39. Chapter 39
thirty-nine
I had bigger problems than Sebastian’s latest revelation. At least, that’s what I tried to convince myself of as I marched to my room, my head full of too much that my heart couldn’t seem to process either.
At the top of my list of worries, just below Langwidere herself—never mind the Nome King—dwelled Pae.
Still, my need to confer with him—put out the fire regarding the cap—didn’t stop me from going straight to my room.
My plan was to give myself time enough to wallow in my newest despair and to sort and sift through how much of this outcome counted as my fault—Sebastian’s antics with Langwidere, Andre’s state, and poor Ginger’s isolation.
When I arrived at my quarters, however, I found a female guard waiting for me.
She stood to one side of my door, which hung open. A peek inside showed how the roses had been clipped from their branches and the bramble cleared. My trunk of dresses had also been removed.
“Your Highness,” said the pale-blue-skinned and black-uniformed Winkie woman with a bow of her head. “My name is Sergeant Neive.”
My capacity for words had become limited. So I said nothing and waited for her explanation which, with some nervousness, she launched into.
“Per His Majesty’s request, your effects have been transferred to his, The Scarecrow’s, chambers. I’m here to escort you to your new quarters.”
“My new quarters,” I murmured.
Rye’s quarters, she meant.
Of course, he’d want me with him. Or, rather, he’d want me to appear as if we were rooming together. As husband and wife, why wouldn’t we?
I only nodded to my escort before gesturing for her to lead the way. No doubt Rye would be in “our” chambers waiting for me. And so, I’d get no respite. No time to unravel.
Certainly, Rye would want to know what I’d gathered from Sebastian.
What on earth would I tell him?
I scarcely knew what to think of it all myself. And there was no telling how Rye would react. Which meant…I couldn’t tell him what Sebastian had revealed. Not all of it.
I maintained my silence during our walk and, thankfully, Sergeant Nieve didn’t press for conversation. Perhaps she sensed my melancholy, my unsteadiness.
“Thank you,” I managed when we arrived at the closed wooden door that must lead to Rye’s chambers. My guard only nodded and stationed herself beside the entry.
“Are you remaining to ensure I stay inside?” I asked her.
“No, Your Highness,” she said, taken aback by the question. “The king asked only that I escort you. Normally, I’m posted here throughout the day—as watch. Another Sergeant takes over for me in the evening.”
I nodded, satisfied that Rye wasn’t deferring to old tactics of trying to keep me locked up. That incident, when he’d made me a prisoner of my own rooms back in the Emerald City Palace, had been precipitated by Sebastian’s arrival, too. Who knew what Rye would say when we again spoke? Would I get a tirade? Or silence.
Perhaps best to get it over with.
I entered the room.
An enormous chamber greeted me. Near one wall, a huge circular bed draped in burgundy blankets and swamped in matching pillows awaited an occupant. Occupants…
Lush and ornate carpets of red overlapped one another, masking the gray stone floor. Beautiful heavy curtains hung around the tall and narrow windows. Drawn with their ties loose, they blocked out the cold winter sun.
Vases filled with cut roses—the same from my room—stood here and there, the bright crimson hue of the blooms complimenting the deeper ruby tones of the chamber’s adornments, ornaments, dressings, and draperies.
“Rye?” I received no answer as I ventured in farther.
At the midway point, a short set of stairs descended to a sitting area, the lavish maroon and burgundy furniture positioned around a roaring fire.
A heap of furs draped one of the settees. Also, someone had laid out a meal and tea on a nearby dinner table. Its twin chairs sat empty. As empty as the rest of the room.
I ignored the food, far too unsettled by all I’d learned to ingest anything. I did pour myself a cup of steaming tea before returning with it to the settee.
There, I settled myself and, with my free hand, pulled the furs over me.
For a long time, I nursed the tea. Watching the flames helped me to keep my mind blank.
In the back of my head, a nagging urgency begged me to rise and go scouring the castle for Nick who possessed the cap I owed to Pae.
I did no such thing, though. Instead, I continued staring into the flames, taking my tea until it was gone. After all, Nick already knew what I’d promised the demon.
