by Maisey Yates
“You cannot help it. You say that you do not wish to be my teacher, but you cannot help it. But sex, Lazarus, requires two people to be desperate. To be mindless. And you think far too much.”
She walked toward him, and she tried to remember the way those other women moved. Slow and sensuous, with a rock in their hips, their breasts thrust out into prominence. Yes, she tried to think of that and keep her gaze on his. And a surge of power went through her when she realized he could not take his eyes off her. He was waiting to see what she would do next, and he did not know. She did not know what she would do either, but she was gratified that she was able to surprise him.
Even if she would have to surprise herself, and make decisions very quickly.
And when she reached him, it seemed obvious. She did exactly what she wanted to. She wanted to touch that great and glorious chest, for she always had. For he was incredible and beautiful in all ways, and she had lusted after his body since before she understood exactly what it was she was feeling.
She could remember clearly the first night she had understood that she desired him the way that a woman desired a man. It had been when a woman had approached him at the campfire, all curves and heavy-lidded smiles.
She had put her hand on his chest, and Lazarus had responded, taking her hand and going off with her into the darkness.
And that was when she had realized exactly what they did in the darkness. And when she had imagined putting her hand on his chest. When she had imagined what might happen if she were to touch him that way. And what it would be like if he led her off into the darkness. What then? She felt sick with jealousy but things had made sense then. In a way they had not before, and in some ways she was grateful for it. Because it had given her clarity. And so there was that. But it had eaten at her as well.
And so she did it now.
Touched his chest.
She had wanted to then. As she had wanted to do since she was just seventeen and falling desperately in love with him, while understanding slowly what that meant. How impossible it was.
In some ways, though, she had been happy. Because at least she had felt love. Even if it wasn’t returned. She had loyalty. But now... Now she could touch him, as a woman touched a man. Now she could reach down into those hidden parts of herself. The woman, not the warrior. The woman who had sworn so much more to him than fealty, but had sworn her heart.
And now she would swear her body to him, if he would have it.
And you will extract all the desire in his whole being from him.
She knew it then. For perhaps what he’d said was true. And he had really never had a woman like her.
And yes, it was to be her first time.
But she did not want gentle. She wanted them. What they were.
Not what someone else might be. Not how he would handle a virgin, but how he would handle Agnes.
Hand flat, splayed over his chest, she moved it down his body boldly, taking in the sensation of his muscles, of the crisp hair there that was so different from anything on her own body. He was a man. And there was no denying it. And she was a woman.
Often with them those lines blurred, because they were warriors, but here in this space it was undeniable. Here in this space, they were one. And, too, such very different entities all at the same time.
“I want you,” she said. “Do you know how much? How unfair it was when you put your mouth on me when I was not prepared after spending years working to banish the fantasies that I had of you? It was nearly impossible to endure. And then you... Then you changed everything. You changed everything when you put your mouth on mine, and when you put your mouth...there. On that secret place where I’ve... I’ve tried not to want you. And you think of me as innocent, I know you do, but my fantasies of you have not been innocent. Not for a very long time.”
And then she pushed her hand down beneath the edge of the towel, which loosened the knot, and she saw it falling to the floor. And his body was exposed to her. Oh, his body. It was so beautiful. So incredibly beautiful.
“I want you,” she repeated, and she wrapped her fingers around his thick length, around the evidence that he was just as desperate for her as she was for him.
He groaned, harsh and short, his breath hissing through his teeth. His eyes closed and his head fell back, and she had never seen him... She had never seen him like this. There was a resignation in the action that was nothing like the Lazarus she had known these last eight years.
She felt powerful. Holding him like this. And breathless with desire. It was the strangest thing. To feel both strong and weak all at once. Like she could do anything, and like he could defeat her were he to place his lips on hers and kiss her until she was mindless.
But they were locked in a battle where both would emerge victorious in the end.
A thrill of excitement raced through her.
“Do I please you?” she asked, lifting her eyes to his, and then following some instinct she hadn’t known she possessed, drawing her tongue across her upper lip.
And that was when he moved. He gripped her wrists, propelling her backward, and taking her down onto the bed, his naked body looming over hers.
“Little witch,” he said.
“Perhaps,” she said. “This feels a bit like magic.” And then she arched herself upward, and she could feel him respond. Could feel his powerlessness to do anything but meet her there. His desire as intense and terrifying as her own. And then, with all the strength she possessed, she wrapped her leg around his waist and reversed their positions, so that she was on top of him, looking down at his glorious naked form. She put her hands to the belt on the dress, letting the fabric fall loose, and then shrugging the gold film from her shoulders, letting it fall so that she was bare breasted above him.
“Is this a fight for dominance then?” he asked, his voice silky. “Because I warn you. I will win.”
