Chapter Twenty
“…and Lord Marzio said,” and here the lady speaking lowered her voice and leaned in, the tall purple plumes on her headdress bobbing, “that all of Dromos’s demons would’ve blushed at the sounds coming from that room!”
I let out a small, shocked sound along with the other three people listening to her story.
Duke Lucian and Lord Benedict had recently left Nevaia to oversee the summer campaign against the mountain raiders who harried Calatria’s northeastern border.
Along the way, they’d apparently spent the night in Lord Marzio’s manor, and he’d lost no time in spreading the details of their visit.
It didn’t sound like they’d spent much of the night sleeping.
Based on my limited personal experience of Lord Benedict, I wasn’t shocked, and I was even less surprised.
But I’d spent the last two months since making my new bargain with Stefan trying to acclimate to Nevaia’s high society, and one of the first things I’d learned had been to do precisely what everyone else did as often as possible.
If they were laughing, laugh. If they were drinking wine, take a glass.
And if they were gasping in delighted mock-horror at a bit of prurient gossip about the beautiful duke and his notoriously, adoringly lusty consort, then gasp.
In this case, my gasp conveniently covered a sigh.
Stefan’s meeting with his father had gone well, so he’d told me, with Lord Ettori satisfied with the results of his kidnapping, threats, and poisoning.
It’d also meant that Lady Estella had resigned herself to my existence, recognized that establishing me here would make Stefan more likely to stay, and begun to encourage her friends to acknowledge us.
This garden party, given by one of her bosom cronies and therefore a required event for Stefan and me, had been endless and stultifying even by Nevaia’s high standards.
On my island, the middle of the summer had been hot, but not oppressively so.
Sea breezes swept over the island at all times of the year.
But here, a warm wind from the hills pushed the cooling ocean air out from the shore, leaving the capital a sweltering, sweating misery.
Especially in a fucking corset. Gods. Aldrich had told me, with the blissfully smug air of a man wearing a loose cotton shirt underneath a light linen jacket, that some discomfort was naturally attendant on the pursuit of fashion.
If I hadn’t been quite so immobilized by the teal blue watered silk contraption he’d laced me into, I’d have shown him some discomfort.
My face had to be nearly as red as my hair, even standing here languidly in the shade of a spreading chestnut tree at the edge of the lawn.
Did I dare use magic to find some relief?
Here in public, where anything that went terribly wrong would cause an uproar, in addition to possibly lighting my clothing on fire?
I’d only done that once, so far, but Aldrich’s terrified cry still echoed in my mind.
I had to, though, or I’d faint, and someone would unlace my disgusting damp corset and peel it off of me in horror in front of everyone. Oh, Ennolu, that someone might be Stefan. That would be worse than going up in flames.
The lady relating Lord Benedict’s perversions had moved on to the awkward way Duke Lucian had mounted his horse the next morning, and I contributed the required “Oooh!” while turning my focus inward.
Like any large city, Nevaia had its share of mages.
Many of them took pupils, and my mother had recommended one she’d known long ago and trusted.
She and I had exchanged letters every week, and I’d kept her up to date on the three-times-weekly lessons I’d been taking.
We hadn’t yet found a good time for a visit, but I hoped I’d have something to show her when we did.
And for that, I needed to practice, damn it, no matter how strongly my tutor had emphasized—in gruesome and graphic detail—how one ought not to try to regulate the temperature of a living thing.
But we had practiced warming and chilling objects, liquids, and even the air.
Like the damp, miserable, thin layer of liquid coating my skin under my clothing.
Or the oven-like east wind trying to ruffle my limp curls.
Reaching my power came naturally to me these days, given the expert tutelage I’d received and…
a little quiver went through my stomach, and no, I couldn’t think about the other reason my power had been so consistent. Not here surrounded by people!
I couldn’t help glancing across the lawn.
I’d been trying to avoid looking at him.
But Stefan’s embroidered lime-colored taffeta caught the eye even surrounded by the garden’s greenery, and his golden head shone in the sun.
His height and broad shoulders made him unmistakable in a group of other gentlemen—at least to me.