The trade had been his idea. And now, the Emperor of the West would either pass the cap onto me…or he would not. Since this was his castle, I had little doubt he’d know where to find me. Surely, he and Rye had spoken since my return with Sebastian.
Whatever would come of that meeting, my actions…would come.
So I shut my eyes and soaked in the warmth of the fire, though I found little respite in the comforts around me.
Everything was all wrong again. And even though I’d tried to fix it, even though I had saved Sebastian, I’d still, in so many ways, failed.
Rye had been right—that I’d been reckless.
Hopelessly so.
And so, now, I would take the consequences as they came.
I awoke with a start when the door burst open. My heart scampered as I sat up, my teacup toppling to shatter against the stone floor.
The door banged shut again and only then did I have enough of my wits about me to identify my surroundings—as well as the dark and crowned figure that stalked toward the bed.
“Rye,” I said, tossing off the furs and standing, careful to avoid stepping on the broken shards of my cup as I rounded the couch. I stopped short of ascending the short stoop of steps to the upper level of the room, too baffled by Rye’s actions to approach.
One after the other, he began tossing pillows off the bed.
He presented just as I’d left him, too. Still in human form.
My influence had never lasted this long. Had never continued without my presence…
Goodness. How much magic had I sent into him?
While he ignored me, continuing to pitch pillows onto the floor, I spared a glance toward the windows. Because of the drawn curtains, though, I couldn’t gauge the time, or guess at how long I’d been asleep. So I had no way of knowing how soon Pae would come to collect.
At the moment, Rye’s actions presented a greater mystery than the time.
“Rye,” I said, still blinking the sleep from my eyes.
He offered me no acknowledgement as he pulled the burgundy comforter from the bed, wadding it in the process. Then he flung the mangled blanket back onto the mattress.
Next, he went to where my trunk of dresses sat and opened it. He yanked a frock up from the garments and ripped it at the bodice with a fierce jerk of his arms.
My eyes bugged, and my cheeks reddened, my mind at once returning to how he’d torn my dress in The Silver Mountain Spring before his hands—and mouth—dove for what lay underneath.
“R-Rye, what are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” he snarled, flinging the dress off to one side of the bed before tearing up one corner of the black sheets and rumpling them.
“Do…you want me to answer that?”
Finally, he turned on me. Tension infused his frame and fire scorched his cold eyes.
“I’m addressing the rumors,” he said, glowering at me. “Rather, I’m fixing them.”
I gathered the skirts of my dress and ascended the short set of stairs.
“Which rumors?” I asked as I approached.
“All of them,” he replied, keeping me squared in that unblinking stare, which followed me as I came to stand before him.
While his gaze remained steady on me, I spared a glance at the mussed bed.
A beat passed. And then…I tested him. “This is something you feel the need to stage?”
He grabbed me by the waist, sucking in a hissing breath between his teeth as he yanked me against him.
“Do not tempt me,” he warned, the growl of desire in his voice unraveling me on the inside, doing things to me. Calling my skin to call for his.
And this… This feeling that devoured me from within? The fiercest hunger and the most debilitating thirst were nothing compared to this.
He stepped into me, a knee finding its way between mine.
Steering me backward toward the bed, he leaned down, lips brushing my throat but refusing to caress. He inhaled, breathing me in.
“Make no mistake,” he said, releasing the words on a warm exhale that engulfed my collar, his voice rumbling through me. The combination of these sensations along with his following words brought a fresh and more fiercely burning flush to my skin. “I would take you right now if I could.”
I tilted my head back, enticing his lips to go where they would as they trailed lower.
If only he would kiss me the way he did in the Silver Spring. Instead, he shoved me onto the bed. That dark glower found me and again refused to let me go as he climbed over me.
I crab crawled backward, further mangling the already wadded covers. I didn’t get far, though, before he hooked me by the back of the knees and drew me under him, skirts hiked halfway up now, one leg pulled to his side as he invited himself over me.
“I am tired,” he said, “of pretending I don’t want you. That I haven’t since the day I set eyes on you. That I didn’t love you first…”
My heart exploded with these words—all of me simultaneously ruined and restored.
“I have lost both the strength and will to withstand you,” he said, “or to care any longer if I should. The deepest parts of me crave you body and soul, and if I only could, rest assured, Tip, I would have you. Every way I’ve imagined and then some I haven’t.”
