Chapter Ten
“Stop wriggling,” Benedict said, and then grunted as I shifted sideways, my elbow knocking hard into his ribs. He tightened his grip and managed to dig his fingers into mine, and I yelped and flailed, knocking us both sideways.
The hallway spun dizzyingly around me, my feet slipping, and we stumbled through the door of my bedchamber together, Benedict steering us as I laughed and did my best to tumble onto the floor.
Instead I landed on my back with a soft thump, my head bouncing.
Oh, gods, too much wine. I squeezed my eyes closed until everything settled, from the universe around me to my stomach.
My bed. I’d made it to my bed.
Benedict had carried me here and poured me into it after all, despite my best efforts to send us both sprawling. Of course, he’d only gotten me as far as lying sideways with my legs hanging off, but I had to give him credit where it was due.
I blinked and found him staring down at me, gray eyes wide.
Not angry, the way I’d expected. But—open, wanting something—he shook his head and drew back, expression shuttering, but I reached up and caught him by the front of his shirt, clinging on for dear life.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I demanded, not even slurring my words. Well, maybe a tiny bit. “Who’s going to fight off all the assassins if you leave me here alone?”
He stilled, leaning down over me with one hand braced on the bed and the other trapped under my waist. The candles in the branch by the bed had burned down to stubs while we ate, shedding only a faint flickering glow on the side of his face.
Candlelight flattered everyone, but it made Benedict look like the gorgeous subject of yet another modern artist’s experimental portraiture. The sharp line of his nose and the angle of his jaw, his firm lips fading into shadow, the golden gleam in his eye, all of it held me spellbound. His heart pounded away under my hand. Wine could do that, but probably not to a mage who could drink every soldier in Calatria under the table.
A warm, lazy, melting need unfurled inside me, between my legs, spreading through me like a drug. Perhaps I did need to indulge my appetites more often: for food, for wine, for being fucked within an inch of my life by my detestable stepbrother.
He didn’t seem so very detestable right at this moment, honestly, and I could quite happily blame the wine for that as well as for my loose-limbed sprawl.
I let go of his shirt with one hand and tried to smooth out the wrinkles I’d left in it, patting clumsily at his chest. Mmm, he had such a hard chest. Patting turned into…petting. And tracing the outlines of his pectoral muscles with my fingers.
Benedict let out a strange, choked sound, and he yanked his hand out from under me and reached up to catch my wrist, tugging my hand away from his chest.
“I’m not leaving you alone,” he said, voice rough with—probably annoyance at my drunken antics. Wine brought such slow, unpleasant clarity. I’d forgotten about that side-effect. My skin burned where he touched me. “I’m going to stir up the fire. Give you a chance to get under the covers and sleep it off.”
My detestable stepbrother. Not so detestable when he held my hand like that, one thumb stroking the back of it, sending little ripples of heat down my arm, into my chest. Lower.
And not so much a stepbrother, maybe?
“Are we still stepbrothers when my father’s dead?” The words came out without any volition of mine, another blasted effect of the blasted wine. “He’s not married to your mother anymore. Of course, he actually loved her, unlike mine, and they didn’t divorce, so I suppose in the eyes of the gods—”
“Stop!” I blinked at him, arrested by the unexpected harshness of his tone. His chest rose and fell visibly as he sucked in a deep breath, letting it out slowly. If he hadn’t moved my hand, I’d have been able to feel it, the way I could feel his thighs pressing against my dangling legs where he leaned against me. “Yes, we’re still stepbrothers in the eyes of the gods and the law and everyone we know.”
He looked down and up to my face again, his eyes lingering for a moment. I followed his glance. My robe had come partially undone, and only one loosened tie holding a fold of it in place preserved my tenuous grip on modesty. Candlelight flattered me, too, gilding my pale skin in a way that those stupid painters might have enjoyed, turning my sparse body hair into sparks of spun gold.
“Lucian,” he said more gently. “I’m sure he loved your mother as much as mine. We didn’t even meet until we were both grown men. If it bothers you—look, if it makes you feel better, your parents didn’t get a divorce in the temple, did they? I thought the marriage was just considered dissolved when she went into the convent. So maybe in some way, we were never stepbrothers at all. I don’t know, I’m not a bloody priest!”
