by Jean Johnson
“And we have some nice kindling and shredded rags in the east wing, and dead wyvern bodies to dispose of before they start stinking up the gardens,” Trevan continued, picking up their tale. “But in the meantime, Evanor—culinary genius that he is—has cooked up two bowls of soup guaranteed to take the anemic edge off of your suffering, plus pitchers of blood-bolstering, water-absorbing juices. But he says you don’t get the newest, largest set of his otherworldly, fluffy toweling-cloths until you’re both healthy and well. We’ll check on you in an hour; we’ve got cleanup duty in the sewing hall, and that’ll take literal tons of water to sponge away, even after we scrape off most of it.”
“At a nice, safe, magically assisted distance,” Koranen added with a little smile as the brothers retreated back to the door. “There’s not enough room in here for more than the two of you to be cozy together, I think.”
A glance at Saber as the two brothers left showed Kelly that he was blushing. A glance at Kelly showed Saber that she, too, was blushing. She splashed him. He splashed her. It felt good both water-wise and tension-wise, so they splashed each other some more and grinned like fools.
Eventually, they floated over to investigate the food brought to them. When the edge had been taken off of her hunger, when she felt bloated but somewhat hydrated, Kelly realized something felt odd. Setting down the half-emptied mug she had been drinking from, she touched herself through her soaked blouse, then up underneath the hem.
Even though it felt damp on the outside, the inside of her corset was dry. While it was completely submerged in water.
“I’ll be damned…”
“What is it?” Saber asked, breaking off from drinking his soup.
“My corset’s dry! Next to my skin, I mean. You weren’t kidding about this absorbed-through-the-skin stuff, were you?” she added, twisting in the water to face him.
Saber shook his head, trying not to think about her corset. “You’ll, ah, have to remove it—it’s probably not letting in enough water next to your skin to help neutralize the poison, so your skin is drying it out.”
She blushed and turned her back on him, batting her blouse up out of the way where it floated in the water. It kept drifting into her line of view, though, while she was tackling the laces of the bra-like garment. “I’m, uh, going to have to take my shirt off for a few seconds.”
“I should probabl—” Saber broke off abruptly.
Kelly peered at him over her shoulder. He had a funny look on his face. “What’s the matter?”
He blinked and scrambled to get out of the tub, water sloshing everywhere. “Excuse me!”
Bemused, she watched him snatch up the vase on the edge of the tub and splash in a beeline for the refreshing room door, ignoring the water he dripped all over the floor. Oh. Probably the onset of the diarrhea he warned me about… She waited until the door was shut, then ducked to wet her drying head, and shrugged out of the blouse. With it out of the way, it was easier to get the corset off. Tossing the corset over the rim, she struggled her damp blouse back over her head, then squeezed out the fitted undergarment and draped it on the wooden steps leading up to the stone-lined tub to dry.
At least she hadn’t had to take care of laundry. Dominor usually did that chore for the rest; he would go through the castle once a week, gathering up a basket from each brother, then use a tub much like this one in the laundering chamber in the basement of the castle to soak the clothes, add some soap, and poke at it with a stick and a spell for a little while until everything was fresh and clean. Then he dried it with another spell as he drew each article out of the water and applied other spells for freshening, de-wrinkling, pressing, and folding.
She had been highly surprised at first when she learned of him handling that particular chore. After a bit of thought, and given that he was the greatest clothes-horse of the eight of them, always dressed in very expensive fabrics dyed and trimmed in tasteful jewel-tones and thread-of-silver, Kelly didn’t blame him for wanting to make sure none of his brothers accidentally shrank anything with the wrong cleansing spell. Since she didn’t have a spell to make the work quick and easy for herself, no one had asked her to do it for them.
Frankly, Kelly was not about to volunteer. It was more than fine by her; she had always hated doing laundry, though she did love making the clothes that inevitably ended up needing to be washed. That was the perennial sewer’s dilemma, of course.
Saber came back a few minutes later, looking gaunt and dry-skinned, though he had apparently soaked himself with the vase at least once while he was gone. A look at the water all over the floor, and he grimaced and snapped his fingers. It whipped up all around him and arrowed back into the tub with a splash. Climbing in beside her, he drew in a deep breath and burrowed under the slowly cooling surface. He emerged with a gasp several seconds later and half-crouched, half-floated shoulder deep for a moment, then ruefully shook his head.
