Chapter 5
RYLAND
She's watching me undress, and she doesn't know what her face is doing.
Her mouth is set, her chin raised, her spine as rigid as it was at Dover, but her eyes follow the movement of my hands as I loosen my laces with a focus that has nothing to do with tactical assessment.
My shirt lands on the floor. My boots follow.
She hasn't moved.
She's still standing in the tunic she'd worn all day, every button fastened as if the wool could serve as armor.
"You can stop pretending the tunic changes anything," I say. Her gaze snaps to mine. "Chemise."
For one heartbeat I think she's going to refuse. Then her jaw tightens.
Slowly, deliberately, she reaches for the first button at her throat.
She never looks away from me.
One button.
Then another.
The tunic loosens beneath her hands before she pushes it from her shoulders. Heavy wool whispers over linen and slips to the floor around her feet.
She's left standing in nothing but a simple white chemise.
The firelight behind her turns the linen almost translucent, outlining every curve she's pretending I haven't already memorized with my hands.
The hard points of her nipples press against the fabric.
Her lips are parted. The pulse at the base of her throat is hammering, and from across the room the bond gives me the rhythm of it.
Fast… faster than she wants it to be.
She steps free of the discarded tunic but doesn't try to cover herself.
Doesn't fold her arms. Doesn't reach for her braid.
Instead she gives me the same direct, assessing look she's given every corridor and guard rotation all day.
The fact that she spent twelve hours studying my fortress while I ran my pack is something I should find threatening.
What I find is something else entirely.
She spent the day learning the bones of my world.
Now she's standing in my chamber wearing nothing but a chemise, watching me and the heat between us is filling the room like smoke through a sealed corridor.
I can't sleep with her in my bed. I can't sleep without her. Both truths make me want to put my fist through the wall.
The night before, I took her on this bed.
Pinned her wrists, buried myself inside her, felt the resistance of a body that had never been entered before mine.
I finished against her thigh because she hasn't stopped pretending she doesn't want what I'm giving her, and leaving anything permanent inside her before she does would be wasted.
She lay curled away from me afterward, breathing hard, and when I pressed my mouth against the back of her neck and told her what comes next, the tremor that ran through her body was fear and arousal so tightly wound the bond couldn't separate them.
Tonight she's not trembling. She's standing in my chamber looking at me like a woman taking measurements, and the composure she's rebuilt since this morning is so precise it's almost admirable.
I cross the room. Her gaze follows me, steady, and she doesn't step back when I stop close enough that the heat from the fire behind her radiates through the chemise and warms my bare skin.
The space between us holds like a breath not yet released.
Two inches of air doing more work than the walls of this fortress.
"You walked my Tower today." I keep my voice low. Factual.
"I learned where things are." The same phrase she gave Thane. Level. Controlled. The voice of a woman stating facts rather than requesting permission.
"You learned more than that." I reach forward and gather the loose hair from her shoulder, pushing it back.
My knuckles graze the side of her neck, and the heartbeat beneath her skin kicks against my fingers.
She controls the reaction in her face. She can't control the one in her throat.
"You mapped guard rotations. You counted doorways.
You found the cistern in the inner ward and stood there studying how the water feeds through the wall until Thane had to pull you away. "
Her eyes narrow. Not surprise. Recalculation. She's revising her assessment to account for the fact that I was watching her watch my fortress.
"Thane reports to me." I tilt her chin up with two fingers.
Her teeth set behind closed lips, but she doesn't pull away.
"Everything you did today, everywhere you went, everyone you spoke to.
I know about the shoes Margery gave you.
I know about Aldric in the corridor. I know you stood at the south wall arrow slit and watched the river long enough to count the boats that passed. "
The fingers on her chin hold her face angled toward mine, and the heat between us in this close distance is staggering. Her lips are parted. A tendon in her neck flexes through a swallow she can't suppress.
"And I know you ate standing up in the kitchen because sitting down hurts." My thumb traces the line of her jaw. Slow. "Does it still hurt?"
She holds my gaze. "Yes."