That sudden stinging in my eyes…that had to be an effect of the wine too. But it came back to me as if it had happened only yesterday, the twist to my father’s mouth and the look in his eyes as he told me—in his cups himself, not that it excused anything—how it had been the best thing that ever happened to him when his first wife took herself off to a convent on a western island, leaving him, and me, and Calatria, behind. Joining a religious order meant she had to be celibate. The act had legally dissolved their marriage, although I supposed the theology of it might be a bit shaky. I’d been fifteen when she left and seventeen when he told me how glad he was that she’d gone.
“He didn’t,” I whispered. “He told me so. He never loved m—her. He never loved her. He had to marry her, because he’d gotten her with child and he needed an heir, and she was high-born enough that it made sense.” The stinging had become full-on burning, and my breath hiccuped in my chest. “Maybe we should ask her if she knows, since she’s a bloody priestess now. Except that I can’t, because she doesn’t answer my lett—”
The next syllable wouldn’t come, stuck in my throat like a barb. I turned my head and tried not to sob, but holding it in hurt , and I shook, and the world had gone spinny again, the bed undulating beneath me like an ill-trained horse.
And then Benedict was there, lying down beside me and pulling me into his arms, pressing my face to his chest and holding me tight. The scent of him enveloped me, his hands cradled me, and I sucked in long, shuddering breaths, tears leaking out on the exhales and sticking his dampened shirt to my cheek.
I couldn’t stop, even though I hated myself for my own weakness. The tightness in my chest simply wouldn’t ease, and I’d shake into pieces…
Benedict sighed, took an arm from around me, and slipped his hand into the front of my dressing gown, spreading his fingers over my breastbone. For a moment I thought he meant to start seducing me. My fresh grief was all the more horrible for being so unexpected. One moment of simple comfort, even if it was only his pity. Was that really so much to ask? But to have him want to use me at a moment like this…
And then I gasped, startled out of my misery as a cool, tingling sensation spread out from his hand and into my chest, crawling over my skin like friendly ants, the overheated discomfort of being past the point of enjoyable drunkenness evaporating in their wake.
The magic reached my head and trickled through my mind like fresh water in the summer, an instant, stunning relief. The confusion and fuzziness rinsed away, leaving me clear, calm, centered.
Sober.
And not hung over, either. Simply refreshed.
Benedict took his hand away, but he didn’t wrap his arm around me again, instead rolling onto his back. My head lay in the crook of his shoulder. He didn’t shake me off, but I could feel the rigidity in the arm still underneath me.
All right. I’d embarrassed him with my display. I’d embarrassed myself, for that matter. Clearly he’d seen no option but to sober me up, and quickly, so that I stopped whining about how neither of my parents gave a bloody fuck about me.
I ought to move. Say something to change the subject, or better yet, say nothing at all. Go into my bathroom and ready myself for bed. But his alcohol-draining magic trick—and that explained quite a bit about his endless ability to handle his liquor, if he could perform the same magic on himself as easily as he had on me—hadn’t rid me of the lassitude that came after an unpleasant surge of emotion.
Instead of rising, I tipped my head enough to get a look at Benedict’s profile. He stared up at the ceiling, lips compressed, not giving much away.
Maybe I didn’t want to move, but I could change the subject, at least.
“How much will you pay me not to tell everyone who thinks you have godlike powers of drinking that you can clear your head whenever you want, and cheat?”
Some of the tension drained out of him, his arm relaxing under me. Apparently he wanted to discuss my weeping into his shirt as little as I did.
“Pay you? You have the ducal treasury at your command. You don’t need it.”
“You spend enough time with Clothurn to know the treasury’s not precisely overflowing,” I said, and immediately regretted it. I’d meant to sound scathing, or possibly just conversational. Instead, I’d sounded…jealous. Dammit.
Benedict turned his head, meeting my eyes steadily. “Not anymore. And it’s not as if we spent much time talking about council business.” His lips quirked. “Although I’m getting the impression you’d prefer it if we had, hmm?”
Oh, how dare he! “Hardly,” I snapped, and sat up abruptly enough that my vision went sparkly for a second.
“Oh, very hardly,” he said, a thread of malicious amusement in his tone. Bastard. “Extremely hard. Over and over again.”
“If you think I’m interested in hearing about—” I had to cut myself off, my previous fevered imaginings of Benedict and Clothurn in bed popping into my mind. If I finished that sentence, I’d choke on it. “I’m not,” I finished lamely.
