by Ann Jacobs
“I don’t mind bald. Your head feels…incredibly soft. Still, I’d rather have some hair, even if no man but my Master will ever get to see it.” Emerald loved the feel of the tightly curled, short pelt, the incredibly light feel of her head, the unfamiliar coolness of the breeze when it tugged at the short strands of her hair and swirled over her scalp.
“It’s traditional for the royal eunuchs to remove their hair. By now it seems as natural as brushing my teeth to lather up each morning and shave my head clean. Stroking it with the razor feels almost as good as stimulating my prostate with a dildo.” Hikaru set down the comb and clippers and tunneled a finger into the short curls at the crown of Emerald’s head. “There. I think you’re finished here. Are you ready for your wig?”
“Yes.” She didn’t relish wearing the heavy, jeweled headgear, but she figured she had to put up with a little discomfort for the prestige of being consort to her country’s reclusive Crown Prince Arik.
“Close your eyes, my lady.” When Hikaru clapped his hands, the door flew open. She felt a surprisingly light weight settle on her head, heard the eunuch dismiss whoever had come in. Something soft and silky fell over her shoulders, kissing her belly, her arms and legs.
“You may look now.”
Yesterday a submissive bride, today a princess. The short, curly-haired wig, not much different from the hair Hikaru had just trimmed, had been strewn with diamonds set on fine wire mesh. Her robes were not gold or silver but a shimmering combination of both colors, so sheer she could have spotted the smallest blemish if one had dared pop up on her royal person. “I want to see my Master now,” she said, imagining him similarly attired, his muscles rippling beneath his own princely robe.
“In but a few moments, my lady. I must go and ready him now that he has broken his fast.”
* * * * *
This morning he’d even hidden his cock behind black leather. He had to be roasting in the heat, for Obsidion’s sun beat down on them as they strolled through the palace gardens. Emerald bit back a sarcastic comment when she smiled up at Prince Arik, or rather at the single deep-brown eye that was all of him that she could see. “How do you eat?” she blurted before she could call back the words.
“The same way you do, I imagine.” His tone implied amusement, but it infuriated her, having to converse with a mate she’d fucked and sucked yet never seen up close. “I take my meals in my chamber.”
Away from everybody, including me. “Why?”
“Because I cannot eat while I wear this.” He lifted his left hand and touched the spot where she guessed his mouth must be. “Trust me, my princess. You don’t want me to remove it.”
Did he hide some horrible disfigurement? Emerald couldn’t imagine he did. Still he seemed quite sane—not the sort of man who’d adopt his fearsome mode of attire for no better reason than to intimidate his father’s subjects. “Were you in your chamber the night before we mated? Standing in the window overlooking town?”
“Yes. I find it clears my mind, looking down at the Street of Pleasure, imagining myself playing there like other men.”
“I saw you. You are beautiful. Perfect. I wondered then as I wonder now why you choose to hide behind all this.” When she reached out and touched the leather stretched over his right upper arm, he winced.
“I don’t know what you thought you saw, or what kind of trick telescope you were using. I’m not beautiful. I am scarred, so scarred I would terrify children and give their mothers nightmares if I didn’t wear this bodysuit.” He spoke slowly, as though he thought her a simple-minded child. “The scars are reminders of injuries I suffered years ago in a dogfight off Eastphalia with three mercenary captains. My father had sent them to kill me and they almost succeeded, in case you want to know.”
She’d attributed his halting gait to the tight leather bodysuit, but maybe… “Were your legs injured?” That was the only possible infirmity she’d noticed.
“One leg. One arm. One side of my body and face.” He sounded weary, resigned. “If you saw me in the window and didn’t notice, it must have been my uninjured side you were ogling. Come with me. You have already taken my seed into your luscious body. Since you’re obviously fascinated about seeing what I hide from the rest of my father’s subjects, I will show you.”
* * * * *
In his chamber, Arik punched a button on the intercom. “Contain yourself, my princess. The unveiling will necessarily have to wait until my body servant arrives. Meanwhile, you may disrobe. I’ll enjoy watching you, and watching him restrain you.”
