Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
ANDREIEN
I braced myself against the sheen of tears in lustrous eyes braced for pain but hoping for joy.
She did nothing to conceal the transparency of her emotions, and that soft, searing look nearly brought me to my knees, tugging on every instinct to protect her—and the darker need to confine and control.
Resigned, I took her hand to help her into the coach.
“You're too open,” I told her after the coach began moving.
She was nothing like I’d expected. She didn’t respond as human women typically did, and I’d had to adjust my tactics—quickly. Overt seduction wouldn’t woo her. Attempting to sweet talk her downtown had almost backfired, if not for the opportunity that foul human presented me to recast myself in her favor. I’d scaled back the heat almost entirely, and turned up the. . .charm. Warmth and sweetness, offering comfort and companionship.
“It's safe with me,” I said, trying not to brood, “but not with anyone else.” Why couldn’t we develop the bond in bed? That was the perfect venue for cementing intimacy.
I suppressed a frown, staring at her, and curved my lips in a smile, looking at her under my lashes.
My smile didn’t last long. Her brow creased with the same bemused, laying-in-wait skepticism she'd been aiming my way all evening—the girl was humoring me, as if she'd decided there was no point in arguing when time would take care of the problem for her.
As she gazed at me with that humoring expression, three hundred years of denying myself the pleasure of strangling my beloved younger sister after one of her pranks allowed me to keep from teaching this girl an immediate lesson in humoring the Heir of Casakraine.
“What do you mean?” she asked in her soft voice.
“You're too willing to accede to my will.” Except in the one way I wanted, of course. Females.
She folded her legs on the seat. I imagined them enfolding me. “Maybe I don't have energy to waste fighting a battleI'll lose. I have to dance.”
I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose, and did not yell at her. “And there, again, you expose yourself too readily. Here you've handed me more power over you—I know what you want. I can use it against you.”
Her eyes widened slightly, pools of endless onyx. But where I expected tension, suddenly she relaxed and shook her head. “I don't think you’d do that to me. I don't know why, but I don't feel you're that kind of man.”
By the Dark, could she be any more naive? “Hasannah, I am not a man at all.”
I quailed at the massive task of keeping her alive. My mother had warned me during one of our many screaming arguments over her methods of ruling the Court, that one day I’d understand the value of ruthlessness.
That glimmer of understanding dawned now. There was nothing I wouldn't do to cut off the merest hint of threat towards this human female.
She wrinkled her nose briefly. “You understandwhat I mean. Besides, if we're going to be in a relationship, clear communication is paramount. I'm not exposing my vulnerabilities, I'm negotiating. Setting boundaries.” Something flickered in her eyes. “As long as you don't interfere with my dance, we can. . .date.”
She was so very mortal.
Date.
A date was a food, not what I was going to do to her once she accepted me into her bed.
I reached across the coach, capturing her hand and lifting it to my lips.
“Fine, Hasannah. Fine. I won't argue over it with you. I've never seen a happy coupling where one person tried to change the other.”
“I hope you remember that,” was her quiet reply. “Because some things can’t be changed even if you pray they would.”
My suspicion was that as long as she was allowed to dance and train at will, she wouldn't fight me on any other front.
No, I’d take her vulnerability into consideration and ensure she was never left alone with any member of the Court. Not until she had another fifty years of age on her.
She gave me another one of her reserved half smiles. “And I don't mind if you tell me things. Explain things I need to know about the city. I'm just so focused on dance that it might seem like I'm not paying attention.”
I squeezed her hand gently, amusement and indulgence soothing some of my worry. “I watched you dance. It should consume you.”
When I'd thought vaguely of who I might take as consort, I’d assumed it would be a polished, powerful, politically connected Lord of a High Fae Court. Fate had delivered me the exact opposite, but looking into eyes both knowing and guileless, gentle and ruthless, I couldn't be more pleased.
This mortal girl possessed depths. I hadn’t lived five times a human's natural lifespan only to fail to recognize a soul that would one day be completely my equal. Perhaps not in the raw power of the Fae, but in the strength of her will, her intellect.
Her passion.
Perhaps the Dark wasn't laughing at me after all.
As I caressed the back of Hasannah's hand with my thumb, the hunger I'd managed to bank in the market reared back to the surface.
I stilled, counting her breaths, inhaling her scent, and began to think of all the things I could do to her during the coach ride home.
Beginning with licking her between her thighs and ending with licking her opening after I filled her with my seed. First her lush mouth. Second, her glistening lips. Third, the tight entrance I knewfrom looking at her no male had ever touched.
Would she allow me to touch her so soon? Or did she require courting, promises of love and fidelity and protection?
“In the interest of clear communication,” I said, “I would like to know your requirements to fuck me. Preferably sooner rather than later. I'm not interested in drawing out the anticipation. I'm too young for that sort of game.”