He gave another thoughtful hum. “All right. Maybe you’d be more interested in hearing about what I’m going to do to you .”
My cock instantly stiffened, pressing against the small bit of dressing gown that still covered it. And wouldn’t cover it for long, if this kept up.
No, absolutely not. With the wine sent on its merry way, I had no excuse at all for further…indulgence.
“It’s getting late, and I’d prefer to sleep without nightmares, thank you, so no thank you.” I grasped the edges of the dressing gown and pushed to my feet—almost, because Benedict struck as fast as a snake, tossing me flat on my back again firmly enough to make the bed bounce, looming over me and caging me in with his hands on either side of my shoulders, with my legs hanging off the side of the bed again.
My dressing gown finally gave up the fight and fell open, exposing my heaving chest and my flushed skin—and my fully-hard cock.
Benedict smiled slowly, surveying me up and down, finally pinning me with his gaze. I’d never seen his eyes so bright; they almost seemed to glow with his magic—or with something else that I couldn’t name but that made my breath catch.
“I believe I owe you,” he said at last. “I like to pay my debts in a timely manner.”
“Owe me?” Gods, what could he possibly think he owed me? This had to be the lead-in to some scheme or trick, something that would put me in another terrible position—like on my throne with his cock in my mouth, or bent over whimpering as he turned me inside out. “You don’t owe me anything. Nothing. I absolve you of any debt, Benedict.”
He threw back his head and laughed, a full-body guffaw that would’ve been considered egregiously vulgar by anyone at court, including me…except that it made me want to crawl inside his chest and feel the vibrations of it.
“I get the feeling you don’t trust me,” he said, still grinning down at me with his eyes bright and his wavy hair all tumbled about his shoulders, appearing about as trustworthy as a big, predatory cat crouched over a sparrow. “I’m wounded, Lucian. Really. To the heart.”
“As if you have one. All of those languishing former lovers can attest to its absence, I expect.”
Benedict’s grin faded away for a split second, returning in its crooked, cocky glory so quickly I might have imagined it. “I certainly never had one to give to any of them, that’s true, but I didn’t hear any complaints all the same.”
“Probably because you left too quickly to listen to them,” I said, and Benedict rolled his eyes and pushed up and off of me. Didn’t he realize he was proving my point? “Or because—Benedict, what the hell are you doing?”
I tried to get onto my elbows, but he’d already dropped to his knees in front of me, caught my wrists, and tugged me right back down again, my cock bobbing in the air.
My view of my own nakedness, my erection, and his wicked smile had me biting my lip to keep in a moan. His fingers flexed around my forearms. I didn’t even bother struggling. The slight tenderness, not quite bruising, that lingered on my wrists from earlier in the day was more than enough to remind me that it’d be entirely futile. Oh, that shouldn’t make me even harder, with the needy ache spreading down into my balls and my hole.
“I’m paying my debt,” he said. “And I’ll pay interest, too. First your cock, Lucian. I’ll suck that until you come in my mouth.” His matter-of-fact tone made it all so much worse, my fight to keep from making a sound, from squirming in his grip, from spreading my legs as wide as they could go and starting to beg. “That’s just repayment. You’ll have to find out what comes next. So to speak.”
My head spun, and it had nothing to do with wine or the hour. It was simply Benedict. I had to close my eyes and tip my head back into the blankets. His breath and then his lips brushed over the inside of my right thigh just above the knee. My startled yelp made him laugh, tickling me with it, and then I was squirming after all, opening my knees and scrabbling to lift my feet and brace them on the bedframe, pushing down toward his mouth, desperate and frantic.
When his lips closed suddenly over the head of my cock I cried out loudly enough that the guards down the hall might have heard me. If they came running and saw this, I’d have to abdicate, grow a large mustache, and move to a convent myself to escape the gossip and laughter.
“Benedict,” I gasped. “Oh, gods. Bene—please, a moment—” His tongue wrapped around my cockhead in a twisty, impossible way that put my earlier efforts to shame, and fuck, if he did that again I’d spend in three seconds. “They’ll hear me, I can’t keep quiet, you didn’t lock the—mmmph!”
He let go of one wrist to clap his hand down over my mouth. It tried to open to let out a moan, but instead I only moved my lips a fraction of an inch against his skin, his hand so hot and heavy and strong, keeping me from sucking in a full breath through my nose.
