratively, anyway. If literally exposing myself had been a ship, it’d not only have sailed, but been boarded by the Dire Pirate Kostas, burned, and sunk.
Maybe I could summon the smallest bit of dissimulation after all. “It’s hard for me to talk about,” I said, lowering my eyes demurely so as to hide the lie in them. “It’s improper. But I do believe you. It’s not that I’m afraid you’ll be cruel about it.”
That, at least, had the benefit of being true. You’re safe, as the pursuing wolf said to the hare…and yet I didn’t doubt his word.
“No, I won’t.” The motion in my peripheral vision resolved into Stefan’s shirt, fluttering through the air as he tossed it away. His shirt. Which meant he’d be…
He leaned down again, and I had to look, but I barely caught a glimpse of the expanse of his naked chest and shoulders before he slid a hand behind my head to hold it in place and covered my mouth with his.
Stefan broke the kiss long enough to murmur, “I won’t even be cruel enough to make you ask for what you need, Remi, let alone beg me for it.”
My hands had come up to grasp at him, fingers tracing ridges of muscle and smooth skin and curling into the hair on his chest and trailing down his stomach, and I had no idea what to touch first. Or next. Or how to touch him so that he’d enjoy it a tenth as much as I would.
“I wouldn’t even know what it was that I needed,” I gasped, reduced to abject honesty again by my lightheadedness. “I have no idea what to do.”
“Don’t worry.” He mouthed along my jaw, and I let my head fall back, hoping he’d suck on my throat again, and he did, and I moaned like a slut and didn’t even care. “I know exactly what to do with you. And your curse.”
My curse had nothing to do with it, but as long as he thought it did…
I could be as much of a slut as I wanted, couldn’t I?
He’d never know that it wasn’t irresistible, tainted magic prompting my encouraging whimper as he kissed down along my chest, or making me spread my legs in anticipation of his moving between them.
He’d never know that he was the irresistible one, damn him, for some ineffable reason known only to those gods who’d chosen to make me their plaything.
And Stefan’s. Because as big hands slid under my shirt, pushing it up and off, need built inside me to the point that I didn’t even care what he saw.
A thin chest, narrow shoulders, freckles scattered here and there on my redhead’s skin, nothing to inspire poetry or even lust. But I eagerly lifted my arms and let him strip me bare—and then gasped up at him, wide-eyed, as he wrapped the shirt around my wrists and tugged them up to extend my arms.
I lay before him as he knelt there gazing down at me, expression unreadable.
His eyes moved from where he had my wrists pinned, down to my face, lingering for a moment and letting them meet mine.
And then down again, over my heaving chest and the fine line of coppery hair that led to the thatch around my cock, which had gotten hard yet again and pointed up at his face.
My skin prickled under his regard. But at least I could finally stare at him as much as I wanted, taking in every curve and plane: the thick muscles of his arms, the broad expanse of his chest, the way the sunlight glinted on his pale skin and golden hair.
When he abruptly released my wrists, I let out a startled little cry.
He looked back up and met my eyes, his glittering. “Next time,” he muttered. “If there is one.”
Before I could respond, or even understand, he bent back down, burying his face between my legs and bypassing my cock entirely to pull my balls into his mouth.
The ceiling blurred as my lungs seized up and my body went as stiff as my cock.
Hot, and wet, and that was too sensitive, too soft, too, too, too—his tongue dipped under, lashing down between my cheeks, and he’d wrenched me open with his grip on my ass, and then he licked me—
My cry sounded more like pain than like the sharpest, most achingly shocking pleasure I could’ve imagined.
Except that I never had imagined it, it hadn’t crossed my mind that any man, let alone a man like Stefan, would swirl his tongue around my needy hole and press inside, nibble at the rim while his fingers pulled me open, kiss the inner curves of my ass and nuzzle my overheated skin.
This might as well have been my curse after all for the feverish unreality of it, the way I had no control over my own body, arching up and pushing down toward him, the whole world narrowing to the twisting, frantic ache inside me, the emptiness that his clever tongue could tease so sweetly but never fill.
“Please,” I choked out, begging after all. “Please, Stefan, please!”
He lifted his head, showing me a shiny, reddened mouth and wildly disarranged hair and wide eyes—no trace at all of the sardonic, overly controlled rake I’d thought I married.
“Forgive me,” he said, and rose up to his knees again. “I was lost in the, ah,” his lips quirked, “task at hand.”
Stefan pulled a little bottle out of his pocket, set it on the bed, and tugged at the first button of his breeches.
I’d seen other men naked before a thousand times, because living in the close quarters of an all-male abbey didn’t lend itself to privacy. But we’d all been dawn or dusk mages, all using potions to control our curses, and all, as a result, incapable of arousal.
As Stefan pushed his breeches and drawers down his thighs, he revealed the first erection I’d ever seen that wasn’t my own.