“I need no restraining. I am your willing mate.” Her steady gaze as she slipped off her royal robes and stood before him naked but for her wig very nearly persuaded him she spoke the truth—that she possessed the fortitude necessary to withstand looking at the devastation that nearly made him vomit every time he saw himself.
She might even think she could take it, but he knew better. “You forgot to take off your wig. When we’re alone, I want to see you in all your naked glory.”
She lowered her gaze as though showing him proper respect. “I have no shame, not before my Master.” She lifted off the diamond-strewn confection of auburn curls, moved in front of the window and shook her head. She must have known that would make the sun’s rays bounce off her closely clipped hair, must have sensed how much he longed to discover with his own hand the feel of that bright, curly pelt.
He’d soon indulge that longing. He’d stroke her silken skin and lick the cream from her plump cunt lips the way Hikaru and the other royal eunuchs had done in his stead during the mating ceremony. He wet his lips behind the hood—the air vents suddenly seemed to have closed. He practically gasped for breath at the closed-in sensations.
Where was Hikaru? Arik’s cock had swollen painfully within its leather confines. “Come, then, if you have no shame, for looking at you has me seriously aroused. Free my cock and pleasure me while we wait for Hikaru.”
“Yes, my lord.” When she fondled him through the leather, searching for the zipper that provided access to his sex, he couldn’t stifle a groan. “I love this…love the feel of it in my cunt.”
The zipper opened abruptly, and she slipped one soft hand inside the suit to cup his sac. “I want to suck these, too. I want to feel them bouncing against my warm, wet slit. And I want to feel every inch of you caressing me.”
May the gods help me. She was offering him the sort of fucking he’d accepted was forever beyond his reach—an offer he was certain she’d rescind as soon as she saw him as he was—as he’d vowed to stay for the rest of his life.
Emerald drew up a cushion and knelt on it. She took his cock head in her mouth, encompassing it within that hot, wet cavern, licking around the corona and lapping the slippery lubrication that oozed from its tip. Her lips tightened around his shaft while she gently squeezed his scrotum. Fuck, he was about to come, and he didn’t want it to be like this.
“Stop.”
She lifted her head and looked up at him but kept caressing his balls and the base of his cock with gentle hands. “Why, my lord?”
Because…because he couldn’t bear to have her show him heaven only to snatch it away. And she would. No woman could possibly stand looking at the monster he’d become. Still, no woman could tempt him to change his path—to give in to lust and toss away the righteous vengeance he enjoyed each time he saw the pain and guilt in his father’s eyes.
“I don’t want you to see me. If you do, you will run as others have, and I want very much for you to stay.”
“We are mated. You claimed me before King Gawain and his entire court. I am your princess, and I intend to remain your princess for the rest of my life.”
As certain as Emerald sounded now, Arik wouldn’t let himself hope her determination would survive the shock she was about to receive. But he was impatient, no longer willing to wait for Hikaru. “We shall see how long you feel that way. Take off my hood.”
“How?” She reached up and stroked his cheek
s, a puzzled look on her beautiful face.
He managed to hold back an oath when she ran the back of her hand over the ravaged side of his cheek, sending shards of pain down his neck and arm. “Not there. The seam around my neck unfastens all the way around. Once the hood comes apart from the bodysuit, you can loosen the laces at the back of my head and lift it off.”
Cool air surrounded Arik’s throat as the hood separated from the suit. A hiss erupted from Emerald when she slid her fingers into the opening. “I told you I have scars,” he said shortly. “You said you wanted to see.”
“I do.” She didn’t sound as certain now that she’d felt part of the thick, raised scar that took a jagged path from the stump of his right arm over mutilated flesh and bone, until it disappeared into his hairline above where a laser shot from one of his attackers had gouged out his right eye.
He couldn’t let her do it. “Zip the hood back on, Emerald, and be satisfied with knowing only as much of me as I show my father’s subjects.”
“No.”