I gasped at these words—more shocking, more luring, more inciting even than his last.
As those eyes bored into me, his hair hanging down to curtain a too-serious expression that verged on predacious, a heady but intoxicating trepidation mixed with my anticipation.
What was at the root of this simultaneously paralyzing and euphoric fear? That despite his words he would deliver on these promises? Or that he wouldn’t…
One gloved hand found and gently wrapped my neck, thumb playing over the hollow of my throat before he released me, fingers trailing down to hook the front of my bodice. Closing his fist, he wrung the fabric in his grip, as if it took all his strength not to rip this dress open too.
“I would shatter you,” he vowed as he leaned down over me. My chest rose and fell with a quickening pace as he brought his lips to my ear. “Again, and again…and again.”
Warmth surged through my whole body, and I pulsed in all the places I yearned for him to touch me. My blood continued to carry the rush of the moment through my system, and I trembled as my fingers found and wound his collar. But at this, Rye retreated, his hands gently prying mine free of him as he sat back into a kneeling position.
“But I can’t,” he said, removing his gloves one after the other as I pushed myself onto my elbows and then my hands, tormented by the dual and conflicting desires to launch myself at him and try scrambling away again.
Once more, here was another version of Rye I’d yet to meet. Or perhaps I had met the shadow of him—when we’d been in that spring together.
“And the reason I can’t,” he growled, “is because you are not my wife.”
He took hold of me and drew me toward him. I went, a helpless doll in his grasp.
“God help you if you were,” he said before he brought my hips to meet squarely with his.
I cried out, both with shock and desire, to find myself straddling him, my thighs locked around him, hands gripping his shoulders. And something about my response stirred that buried hunger in him to frenzied fire. Teeth gritted, stare feral, he flipped me off him and onto my stomach. My hair rushed into my face, and I had enough time to blink at the far wall before he seized me and drew me up again, brought me flush with him, my spine pressed to his chest, my legs once more wrapped around his knees.
“If you were.” His arms locked me against him, lips teasing my neck as he spoke, his voice husky and thick with longing. Still, he refused to kiss me. “If you were…I would have this castle ringing with your pleasure. So there would be no question as to who you wanted. Or to whom you belonged.”
His words. They made me even more drunk than the flamebrew had.
My heart thundered in my chest, and my body cried out with an echo of phantom pain as, suddenly, he released me, arms unwinding from around me, his form slipping back from mine. In his absence, coldness closed in. I turned after him, reached for him as he parted from the bed to stand. My hands again caught his collar, but Rye ignored my touch, swooping in to draw me from the bed in such a way that I half slid half unfurled to the carpeted floor where I landed on my knees.
He loomed over me, and terrified and exhilarated still, I peered up at him.
His expression impassive again, he stared down at me, bare hand finding my cheek, grazing the skin there with such tenderness. His fingers trailed to my jawline, and he tilted my chin up to him. His thumb traced my parted lips as, for a moment, they stole his focus. Then those eyes pinned me yet again.
Thistouch? Another salacious promise I dared not try to interpret.
“Put the ring back, Tip,” he commanded. “Put the ring back and I swear to you that, on our wedding night—on our true wedding night—there will be no more pretending.”
I blinked rapidly, trying to determine if I’d heard him correctly.
Dropping some cloth item next to me, he stepped back, that gaze holding me even as his hand slipped away from me. A hand that no longer wore its own ring.
He turned to go, then, leaving me gasping and bereft, freezing and flaming. So much so that I didn’t even care that the item he’d just discarded happened to be Nick’s golden cap.
How could I care when the one thing I truly needed at that moment happened to be him?
Without another word, Rye strode for the door.
I wanted to call out to him, but my throat remained locked.
The room spun as I tried to catch my breath, tried to fight the heat that had overtaken all of me.
I flinched when the door slammed shut behind him. Numbly, I waited for it to reopen, praying he would come back, even though I knew he wouldn’t.
After a moment, my hand fell to find and grasp the golden cap.
And then I huffed a laugh.
Because at last, it dawned on me what had just occurred.
In his own head-spinning, mind-melting way, Rye had just…proposed.