One word. Delivered without flinching. Without asking for sympathy she knows I won't give.
She's telling me the truth because lying about it would be weakness, and this woman is constitutionally incapable of appearing weak.
I note the pattern: she doesn't lie, even when the truth costs her.
Useful. A woman who won't fake pain won't fake anything else, which means every response I get from her tonight is real.
"Good." I let my hand drop from her face. "Turn around. Hands on the bed."
The silence that follows fills the room the way smoke fills a corridor. She doesn't move. Her eyes hold mine, and I watch the calculation run behind them: what this costs, what it buys, where she can bank whatever she learns tonight against whatever I take.
She turns. Her hands flatten against the furs, shoulder-width apart, and her spine is a rigid line beneath the thin linen.
She's bracing. Every muscle from her shoulders to her calves is locked, and the sight of her bent at the waist with her palms pressed to my bed and her hair falling forward sends a heat through me that the bond amplifies to something nearly unbearable.
I step behind her and push the chemise up past her hips. The undergarments beneath are the same ones she retrieved from the bedding this morning, and I pull them down to her knees with one motion. She flinches at the exposure. Absorbs it. Holds.
The bruises from the night before are still vivid. My handprints in purple and red, layered across her skin, marking territory I've already taken. The sight of them should satisfy me. Instead it makes me want to add more.
"What happens next is discipline." I press my palm flat against the small of her back, holding her in place. The muscles under my hand are trembling, fine vibrations she's trying to suppress. "You're going to count them."
Her fingers dig into the pelts. "I wasn't aware I'd done anything wrong."
"You spent all day walking through my Tower gathering intelligence to use against me.
You sat beside me at the evening meal and gave me nothing while your mind was working behind your face like a siege engine.
" I step close enough that my chest presses against her spine and the length of my cock presses against her bare skin through my unlaced breeches.
"I see all of it, Eleanor. Every move you make.
And it changes nothing about what's going to happen to you right now. "
This is becoming a rhythm. The night before, the discipline was a response.
Tonight it's a sequence: I take her across my lap or bend her over furniture, and afterward I take the rest. She knows what comes after the spanking now.
The knowledge is in the tension of her body, the way she's bracing for every stage of what I'm about to do.
My hand comes down.
The crack is sharper than before. Harder. I'm not warming her up. I'm making a statement, and the sound it pulls from her is a gasp bitten off between clenched teeth, her body lurching forward against the bed.
"One." Her voice is a wire pulled tight.
Again. Lower. Where the bruises from the night before overlap, and the impact against already-tender skin draws a ragged sound from deep in her chest.
"Two."
I find a rhythm. Each strike placed with calculation, alternating sides. She counts them in a voice that starts controlled and shreds as the numbers climb. By five her shoulders are shaking. By eight her fingers are twisted in the bedding and her breath is coming in hitches between each count.
The bond pours everything into me. The heat spreading across her skin.
The pain that spikes and diffuses with each impact.
And beneath the pain, threading through it, the involuntary arousal she's been fighting since I bent her over this bed.
The bond reads her with an accuracy no man should have: a pull, a gathering heat, the kind of want that builds against will.
I use it. I time the next strike for the moment her body begins to settle, when the pain has ebbed just enough for the warmth underneath to surface. Her gasp at nine is different from the others. Sharper. Confused. She doesn't know why that one landed differently. I do.
By ten, she's wet. I can see the evidence of it between her thighs, a slickness catching the light from the hearth that she can't hide and can't control.
Arousal making decisions her mind hasn't sanctioned.
She knows I can see it. The tension in her spine tells me she'd rather bleed than acknowledge what her body is doing.
"Twelve," she grits out. Her voice is rough. Scraped raw.
I drop to one knee behind her. Run my thumb through the wetness between her thighs, a slow deliberate stroke from front to back, and hold my hand where she can see it over her shoulder. My thumb glistens in the firelight.
"Your mouth tells me you don't want this. Your body says otherwise." I press my thumb against my lips and taste her. Salt and heat. She goes rigid watching me do it, and what comes from her throat is something between fury and a moan.