“Do it.” Damn it, his princess was proving to be a very disobedient slave.
As though she knew her touch would steal his resolve, she wedged one hand inside the hood and tunneled her fingers into his hair. “I want to know all of you, Master.”
He wanted to stop her but what she was doing felt too good. “Please, by the gods, don’t do it.” Arik couldn’t bear to see the revulsion on her face but he couldn’t make himself drag her hand away.
“Why not? Your hair is as soft as I imagined it would be. Move in front of the stool so I can stand on it and reach the laces. First, though, call off your royal eunuch, and trust that your scars will not repulse me. I wish to serve my prince—my Master—in every possible way.”
Her touch was warm, soothing, yet incredibly arousing, her suggestion mesmerizing…hypnotic. He spoke into the communicator by the bed. “Hikaru, wherever you are, I no longer require your service. I will summon you after—”
“After he services his mate—properly this time.” Her husky promise made Arik’s cock twitch to life, though it had shriveled at the sound of her distress a moment earlier.
He moved in front of the stool, sighed and awaited the horrified reaction that always accompanied anyone’s first sight of him. No words could adequately prepare her for what she was about to see, but he had to try. “Be careful of the right side. I’ve lost an eye. Some of the scar tissue around the socket is still sensitive.”
“You aren’t going to scare me off, Master, so you may as well save your breath. I wanted a prince for a mate, and now that I’ve got you I intend to keep you. Have you any idea how jealous it made my sisters when Meredith matched me up with you?” Emerald’s banter eased Arik’s fears while the feel of each lace giving way to her gentle fingers fed them. Damn it, he could barely breathe.
By the gods, he wanted her to accept him. He’d never before met a woman willing to defy a prince’s order—or one so determined to impose her own will on her Master. When he’d told his father he’d sooner fuck whores from the Street of Pleasure than take a mate chosen by a matchmaker, he had been wrong. In one day the beautiful redhead who now had his hood loose and was about to lift it off his head had captured more than his animal lust—she’d engaged his emotions.
He’d never been so scared, not even when the three mercenary craft had circled him off the small planet of Eastphalia, shooting their lasers with deadly precision, determined to destroy him and take his small transporter down. Or when he’d come to in a primitive clinic on that planet in a haze of pain that almost but not quite dulled the revulsion he felt, looking for the first time at the charred stump of his right arm, realizing that was only a small part of what had happened to him when he’d crashed his burning ship.
He’d give all of Obsidion’s wealth to keep Emerald from seeing it now. “Wait,” he told her, lifting his hand and trying to grasp the loosened leather but succeeding only in putting pressure on the tortured flesh beneath it.
She stayed his hand. “It will be no easier later. Let’s do it now.”
He couldn’t watch. Couldn’t bear to see the horror in her eyes. But he couldn’t deny her right to see the man she’d mated with, the father of the child who even now might be growing in her belly. Defeated, he closed his eye. Then he lowered his head and steeled himself to hear her scream.
All he heard as the concealing leather fell away was her swift intake of breath and a dull thud when her body hit the marble floor.
Chapter Five
Half-conscious now, Emerald lay not on the floor but on Arik’s bed, trying desperately to recall why she’d fainted.
Softly, so softly, he was speaking to her as though she were a frightened child. How long had she been lying there? She had no idea. It could have been mere moments—or hours.
Though his words hadn’t stuck in her mind, she’d never forget the tear that fell from his eye and lingered on her cheek—a warm, wet kiss from her Master. A kiss that held regret, resignation and disappointment. One that made her want him more than ever, even more than she wanted to experience a repeat of the delicious climaxes he’d brought her yesterday.
No! Fate couldn’t have played such a cruel trick. Shame washed over her, for she sensed that by fainting she’d hurt him as badly as the injuries that had mutilated him.
I shouldn’t have insisted he bare himself. Should have kept my curiosity under wraps. Curiosity, nothing, I wanted all of him, needed him to bring me pleasure, not just with his cock but with all of him. I couldn’t be satisfied with him fucking me, and his royal eunuchs doing what he would not, could I?