“This isn’t working. I need to get my clothes off. I’ll, uh, go find another tub.”
“And suffer, waiting for it to fill deeply enough?” Kelly shook her head. “Go ahead and strip. I won’t be offended. You probably won’t have anything I haven’t seen before.”
ELEVEN
Saber blinked at her, mouth slack and brows raised, gaping a little. Morganen’s words from weeks earlier came back to haunt him, now. “You mean you’re not a…a…?”
“A virgin?” Kelly finished frankly for him, raising her own brows. “Technically, I still am, but since it’s not overly valued in my culture, I have seen my share of male nudity. I simply haven’t done anything about it, yet. So you won’t shock or offend me.”
She wasn’t even going to try to explain the whole confusing concept of television sets, DVDs, bachelorette parties, and stacks of naughty videos, viewed with lots of giggling, popcorn, blushes, lewd comments, and shrieks of laughter.
“You…are a maiden?” Saber wanted to confirm, digesting her words.
“Technically, yes,” she agreed. “I’m just not innocent.” As he continued to stare at her, she rolled her eyes and turned around, giving him the privacy of her back. “Oh, just get your pants off and get it over with!”
Saber heartily hoped the water had cooled enough to cool him off as well. A lot more. To the point of loin-numbing cold. He wrestled with the ties holding the front of his breeches together, then inched them off under the water.
A tug on the thigh-length hem of his tunic proved futile to keep from revealing himself, since the fabric simply floated aimlessly upward in the water, but at least she had politely turned her back. When she ducked under the water to soak her scalp and face, he wrung out the pants, then tossed them past her shoulder as she surfaced. She flinched back from the unexpected apparition, and Saber had to grab her waist to keep her from backing up too close to him.
As much as he needed to remove his tunic, since it, too, restricted in some places how much water soaked into his skin and neutralized the poison, he couldn’t remove his hands from her flesh. Her own blouse floated loose in the water, caressing his wrists.
They stayed like that a long, breathless moment, only the water moving around them in residual ripples. Both of them were aware of the intimacy of their situation. Then she moved, her arms shifted…and her hands pulled on the hem of her blouse, lifting it up over her head. Saber released her, shocked and aroused as she matter-of-factly stripped the garment over her head. Baring her back to him.
“I don’t think I got the same amount of venom, but I think I got more than en…uhhh…Oh, god!”
He knew that exact same feeling that was striking her now. A moment later, she exploded out of the water, slipping on the rim in her scramble to get to the refreshing room. She darted back when halfway there, snatched up one of the terry toweling cloths she had introduced them to, and disappeared through the door. Oblivious to the clear view he had of her glistening but rapidly drying breasts as they jiggled in her haste.
Groaning, Saber sank back under the
water and concentrated on massaging his bitten and slashed left hand. It was finally starting to bleed normal red blood, not reddish-purplish ooze, so he muttered a healing chant to get the puncture marks and self-inflicted wounds to close. Cursing the unknown mage who insisted on plaguing them so lethally, he wondered yet again who could hate them all so much.
Mekhadadaks and watersnakes, wyverns and demonlings…Whoever hates us would be flayed alive by the Mage’s Council for keeping so many highly illegal, magewar-bred beasts. If they could only find her or him! And because we’re Cursed, they’re not even going to try.
Kelly came back out, wrapped from armpit to thigh in the now soaking-wet towel, her wet trousers and equally dripping undertrousers bundled in her hand. She had wrung them over her naked body to dampen it and now dropped the sodden clothes in her laundry basket, woven by Trevan and provided by Dominor for tidiness. An indrawn breath made her look up at Saber, who was staring at her. She folded her arms defensively. “I see no reason why I should sit in my clothes in a tub full of water, when it’s just uncomfortable and awkward. We’re both adults, after all, so there shouldn’t be any problem.”
“That…is the problem,” he managed, swallowing to get his heart out of his throat, more than to get any actual liquid down. “We are adults.”
“Well, this is the only bathing tub that’s this close to a refreshing room, in this section of the sprawl you call your home. Unless you think you could make it to a suite out at the edges of the wings somewhere,” she pointed out, mounting the steps daintily. She sat down on the rim, then looked at him. “Are you going to turn your back?”
