Chapter 6 Sheuan #2
Instead, she stood there, humiliation curling in her heart like so many dead, drying leaves. No. She firmed her jaw. This was beneath her. She tried again. “Am I not to your taste, Sovereign?”
His hands went to the collar of her robe. A brush of warmth and then he’d shucked it off her with the air of someone shucking corn. She still wore her dress, the room was warm, yet she felt goosebumps rise in quick succession down her arms.
“You think you know so much.” His voice was soft, sibilant, as one hand slipped to her back, finding the buttons of her dress. “And you think the things you don’t know, you can find out.” He undid them as he spoke, his fingers deft. “How much do you want to get to know me, Sheuan Sim?”
Was this a question she was supposed to answer? She chose something diplomatic, slightly suggestive. “I wish to know you the way any wife wants to know her husband.”
“Gods below, what a boring answer.” His hand rose, cupping her jaw, before sliding down her neck and beneath the collar of her dress.
With a flick, it pooled around her ankles.
There was no heat in his gaze as he studied her, only the clinical dissection of a doctor with a corpse.
She didn’t turn, aware of the angry red spots on her shoulder blades where the feathers kept pressing through her skin, where she kept pulling them out.
An unwelcome souvenir from her time in restored Kashan.
One side of his mouth pressed together. “Hm.”
There was something unbearable about all of this. Sheuan was used to donning different masks, different miens, different personalities. She’d thought she’d broken free, and here she was, once again wondering exactly how she should behave. What about what she wanted?
She put her hands to his waist, felt more puckered flesh there. Keeping her gaze on his, she pressed her fingers to his hips, sliding them beneath the waistband of his pants. He looked completely unaffected by her exploration, neither welcoming nor forbidding.
The scars ended above his buttocks, which were smooth, well muscled. She tugged him closer until their bodies touched, her breasts against his chest, his hips aligned with hers.
He wasn’t the least bit hard.
The Sovereign looked down at her, the way a wolf might at a pup that had bitten his tail. “You’d think, at my age, that I’ve been with countless men or women. Yet I can count them on a single hand.”
This whole encounter was puzzling, strange.
She was his wife now. Why hold back? If he’d been with others, what had moved him to intimacy then?
What did she lack? What was she doing wrong?
She was used to partners melting, hot, beneath her touch, their breath quick, eyes hungry and wanting.
In those bedrooms, she’d taken control, had guided their desire like a palm cupped beneath a spout of water.
Here, she tried to grasp some upper hand and found only dust, disintegrating between her fingers. “Have so few people pleased you?”
“You could say that,” he murmured. He hadn’t broken her gaze, his brow smooth. “I wonder what your father would think of this.”
She froze. What would he think of this? According to the Sovereign, her father was a traitor.
He’d embezzled funds. Sheuan had always had her doubts, but she’d been a child when the Sovereign had sentenced him to death.
She’d let that go out of necessity, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t painful, a bruise that she pressed in quiet moments by wondering what her life would have been like had he lived.
And here she was now, married to the man who’d ordered his execution.
Even if her father had embezzled those funds, did that make him a greater traitor than she was?
In one swift movement, the Sovereign had removed the rest of his clothing. He stepped into her space with the confidence of a man used to getting what he wanted. When their bodies met, she felt him hard against her thigh.
She was yielding to him, her mind still a haze of guilt and confusion, lying back on the silken bedspread, unsure of where to touch him so her fingers curled instead into the uplifted feathers of the embroidered cranes.
She wasn’t ready, shouldn’t have been ready, yet in an instant he was there, gliding inside her with the comfort of a sword sliding home.
No breathless panting or mindless, roaming hands. Only a slight smile.
He wanted her like this. He didn’t want her to play at being soft and accommodating, or to grasp his desire like a weapon to be wielded. There wasn’t so much desire in his face as satisfaction.
This wasn’t who she was. She was Sheuan – sure-footed, clever, the only one who knew the game being played. But he was the Sovereign, and she could only push back so much. She lifted her hands, determined to tangle them in his hair, to touch and bite and find something of the truth there.
But then he moved inside her, his thumb settling at the junction of her thighs.
Rubbing in even, steady circles. Her fingers grasped uselessly as she gasped, as he settled into a rhythm.
He seemed to know exactly how and when to touch her.
She was the one mindless now, as he held her wanting in one hand.
She wasn’t sure when he’d bent down, but his voice sounded in her ear, amused.
“Is this what you were begging for?” He thrust into her, again and again, until she found herself asking, please. Please.
He gave it to her, the pleasure overtaking her in a rushing, pulsing tide.
A coldness, a breeze. He’d withdrawn just as she’d finished, and while she lay there, shaking and helpless, he matter-of-factly pulled both his pants and his shirt back on. “You’ll find I signed the paperwork yesterday,” he said.
She was still floating, her heartbeat a drum, the space between her legs aching. “What paperwork?” Her voice sounded dull even to herself. Spent.
“To dissolve the Sim clan. We both know they aren’t going to make tithe, and with you here, I have no use for them.
As I am simply the Sovereign, you will simply be Sheuan.
” He lay back down on the bed, propping himself up on one arm over her naked body.
He watched her, and she knew he was waiting for her to react.
So little she knew about him, about the way his face spoke of the thoughts beneath, but this she knew.
He’d driven a dagger into her lungs and wanted to see if she’d fight for breath.
She was the one lying here steeped in the fading echoes of her pleasure, yet she felt she’d lost this contest. It doesn’t matter, she told herself.
What matters is that you pick yourself up.
He’d blocked her from his side of the bed, where her dress and her robe lay in a heap.
She couldn’t retrieve them without either crawling over him or creeping awkwardly around the bed.
So she didn’t move, as though her nudity bothered her not at all.
She chose her words carefully, working her way back to solid ground.
“It’s what they brought upon themselves.
If they cannot meet the standards of the other royal clans, they must be discarded. ”
Something like hunger sparked in his eyes.