She thought of how strong he was. The glory she would feel in such a defeat. “I think we would both win in that case.”
He growled again, and she found herself flat on her back, her panties being ripped from her body. “Do not play with me.”
“This is not a game,” she said. “You were treating me as if I were game. A quarry. Something to be snared and caught, and you were so controlled. You had me begging for you, and you would not give me what I wanted. This is no place for games. Not you and me. Either we need to have each other, or we don’t have each other at all.”
The growl intensified, and he gripped her hands, lacing his fingers through hers as he pressed them down into the mattress. “Can you handle the manner of my need?”
“I know nothing else,” she said. “Are we not a product of the environment wherein we were shaped and created? Because I was shaped in your world, Lazarus. Honed into the thing you see before you by your own hand. Were you not always making yourself a bedmate?”
Something flashed through his eyes, and she knew that she had bested him. Yet again.
He said nothing, instead he lowered his head and kissed her, the gesture a punishment that she was more than willing to take.
She could feel his heart raging in his chest, raging out of control.
And then she knew, yet again, exactly what she would do next. She pulled away from him, scattering kisses down his chest, and then she wiggled out from beneath him, and he moved so as to catch her, and she took that opportunity to bring herself back to him, kissing his stomach, the hard ridges of his ab muscles, all the way down to where he was hard and thick for her.
Because why should he be the only one who could undo her?
She put her mouth on him, then opened her lips around the thick head of him, drawing him in as deeply as she could.
His hand went to her hair, gripping her tightly as he swore violently and she didn’t stop. He didn’t make her. And he could have.
Just
as she could’ve made him stop when he had eaten into her in the Parisian penthouse. And she had not. Because the desire was too strong. Because the need for release was greater than the need for sanity.
Mindless.
Desperate.
How they knew it well. She pleasured him like that, until he was shaking, until his hands in her hair were nearly beyond pain. And then he wrenched her away from him, brought her back up his body and kissed her. Then those rough, large hands were between her thighs, stroking her, taking her to the brink, before bringing her back again.
“Please,” she whimpered. “Lazarus, please.”
“Beg me,” he growled.
“Lazarus...”
“Beg me for your release.”
“Please,” she said again.
“Please what?”
“My Lord,” she said. “Please.”
And then he moved his hand just so and gave her exactly what she had needed. Exactly what she had been longing for. Desire broke over her like so many scattered stars, her release of fractured glass pane cracking all around her.
And when she came back to herself, he was there, over her, the thick blunt tip of him pressed against the entrance to her body.
“This may hurt,” he growled, and then in the next moment he thrust home, swallowing her gasp of pain with a kiss.
And it was only pain.
Pain existed only to the degree that you allowed it, something she had learned in her training. And she let it fall away. She made it so that it did not matter. Pain was immaterial. What mattered was that he was inside of her. Connected to her. Closer than she had ever been to another person.
Lazarus. Him.
And then he began to move, taking those pieces of pain and replacing them, thrust by thrust, with pleasure that ran deep.
Until she was sobbing, gasping with it.
Until she was begging him for more. For everything.
Until she was poised on that brink once again, that shattering place that only he had ever really brought her to.
And when it burst, it was all glitter. And there was nothing dark or insidious beneath. It was bright all the way down, the kind of glory that she had only ever dreamed existed in this world.
And when he shattered right along with her, it was like dying and being made new again.
Mindless. Desperate.
No different than her. It was not a game, or a manipulation. Or a means to an end. Not for her either. It was just beyond her. Beyond them.
And then Agnes, who had not shed a single tear even when her father had been killed in an alley in Paris, began to cry.
CHAPTER TEN
LAZARUS LOOKED DOWN at the trembling woman in his arms. His Agnes.
And he... He could not recall the last time he had completely lost the plot like that. He never had. That was why he could not remember it. Because the moment did not exist. She had taken his plans and twisted them, made it so he could not even remember the aim of his seduction. And she had turned it into her seduction. And he had... He had succumbed. Quickly. Willingly.
Were you not always making yourself a bedmate?
And now she was weeping. This woman who had come toward him with such strength and power was shattered in his arms, crying like a child. And he did not know what to do.
He was comfortable dealing with battle. Comfortable dealing with a fight. But this... This moment was out of his reach. He did not know what to do. He did not know what it made him. There had been a time in his life when someone had tucked him in and read him bedtime stories. But it was not now. And it had not been for a very long time. There had been softness in his life, but he could not remember it. And yet he held her up against his chest, because it seemed the right thing to do, whether he fully understood or not. He felt like there was a large space between them, and he did not know how he might cross it. He did not know if it were possible.
* * *
“Why...why are you crying?” he asked.
She pressed her cheek against him, wet from her tears getting on his skin. “I don’t know.”
“Have I hurt you?”
