Chapter Four
CHAPTER
FOUR
Finding somewhere to install Jileana was harder than it had appeared on the surface.
The brothers were newly installed in the city center, in a castle that over-looked the massive harbor.
The chaos of descending on the city had died down to a dull roar, but the men of their army were not entirely organized as they settled in for the night.
People had grabbed beds or floors wherever they could.
The men were high from their victory and many were still up, drinking and reveling by the fires all throughout the city and in the castle.
The brothers of course had the choice of where they would stay.
Jaykun had had first pick and had installed himself in the finia’s rooms. The finia, the ruler of the city, had found herself relocated to the lower rooms for the time being, under guard.
The finia’s rooms were vast, tended to by servants.
Fresh linens had been put on the bed, a fire built in the front room, the sitting room, and the bedroom itself.
In a rear room was a plumbed bath, tiled in silver-and-white tiles.
A room beyond the bath was where the servants, two young women, slept.
The bed was a large affair, decorated with a sheer royal-purple curtain and laid with blankets and a coverlet of rich red, and a multitude of pillows in shades of purples and reds.
The fabrics alternated between velvets and silks.
It was just shy of looking like it belonged in a high-end brothel.
The bed was large enough for three men of Jaykun’s size and build, and he wondered how the squat finia had managed to not get lost within it.
Jaykun walked throughout the castle with Jileana, searching for a place to install her, until he gave up trying to find somewhere safe and quiet, and brought her to his rooms.
“You can sleep in this bed,” he said. “I will find my brothers and bunk with one of them. At least this way I will know you are safe.”
“No,” Jileana said with a shaking of her dark head. “I won’t kick you out of your own bed.”
“It’s hardly mine to begin with,” he argued, giving her a little push toward it.
“This bed is very big and I am not used to … Well, there is plenty of space, is there not?”
Jaykun hesitated. His eyes fell on her body of their own accord, sliding down over her voluptuous shape from head to toe.
The sleek fall of her midnight hair curved around her equally sleek body.
The idea of having her in bed beside him was far too appealing, fraught with temptation and complication.
The memory of what it was like to kiss her rode him hard and he knew how dangerous it would be.
“I don’t think that’s the wisest idea,” he said with a negating shake of his head.
He moved to withdraw from her before the desire that seeped through him compelled him to draw her in once again.
He was floored by how overwhelming the feeling was.
It filled him with a sense of disquiet. He didn’t like the idea of being unable to control his own actions.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to be near the source of those feelings.
“Come,” she said, her iridescent green eyes soft and beckoning as she held out an inviting hand. “Come with me. I promise I will not bite you while you sleep.”
“I’m rather more concerned with me possibly nibbling on you,” he answered baldly as he let her take his hand.
“Would that be so bad?” she asked, invitation oozing out of her body.
“I haven’t quite decided,” he said as he let himself be pulled toward the bed.
“It is such a strange thing, the way you let so much noise into your head,” she observed with genuine curiosity in her voice. “You feel strongly about something, and yet you force yourself to resist those feelings. Why? What is so wrong about what you are feeling?”
“Nothing,” he said with a sigh, scrubbing his hand across his weary face. “I don’t know. It’s been a long day.”
“I’m sure it has been. Especially considering the way you like to end your days.”
“I like nothing about the way I end my days. You speak as though I had a choice in the matter.”
“And you don’t?”
“No,” he said shortly. “I don’t;”
She looked at him then with soft, curious eyes—an expression he was realizing was very natural to her. She seemed to view the world as one great curiosity. He wished he could see the world through her perspective. As it was, his view was far more jaded.
“I think you have had enough hardship for one day,” she said then, finishing their progress toward the bed.
She climbed up onto it, kneeling as she pulled him after her.
Giving in to her lure, he paused a moment, withdrawing from her long enough to rid himself of his boots.
As he did so, she came up close against his back, her hands shaping the contours of his shoulders and arms in long, relaxing strokes.
