Time #2
Tanyn was studying them both, his face back to impassive.
“If what?” I pushed, even though I sensed I actually didn’t want to know what.
“Well, it’s all done now,” Zyra said, fidgeting with the stem of her wineglass and sending wild looks to her husband.
“What’s done?” I pressed.
“I shouldn’t have—” she began.
“Early on,” Tanyn cut into this, and we all looked at him, “my father, or perhaps it was Tatra, would send meagre shipments. Manny and I didn’t fish and hunt because we enjoyed it. We did it so we wouldn’t run out of things to eat.”
I sat very, very still.
And then I lost my godsdamned mind.
Throwing my chair back in order to get up, I did it so violently, it toppled over.
Hurley jumped to his feet and barked over me shouting, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Tanyn stood too, and said softly, “Baby, calm down.”
“That dick dicked with you more than I thought he’d already dicked with you?” I yelled.
Mangold and Zyra were exchanging knowing looks, but I didn’t have time for that.
“He stopped doing it,” Tanyn told me.
“When?” I spat.
Tanyn didn’t answer.
No one did.
“When?” I shrieked.
“When I was twelve,” Tanyn said.
“Oh my fucking gods.” My voice trembled with the depths of my ire, and I was, quite literally, seeing red.
“Catla, calm,” Tanyn ordered.
“Fuck calm!” I screeched, grabbed the wine bottle, which fortunately was mostly empty, and threw it with my demon’s strength against the wall, where it shattered.
Silence descended and the only movement was Hurley scuttling to me and nosing my hand.
Tanyn broke the silence. “Do you have it out?”
“No,” I snapped, grabbed my wineglass, downed its contents in one long gulp, and threw that against the wall too.
It also shattered.
Hurley whined.
I took in a deep breath.
Then said, “Right. I’m better now.”
“We’ll just, er…finish these…um…” Zyra was muttering as she and Mangold took their wineglasses and slunk to the door to their rooms.
When that door closed behind them, instantly, I asked Tanyn, “Why aren’t you having sex with me?”
His brows shot up. “Pardon?”
“You heard me,” I stated. “You barely even touch me.”
“I don’t because we don’t know each other very well.”
“We’re in the midst of a compatibility trial.”
“Yes,” he confirmed.
I waited.
He said no more.
“We’re supposed to fuck during a trial, Tanyn,” I reminded him.
“This is going fast for you.”
“Uh, duh,” I retorted.
His lips hitched.
I arched a brow. “Is something amusing?”
“Would you like me to fuck you?”
“Generally, yes, because you’re hot,” I was just that drunk enough to share. “Right now, no, because it’d be weird and because I just made a fool of myself.”
He assumed a baffled expression. “You did?”
I pointedly looked at the shattered remains of the wineglass and bottle on the floor then back to him.
“Just to say, while you were in the throes of your drama, I was in the throes of fighting my dick getting hard.”
I tossed out both hands. “So…hello.”
“Come here, Catla,” he said.
“You come here.”
“No, sweetheart, you come here.”
“I’m not going there.”
“I’m king.”
“I’m going to be queen.”
“Baby, I know you hate it, but my king will always trump your queen.”
I harrumphed.
Then, for some insane reason (I blamed the wine, and the earlier martini), I stomped to him.
He immediately ended the moratorium on touch because he pulled me into his arms.
That lean, hard body pressed to mine?
Heaven.
Shit.
“How about we agree to let it happen naturally,” he suggested.
“I’m naturally sleeping in bed beside you. In a sexy nightgown, I might add.”
“I didn’t miss the nightgown.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“Arnaud pushed through some tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy,” he declared.
“I’m pushing through not only the end of those but also initiating higher taxes for the same.
They are not happy. They also give profusely to campaigns for members of the Assembly.
There’s going to be a vote on Tuesday, and right now, they’ll get the ninety-five percent to vote my resolution down.
I need to pull three assemblybeings’ votes to my side before Tuesday.
It’s a lot of negotiating, conceding, and strategizing, because I refuse to instigate ass-kissing.
But public services have been negatively affected and even stalled without those taxes. This resolution has to pass.”
Mm-hmm.
Kingly duties never ceased.
He wasn’t done.
“We’re in the middle of a multi-pronged operation to put pressure on not only the three assemblybeings we’ve targeted, but all of them.
This is being done personally, but also through the media.
At first, the citizens of Sky’s Edge didn’t pay a good deal of attention to those tax cuts.