Benedict swallowed my cock to the root, teeth grazing me, and I couldn’t breathe, and it didn’t matter how I bucked or how many muffled cries I let out, he had me helpless and flailing and—
Coming down his throat, pulse after pulse turning me upside down and inside out, choking for breath until darkness swirled in my vision, tingling pleasure suffusing me all the way to my fingertips.
Benedict peeled his hand off of my mouth and let my cock slip from his, and I lay half conscious, panting, the cool of the room shocking on my sweat-slicked skin.
When he cupped my balls and my spent cock and lifted them, I thought he meant to clean me up or dry me off at first—but he’d swallowed my spend, hadn’t he, not let it get me all wet? So what did he mean to—he set his finger behind my balls, so gently it made me shiver, and cool, silvery magic ribboned into me, leaving me…clean, it felt like. Very clean, as if I’d just stepped out of the bath and dried myself with the softest possible towel.
He massaged my balls softly. I shuddered and murmured a protest. Too much, he’d already reduced me to a quivering mess, I couldn’t possibly bear whatever “interest” he’d sadistically decided he owed me…and then he bent his head down and flicked the tip of his tongue over my hole.
Benedict had left me oversensitive and a little sore from the morning. It’d been so long since I’d been fucked—and probably never like he’d fucked me.
Nerves I’d barely known I had lit up like the lanterns along the harbor during a festival, my back arching and my head thrown back.
My tender flesh throbbed under that careful touch of his tongue, every sensation magnified almost past bearing. A swipe around my puffy rim, then pressing into the center, barely penetrating me, and I clenched down around the tease of him and moaned.
“You want more than that?” Benedict murmured into my skin, so closely that he was almost kissing me as he spoke, lips caressing my most sensitive places. I clenched my hands into the bedding and let out a sound that would’ve shamed the erotic performers on a brothel stage. “My fingers or my cock? I could fuck you for a while, get you loose, pull out and use my hand. See how you feel on the inside. And then fuck you again.” He punctuated his words with lashes of his tongue, going a little deeper into me each time. “Definitely fuck you again.”
He still had my cock and balls in one big hand, and he slipped the other between my legs and pushed a finger inside me, startlingly rigid after the slick malleability of his tongue. I couldn’t get hard again, not so quickly and not after how many times I’d already spent that day, but as he hooked me open with his finger and thrust his tongue into me, lashing my inner flesh, my cock twitched and spurted everything I had left. A few drops, but enough to leave me shaking with the aftershocks as Benedict growled against me and fucked me with his tongue, merciless.
On and on, plunging into me, working me over with his mouth and that long finger, narrowing everything in the world down to needing him inside me, needing more of him, thrashing on the bed and alternately demanding that he fuck me and begging him to stop.
It wasn’t until my pleas and curses had dissolved into shaky little half-sobbing moans that he slowed his assault and finally stopped, pressing one kiss to my swollen rim as he withdrew.
Benedict released his grip on me at last and kissed his way up my stomach and chest, finally lying on top of me with his weight barely held off by his elbows, nuzzling against the side of my neck. My head had fallen to the side and my eyes had slid shut, and I could hardly muster the energy to twitch as he pressed gentle kisses under my ear.
That mouth…the one he’d used to ravish me so thoroughly my whole body buzzed with it. I couldn’t hold my feet up on the edge of the bed frame anymore, and they slipped off, my heels knocking into the floor with twin thumps. Surely he didn’t do this for everyone, did he? Kneeling and sucking my cock—sucking my hole, for the gods’ sakes—crouched down and pleasuring me as if he himself had been one of the highly paid companions he consorted with.
Another kiss, this time along the angle of my jaw, and I couldn’t help my smile or the flush of something uncomfortably like delight that had started to follow in the wake of my fading ecstasy.
“I thought you were going to use me for your own pleasure,” I said. “Treat me like a whore.”
Benedict stilled, lips almost touching my cheek. His sharp inhale tickled my jaw, and his long exhale heated my neck.
“Who says I’m not?” he said at last, voice tight. He kissed me, flicking his tongue against my heated skin. It chilled me far out of proportion to the cause, goosebumps rising on my legs. “The expenditure of a few coins, or the use of a bit of magic to check for poison, doesn’t give a man the right to be a thoughtless lover. Besides,” and he pressed his body closer, the wool of his trousers and the cold metal of his buttons rubbing over my inner thighs and brushing against my soft cock, “I’m going to be careful, because you must be a bit sore by now, but I’m not going to be a gentleman and finish myself off with my hand. I’m going to spend inside you. Get my money’s worth, as it were.”