In spite of himself, he felt his body going lax beneath her massaging hands.
Fine, he thought. If she was looking for a night of physical comfort, he would not deny her or himself.
It wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence for a woman to want him.
However, it was a rare occurrence for him to want her in return.
But who could blame him for seeking out comfort wherever he could find it?
His was a cursed existence, a forced slavery and penance.
He should take advantage of these opportunities much more often than he did.
It was, after all, the only kindness he could find outside his brothers’ love for him.
When she ran her hands down the length of his bare back, he closed his eyes and reveled in the sensation.
Her hands were like magic on his skin, livening up nerves he thought deadened by his nightly torture.
As she ran over unhealed patches of his skin, she seemed to think nothing of it, let it faze her not at all.
In fact, it seemed as though very little fazed her.
After all, she had taken the sight of him burning to cinders almost in stride.
A fact he should be questioning, but he found himself unable to do so as his body reacted with a surprising amount of pleasure.
“Do you do this often?” he asked, almost with the goal of turning himself off to her. “Climb into bed with strange men?”
“Not at all. You would be the first. Earlier I thought we might take a little time to know one another, but there is so little time to be had, I now realize it would be foolish to waste it. Besides, it seems you need it more than others might.”
“So this is an act of pity?” he asked harshly.
“Again, not at all. I find you very appealing. Your body has many nice shapes. Your skin is warm. Much warmer than my own. See?” She held out her arm beneath his nose and he obliged her by stroking a slow hand up along her forearm.
She was right. She was much cooler than he was.
But that made the feel of her no less appealing.
She was soft and smooth, supple to the touch, yet clearly quite strong for a woman.
He liked that. He had no stomach for weak women.
His brothers’ wives struck him as physically genteel—although he gave them credit for being much stronger in their personalities and backbones.
He could understand what had drawn each brother respectively to each woman, knowing his brothers as he did.
Still, like him, his brothers had been greatly altered by the punishments they had endured.
It was a wonder he even knew them at all anymore.
Jileana moved around his body, slowly throwing a leg across his lap until she was astride his thighs.
Cool she may be on her extraneous limbs, but here, where her bottom rested against him, she was hot and beckoning.
Of their own accord, his hands ran down the length of her torso, under her arms, down her sides, and on until he was gripping her hips in his hands.
“Would you give me comfort, Jileana?” he asked in a whisper as he looked into those bottomless, iridescent eyes.
“That and more,” she promised him. “Mmm, I like the way you feel,” she said with obvious pleasure as she curved her spine and pressed her chest to his.
He could feel the weight of her full breasts between them, and a searing flash of aroused awareness bolted through his body.
In all of an instant, his clothes—what little there were of them—felt confining and cumbersome.
He was overwhelmed with a craving to be skin-to-skin with her.
To feel all that sweetly supple skin against his own …
Yes, that was a comfort he wanted very much indeed.
With purpose, his fingers slipped beneath the hem of the tunic she wore, the bulky fabric hanging heavy on her small frame—small in comparison to the body it had been tailored for, in any event.
He found himself wondering how he had gotten to that point.
His only goal for the day had been to take a city and make it his own.
To own the city that owned the armada he so desperately needed in order to progress onward, in order to fulfill his bargain with the warrior goddess.
A bargain he must fulfill lest she become angry and turn her displeasure on him or his brothers.
His brothers had, for the most part, been released from their duties to Weysa, but that could easily change.
They were all fodder for the gods’ mercurial moods and wishes.
There was no guarantee of anything when it came to the whims of the gods.
But now he was here, finding solace in a warm, shapely body, and he couldn’t make himself turn away from her.
He did not even want to, he thought as his hands filled with bare flesh.
When he saw her naked the first time, he had wondered what all that sleek flesh would feel like, and now he was discovering the answer.
It was an answer that had his body hardening with need and craving.