She heard voices, Arik’s and Hikaru’s? She felt someone tying silky-feeling scarves around her wrists and ankles. I told you I won’t run away. You don’t need to tie me to your bed. Although she wanted to speak, her voice wouldn’t work and her eyelids felt too heavy when she tried to open them.
“I believe she’s waking up, my lord.”
“Then finish restraining her and go. Hurry. I will call when I need you to get me back into the leather.”
Footsteps, too light to be her Master’s, padded along the floor. The door opened and closed. Tentatively she moved her arms and legs, found them so lightly tethered that she could move one arm. When she raised her hand to her cheek, she found the spot that still was damp from the prince’s tear. “Master?”
“Yes, it’s me.” He sounded resigned, as though expecting her to try to bolt. “Open your eyes and take a good look. I’m naked now. Hikaru finished the job you started. At least this time when you faint, you’ll already be on the bed.”
Emerald forced her eyes to open, the edges of her mouth to lift. “I never faint,” she said, but her words sounded hollow to her own ears. She looked up, steeling herself not to wince or scream. There he was, in profile, his uninjured side to her, as magnificent now as he’d seemed when she saw him in the window, and she spied another tear on his cheek, sparkling like a diamond.
A diamond in the rough, as courtiers often whispered about the man who’d one day sit on the Diamond Throne. “I want to see all of you.”
Slowly, he turned, showing her his back. Broad shoulders tapered to narrow hips and massive thighs as thick as tree trunks. On the left side he was perfection, his skin reminding her of satin-smooth caramel and cream. On the right lay crisscrossed scar tissue that extended the length of his body, its devastation most evident in the hideously mangled stump of his arm. “When you wear the bodysuit, it looks as though your arm is uninjured. Oh gods, I’m sorry. Forgive me. I shouldn’t—”
“Why? You’d have to be blind not to notice. I usually use a primitive sort of hook prosthesis they taught me how to use when I was recovering on Eastphalia.”
Beneath the gruff, almost defiant façade, Emerald sensed Arik was hurting. Though she still shuddered, recalling her shock at the sight of his ruined face and the gaping hole where his eye had been, the emotion that overwhelmed her now was not pity but anger. Anger with him f
or thinking her so shallow she’d reject him because he was less than princely perfection.
He wasn’t imperfect where it counted. He still had his mind, his emotions. Again she recalled the tear he’d shed when he thought he had repulsed her. She’d show him he didn’t, much as he’d shown her yesterday that they’d been destined to mate—that he only needed that lustful eye and his magnificent cock to make her cunt explode.
She held out her free arm to him, her expression as stern as she could manage while trembling like a leaf in Obsidion’s hot summer wind. “Untie me, Master. Then forget you’re my Master for a little while and lie down on the bed. Face up. I want to look at every inch of you, caress you, show you the kind of pleasure I can give you with my hands and mouth.”
For a moment she thought he’d refuse. His mixed emotions showed in his eye, in the set of his mouth, in the way he clenched his fist before sitting on the edge of the bed and loosening her bonds. “You don’t have to do this,” he said gruffly when he met her gaze.
“But you do.” Smiling, she moved to the foot of the bed and looped the silk scarves Hikaru had used to confine her around his ankles, then bound his left wrist to the ornately carved headboard. Looking at the stump, she smiled and set one of the scarves down. “I guess we’ll just have to pretend I’ve tied down this arm, too.”
Settling cross-legged by his ravaged side, Emerald reached down and stroked the worst of the scars from where it started above his right ankle. “You must have taken quite a hit,” she commented as she traced the jagged, reddened mass up his leg and body. “All this came from just one battle, didn’t it?”
“Yes, but it was one hell of a fight. Me in my little transporter against three armed mercenary fighters. Some of the damage happened when I had to crash-land on Eastphalia and my ship caught fire.” He flinched when she stroked the mangled stump of his arm but looked at her and said, “Don’t stop.” He watched her, wonder in his expression as though he could hardly believe she didn’t recoil at his scars.