He shifted his weight again and I felt the prod of his erection, thick and hard.
His money’s worth. Oh, I did still hate him, no matter what insanity his seduction and his touch had induced in my body and mind to make me feel, briefly and humiliatingly, otherwise.
“Let me know when you’re done so that I can rouse enough to bathe again before bed,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage, without opening my eyes or turning my head. It might or might not convince him, but I had no choice but to try. “I may fall asleep.”
“Feel free,” he said.
And if he sounded angry, good. That’s what I’d wanted. Not his lying tenderness that he apparently spread all over the city every time he paid a whore. Did he expect praise for his noblesse oblige? What an ass.
I breathed as deeply and slowly as I could, keeping perfectly still as Benedict stood up and then leaned back down again, this time with his cock bare and pushing between my thighs.
He lined himself up, pressing the head against my hole until it forced me open, popping inside.
Even after being fucked that morning and thoroughly prepared with his fingers and mouth a few minutes before, the stretch took my breath away. I bit my lip and braced myself as best I could, not resisting, moving with him as he started to thrust. Benedict’s breath echoed harshly, the rhythmic underpinning to the symphony of the slap of his balls against my ass, the creak of the bed frame, the wet sound of his cock driving into my body.
As he’d promised, he seemed to be trying to go easy on me, but at last he lost control and pounded into me, the arm braced near my head rigid with strain and the other hand gripping my hip possessively and holding me in place for him to take. I felt every inch of him, lighting me up on the inside, ripples of sensation radiating out from where he filled me.
He groaned, stiffened, and stilled. This time, perhaps because it hadn’t been long enough since the last for his magic’s curse to build up its strength, I only felt the faintest frisson of something otherworldly along with the hot spurts of Benedict himself.
But it was more than enough to make me gasp and clench around him, a final spasm of pleasure that wrung me out and left me utterly limp.
Every cell in my body hummed with the aftermath of what he’d done to me, my mind floating away on the tide.
Benedict pulled out, leaving me hollow and soaked and shaking.
“Come on, Lucian,” he said, and started to tug at my dressing gown where it still clung to my shoulders. “Get under the covers.”
“Bath,” I mumbled. “So sticky.”
But I couldn’t quite get my eyes open, catching snippets of the dim room from under my eyelashes: the bedposts, a flicker of dying candlelight reflecting from the mirror on the wall, the shadowy ceiling. And I certainly couldn’t do much with my limbs, which flopped every which way.
Benedict wrestled my other arm out of its sleeve and tossed the ruined garment on the floor, rolling me into the bed and folding a blanket over me. It settled like a cloud, wrapping me in warmth, and the mattress and pillows rose up to embrace me.
“I’m still sticky,” I said into one of them.
A moment later Benedict slipped into bed behind me. He’d stripped the rest of his clothes, and he curled his body around mine, hard chest bracing my back, muscular thighs lined up with mine, and his cock slipping between my cheeks as if awaiting another opportunity. Gods, but he was big, and warm, and solid, and when his arm wrapped around me I went boneless, melting into the bed.
And into his embrace, gods help me.
He spread his hand over my stomach and went still.
This time I knew to expect his magic, the unfurling of delicate ribbons of tiny cold pinpricks, dancing through me and taking away the sweat and spend and the wine I’d spilled on myself halfway through supper.
“Better?” he asked me, and kissed my hair.
No. So much worse, because as much as I’d wanted to I hadn’t hated the way he’d taken his pleasure with my body so quickly and carelessly. I’d loved every moment of it. And when he inevitably took me again when we woke in the morning, I’d want that, too.
Unless I could persuade him to go away. I could take my chances with assassins. Surely they wouldn’t try again so soon after the last attempt.
“You could sleep on the floor,” I said. “Or the sitting room sofa.”
Benedict’s low laugh rumbled through my back as he pulled me closer, snugging me against his body so tightly I could feel every hard inch of him.
If I could stay awake a moment or two longer, I could compose the most scathing response to that offensive laugh…but I slid into sleep between one mental insult and the next.