I could always pick him out of a crowd, and it didn’t have much to do with his eyewatering taste in clothing.
As if he’d felt my gaze, he turned his head, seeming to meet it with his even from a hundred feet away.
The jolt of the connection sizzled all the way down to my toes.
Use it. I had to use it, this simmering heat his very existence stirred up in my magical senses and my inner being, or I’d be giving in to what he did to me for no reason at all.
I raised my fan and closed my eyes behind it, going to my center, pulling power from the wellspring under my ribs.
The air around me and the perspiration under my clothes delineated the outside of my skin, and I traced it with the invisible brush of my mind, tugging gently on the motion of it, slowing and cooling it, strands unfurling like a spiderweb…
“Lord Stefan, come to collect your consort?” The strident voice of one of the gentlemen in our little circle of conversation struck me like a blow. My eyes opened wide, and there was Stefan standing next to the lady with the plumes, right there, and my control faltered.
Only for an instant, but it was enough.
I yanked on those delicate strands, startled and off-balance, and they whipped past the barrier I’d put up in my mind, shredding the energy of my skin, my magic unraveling.
Cold. So cold, goosebumps breaking out all over me, my teeth chattering instantly, the fan slipping from my numbed hand…
Stefan lunged for me, the lady crying out in anger as he pushed her aside and the gentleman expostulating, but they didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the support of Stefan’s arms closing around me, the relief of letting my shivering body droop against him while he led me away.
He held me up until we’d gone around the tree and down a short flight of steps.
A sunny bench sat there against a brick wall, deserted because it was far too warm for comfort in this weather—for anyone but a mage who’d frozen himself nearly to death.
Stefan lowered me down and crouched in front of me, taking my hands in his.
I sucked in a shaky breath. His touch heated me more than the sun beating down or reflecting from the wall, but it wasn’t enough.
I focused on his eyes. They bored into me, darker than I’d ever seen them.
“Remi,” he said, and his voice wasn’t the calm drawl of the society fop who’d been my model husband for the last two months. It sent a shudder through me completely unrelated to my shivers. “What happened? I walked over and you collapsed. What do you need? What the fuck did I do?”
“Tried to use,” I chattered out. He thought he’d caused this? In a sense, he had, but not at all the way he seemed to mean. “Magic. To cool m-myself down. But it di-di—” Didn’t work, but I couldn’t get the words out.
“Fucking hell. Look at me. Feel my hands? Remi, use your magic again if you have to, make it work, because there’s no other mage here. And you’re turning blue around the edges!”
Make it work? Who the hell did he think he was, ordering me to simply “make it work,” as if it could be that easy?
Stefan’s hands tightened, and he started chafing my wrists.
His fingers. His skin. The heat and energy of Stefan’s body, seeping into mine…
and suddenly it was that easy, as if his body were an extension of mine rather than a separate entity, the way it felt sometimes when he was in me, filling me, fulfilling me and my magic.
I warmed from the inside out, my magic pulling on his complementary strength and suffusing me with it, all the way out to the goosebumps. They vanished as the shivers calmed and faded away.
Stefan peered at me for a moment and then slumped back on his heels, blowing out a long breath. “What were you thinking? Remi, what the hell were you—and it was the moment I came over to you. Was it because of me? The truth, if you please.”
The truth would be far too complicated for me to try to explain, let alone for him to understand.
How could I tell this man, who’d been acting like a polite stranger to me for two long months, that he’d become essential to me?
Not because my potions had failed—I didn’t even know where the box had gone to in the back of my wardrobe, it’d been so long since I’d thought about using them—but because of something fundamental to who he was.
He’d maintained his urbane demeanor while he fucked me.
Every other day, times that occasionally fell in the middle of the night, when I’d had to go down to his study and tell him, trying not to blush too much, that I needed him.
And then he’d set down his brandy glass, and he’d follow me up to my room, and he wouldn’t say a word as I bent over and he pushed into me, made us one, even though we couldn’t have been farther apart.
Months of entering ballrooms on his arm, of circulating through crowds and nodding and smiling and laughing, frequently enough to grow used to the parties and the company…but never enough to grow used to touching him only for show.