The older Fae enjoyed savoring their food before they devoured it. I didn't blame them when little in life offered anything new, anything exciting. But I was barely five hundred. Life was still fresh for me.
“What?” She jerked, then stilled with the automatic muscle control of a trained dancer. “No, you don't have to repeat that, I understood you the first time.”
Nothing could disguise that betraying flutter in her neck, or the rapid inhalation of her breath.
She cleared her throat. “I've never had a man say something quite like that outright. Usually they try to get you drunk first.”
“So you require wine?” She’d insisted she didn’t drink. “Provisions?” I frowned, wanting to be fair to her. “All of that I'll provide you as a matter of course for being mine—you have no House, so you must come under my covering. What else do you want?”
Anah stared at me. Abruptly, sorrow laced amusement bubbled into her eyes, and she laughed.
“I don't know, Andrei, how about some time getting to know each other? It's a radical concept.”
I resumed caressing the back of her hand. Her gaze flickered to where our flesh joined.
“The bed is an excellent place to learneach other.” I tried out my earnest voice, but it wasn't my best Court mask.
“I can't just. . .” she trailed off and sighed, glancing away, then straightened her shoulders. “You're flustering me a little, and I'm too old to be feeling like a schoolgirl.”
“Too old? Is that a human joke?”
She scowled, and even that expression lacked true harshness. “Maybe not old for a Fae. But I'm thirty. An adult by human reckoning.”
“ Thirty. A veritable Ancient.”
“And how old are you?”
“Don't humans consider it rude to ask a man his age?”
“Only if the man is also a lady, and I don't think you are. Of course I could be wrong.”
I smiled, enjoying the game, and her acerbic tone. “I'm also considered not old, but an adult by the reckoning of my people. I'm not yet five hundred.” Would my youth dismay her?
“I'm strong enough to protect you,” I clarified, repressing the urge to bristle.
“That never crossed my mind, Andrei.”
She paused, lowering her gaze to the floor in the way I was learning she did when thinking. Or avoiding thinking. Bits of her dark hair had escaped the tail she'd scraped it back into, the flyaways framing her face.
“Time,” she said. “That's all I want. I need more than physical attraction, which is complicated for me. It's always been about the mental connection.”
Was that so? Then I was about to deliver her the mental connection of her dreams.
“And if it turns out we don't like each other,” she added, “then?—”
“I'm not letting you go.”
She glared at me. “That's not a healthy attitude. What if we're not compatible at all?” Her eyes flickered again.
What was she hiding?
“Oh, we're compatible.”
I decided to reward my good behavior, and using the leverage of her hand clasped in mine, yanked her onto my lap.
She squeaked, then cut the sound off as if she realized it made her sound like an indignant kitten.
“You could say our souls were made for each other.”
Hasannah wriggled on my lap in a show of temper. I leaned my head back, closing my eyes and biting back a groan.
I clenched my teeth, reminding myself that her ass grinding against my cock probably wasn't a subtle flirtation. If she didn't take me to her bed soon. . .well. We would see what I was truly made of.
“Can I go back to my seat?”
“No.”
“Andrei—”
“I can find something else to do with those lips if they insist on saying things that displease me.”
As Heir to the High Lord of Casakraine, and a High Lord in my own right, I could claim anything or anyone I pleased as long as I was willing to bear the consequences.
“ Droit de seigneur,” she muttered, and I didn’t tell her she was already partially reading my mind. It would only scare her.
Before now I'd never understood why some males succumbed to the rutting spiral and took what should be freely offered. I still didn't understand, but I was beginning to fear the day I might. I was too young to surrender my honor to cruelty.
“And what are you going to do with me when you get me home?” she demanded. “Are you going to force me?”
I stiffened. “Is that what you think I am? A man so weak he has to destroy a woman to bind her?”
“No,” she said after too long a pause.
“Then stop saying things that displease me,” I said through gritted teeth.
I bent my head and sank my teeth into the side of her neck, not hard enough to break skin, but hard enough to make my point.
I flexed my fingers, wanting to cup her breasts, learn their shape and heft, twist her nipples until she cried out, but if I touched her like that I wouldn’t stop until I had her naked on my lap, wet pussy squeezing my cock.
She wasn’t ready.
She needed to take more care in how she handled me. I didn't want to savage her because my restraint snapped.
“It’s too soon,” she said, voice pitched a little higher.
“What does that even mean? Too soon?”
She huffed. “You are such a Fae. You want, you take.”
Fair enough. “Not just a Fae, little mortal.”
I licked the mark I’d made then yanked her head back to look in her eyes, to make sure she understood.
“A High Fae Lord.”
My Anah’s eyes sharpened with fear. She must have been taught enough to understand the difference—and she'd clearly demonstrated she was no fool—because at the admission she stilled, lowering her lashes, and remained silent the rest of the trip to her former home.
She didn’t try to pull away from me, but she didn’t look at me again either.