“No,” she said on a jagged sigh. “I’m not injured.”
“Then I do not understand.”
“I don’t either.” She looked up at him, her eyes shining bright. “It is okay to not understand, Lazarus.”
No. It wasn’t. He was a man who did not traffic in unknowns. But rather in the things that he could see and touch. And he had been proud of this. For much of this time. He had... It made sense. The things that were tangible. That he could see and touch and taste. And beyond that... Beyond that none of it mattered. At least, he had thought so. Until he lay there with this woman, holding her, trying to make sense of what she was feeling. And of why he wanted so badly to protect her when there was no threat.
“You don’t like this,” she said. “Because it was not your timing.”
“God laughed at my timing,” he said wryly.
And it was true. He had sought to control her with desire, and she had turned it around on him, as a blade wielded sloppily by an enemy who had underestimated his foe.
He had underestimated her. And he had underestimated his desire for her. But perhaps... Perhaps because she had desired him this whole time, perhaps because she had known... Perhaps that was why she had managed to best him so effectively.
She was acquainted with this desire between them while he... It was new to him. Or at least, the understanding of it. But he had not known.
“You have wanted me?” he asked.
She nodded. “You are the only honorable man I have ever known. I honestly wasn’t sure if I had any use for men until I met you. And you... You are so brave and steady. And you put your life at risk to save mine. So yes, I wanted you. But in every way. To wish to keep me in your life, to approve of me. To hold on to me. And I knew... I knew when I saw the way those women touched you that I wished I could touch you the same. But I... I also knew that I would never do anything that would make you want to send me away. That I would never do anything that would make me any less to you than I was. And so I determined that I would be Agnes. The most and best, the one who swore everything to you. And if that meant being chased, that I would be. For my desire was tied to you anyway.”
“Agnes,” he said, feeling unequal to the declaration in the moment. “There is no other one like you.”
And then she settled her head against his chest. “And there is none like you.”
There was something in that statement. Something in that declaration that soothed a beast inside of him he had not known was roaring there.
He wanted to keep her, but not in the same way he’d felt compelled to do so before. This was not about holding hard, but gentle. Keeping her in contact with him, his skin, but not holding so tight as to trap her, to crush her.
He just wanted to hold her.
And so he did. And whatever happened next, he would meet at the head then. But for now, Agnes was soothed, she had stopped crying and she was in his arms. Everything else would take care of itself.
* * *
The next morning Agnes was invited to tea with Tinley. It was a very frightening request, all things considered. She had just been with Lazarus for the first time, the way women and men were, and they were lying to Tinley and Alexius. She felt a jumble of nerves as she walked into the future Queen’s personal sitting area, which was lovely and well-appointed.
“Good afternoon,” she said.
“Agnes,” Tinley said, smiling broadly. “You look...well.”
But she could tell the way that Tinley said that meant she did not. Agnes blinked.
“Is there something wrong with me?”
“No,” Tinley said. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Why would you think that?”
“You look very disconcerted.”
“It’s only that you look sort of pale.”
Great. So everything that had happened with Lazarus was written all over her.
“I’m fine. I’m very much looking forward to tea. You know I really like desserts.”
“Lazarus has said. You don’t suppose there’s a chance you could be pregnant.”
She felt her eyes go wide. And the truth of the matter was... She and Lazarus had done nothing to prevent such a thing. They hadn’t even thought of it. Or discussed it. It hadn’t crossed her mind even once. But technically, she would not be pregnant yet. “I... Likely not. It’s fine.”
“And is everything well with you and Lazarus?”
“I... Yes,” she said. “We are well. Lazarus is a hard man, but he is good,” Agnes said.
“And you love him,” Tinley said. “Please sit down. I’ll pour you some tea.”
This was that female heart-to-heart sort of thing that Tinley wanted to have. And Agnes had never engaged in. She had always been hiding things about herself. And right now it was no different. She was hiding.
“Lazarus saved my life,” Agnes said. “Literally. I was a girl on the streets of Paris, and he... He undoubtedly saved me from a very grim fate. I have loved him since I was sixteen years old.”
“Sometimes that isn’t love,” Tinley said. “And I don’t say that to be discouraging. It’s only that... Agnes, I have some experience with that. I thought I loved Dionysus very much. I couldn’t sort out the feelings that I had for Alexius. Until... Until much later. What I felt for Dionysus was not love. It was just a childish sort of infatuation.”
“I’m not infatuated with Lazarus,” Agnes said, laughing. As if that word could be applied to the two of them. The sword fights and sparring. The way that he talked to her. The way that he touched her. It was nothing half so simple as infatuation. If only it could be. “I love him,” Agnes said. “But there is... An intensity to that.”
Tinley laughed then, a high, pleasant-sounding sound. “Well, if you had a late night, you should’ve simply said that.”