Now that schools are being defunded and parents have to pay for books, food, and even fundraise to cover the salaries of teachers who are leaving in droves, they’re paying attention.
Travel route operators have been laid off, and even if routes are authorized through automation, someone has to run those comps.
And more than one in-flight crash has occurred.
In fact, twenty-seven of them have…with four fatalities.
I could go on. Those tax cuts are now not popular, except by the ones who benefit from them, and those are very few.
And beings are now paying attention. Even so, no assemblybeings are caving, and we have only two more days to make them cave. ”
“So, your head is somewhere else.”
“No, and yes. No, my mind is always on you. But about last night, royal spokesbeings are doing the rounds of news shows today and tomorrow. They need direction and we needed to refine the message. We also need to keep tweaking it, because we sense it’s working.”
“Right.”
“So that was last night. Onward from that, I don’t have to remind you that I want you to be my bride, my wife, my queen.
What will not win you to that frame of mind is me being a lech, pawing at you and taking from you something it’s only your right to give, even if it’s tradition that you’re here to give it.
Mostly, we both know, if this was a normal trial, it would be my option to take it.
” His voice changed, grew firm, when he said, “I will not take that from you, Catla. I’ll only accept it when you’re ready to give it. ”
“You might have told me that was your plan,” I returned.
“Apologies,” he murmured.
“And I don’t know if I’m ready to give it…” Lie! I so was ready to give it. Even more so now, tipsy and standing in his embrace. “So thank you for being cool about that and giving me space.”
“You’re welcome.”
“No matter what happens, you’re going to approve the compatibility trial, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
I sighed and slumped in his hold.
“We’ll get there,” he said softly.
“I’m glad you’re sure,” I mumbled.
He took one arm from around me so he could cup my jaw.
At his sweet touch, I focused on him again.
“You’re not opening your mind,” he remarked.
“If my mind was open to more stuff, it’d explode,” I retorted.
He stroked my cheek with his thumb. “We’ll give it time.”
Time.
I wasn’t sure that would work.
What I was sure of was that I had no choice.
“Are you ready for bed?” he asked.
I twisted my neck to look at the mess on the floor. “I should clean that up.”
“We have bots, Cat.”
Cat.
My gaze raced back to him.
Everyone close to me called me that, it wasn’t new.
So why did it sound so damned good coming from his lips?
“Bed?” he prompted.
“Sure,” I replied.
And…yes.
The moratorium on touch was definitely out the window, because he let me go but took my hand and held it all through turning out the lights, guiding me up the stairs and into the bedroom.
He went first in the bathroom again.
I joined him after my turn wearing another awesome nightgown, this a slink of red silk with two high side slits.
Once I was in bed at his side, the lights out, the covers up to my neck, my back to him, him on his back, he asked the canopy, “Was it your goal to torture me with your nightgowns?”
“It wasn’t my idea not to have sex,” I reminded him.
He didn’t reply, not even to ask again if I was ready to take it there.
And I knew why.
Because if he did, it could be construed as him putting pressure on me to take it there.
By Lilith, this was a disaster.
I didn’t need to know he was a decent male on top of everything else.
I sighed.
Heavily.
I felt him roll to his side, facing me.
“Goodnight, Catla,” he murmured, his silky voice a little sleepy, and very lovely.
“Goodnight,” I replied.
I stared at the firelight dancing in the room until my eyelids drooped, and I fell asleep.
Late the next morning, after I woke up alone (again—seriously, the male was an early bird), we breakfasted together (again), then we bundled up and headed out to the two SnowSprints resting in the open area at the back of the citadel, waiting to take us on our journey (by the by, they were also stored underground, that underground being under the open area).
Part of the shipment that came with my boots yesterday was, I was learning right then, two very large, very beautiful bouquets of flowers.
Zyra held one made of white calla lilies and demon-red roses.
She handed me the other: magenta carnations and white roses tipped in blood red.
She got on the back of a Sprint with Manny.
After Tanyn loaded up Hurley, he mounted the Sprint, and I got on behind him.
With light flurries falling, we sped down the road that hugged the plateau, came to the landing platform, and sped across that.
The path we took edged the coast, and it was a good fifteen-minute glide, so probably an hour plus walk, to the cove.
The minute the males stopped the Sprints, I knew why this was a favorite spot of Darynda and Tanyn.
It was beautiful.
The water in the cove was shallow, and the color of Tanyn’s eyes, and snowflake-patterned clear ice limned the edges that touched the shore, and when the sun hit them, prisms of light reflected off the water.