“I don’t think I can,” he admitted honestly, bluntly, his gray gaze fastened intently on those wet, nubbly clothed curves.
“Oh. Okay.”
Her own heart pounding, her body aching for more than just the soothing touch of the water, Kelly managed a blasé shrug and opened the towel. Her nipples, topping her lightly freckled breasts in strawberry-pink tips, hardened under the intensity of his stare, the flush of his skin. She slipped down into the water, revelling in the combined caress of it and his eyes as they followed her progress into the clear liquid of the large bathing tub. He bit off a curse and sloshed around, bracing his arms on the edge of the tub and dropping his head onto them.
“You know,” Kelly offered thoughtfully when she came up from dunking her head, “I think we’ve been avoiding this whole moment fruitlessly, Saber. You want me. I want you. There’s one clear solution to that particular dilemma.”
He thumped his brow against one forearm, his hair clinging in wet lines to his shoulders, throat, and cheeks. “I cannot take you! Even if we were to just touch with hands and lips…”
“You’d risk everything, because of the Curse,” she finished quietly. Disappointed. She bit her lower lip, thought a bit, and cut out her feeling of rejection firmly. A Doyle didn’t obsess over things a Doyle couldn’t change. No matter how much skin she flashed, it wouldn’t change the Curse. Stupid magical fantasy world rules… She sought for a way to make amends for the awkwardness of the moment. “You know, I’m not as bad off as you are. I’ll go find another tub; you can stay in here and soak.”
He turned as she stood up to get out again, catching her thigh with his good hand. Kelly stopped and shivered from the intimate curve of his fingers and wrist, palm hooked around her flesh. He stared at the coppery tangle of curls just above his fingers, visible through the rippling water, then managed to drag his gaze up past her breasts to her face. “It isn’t just the Prophecy…”
Frowning, Kelly tried to grasp his meaning. “It isn’t?”
He tugged slightly on her thigh. Coaxing her back down into the water, he locked his gray eyes with her aquamarine. The eye contact was bold; the cheeks, however, were distinctly pink. “I simply cannot spare the…the liquid.”
She blushed. Her forehead blushed, her cheeks blushed, her throat blushed…even her freckled breasts blushed, Saber noticed, dropping his gaze once again to the waterline.
“Oh. Right.”
“Neither can you,” he murmured, shifting his hand from her thigh to her waist, pulling her deeper under the water. As she nodded, he released her flesh and reached for his tunic.
He twisted the fabric over his head to dry it out a little and dampen his skin at the same time. A second squeeze, and he aimed the trickling fluid haphazardly over her head, generously sharing the moisture. Kelly drifted under the splash, tipping her face up, her eyes closed to enjoy the stream. He trickled some of it over his own head and shoulders again, then lobbed the garment onto the floor somewhere beyond the tub.
Hooking her gently around the ribs, Saber drifted both of them to the sloped back of the tub across from the corked waterspout, and drew her just close enough to be comfortably intimate. The end result was borderline tolerable between his need to hold her close and his need to hold his desire firmly in check. She was also no longer quite so thin and fragile that he had to worry about bruising her with a simple touch, but he still didn’t want to risk grabbing her too hard, either.
Kelly nestled her cheek against his bicep, one of her arms behind his back, the other hand resting gently on his chest, and tried to think of something to say. Anything that had nothing to do with sex. “So, tell me, what do you like to do with your days? I know Evanor’s about as domesticated as a heterosexual male can get, and Trevan and Wolfer like to do most of the hunting, Rydan acts like an odd sort of bat out in his tower-cave, Koranen makes the lightglobes…you?”
“I, ah…I make magical weapons and armor and associated enspelled items, usually,” he confessed, flexing his arm to get her a little more comfortable—comfortable being a relative term, with his groin turgid, longing for a touch, any touch, of her own flesh brushing against his rod. “My tower, the northwest one, has a smith’s workshop attached to it along the inner wall. Though I have to drop my manly pride in honesty and admit I’m not the absolute best swordsmith out there. Sometimes I get swords shipped to me by the best in Katan, so that I can enspell them, since I am one of the best magesmiths…but I’m not the best forgesmith.”
“Poor baby. I’m sure you do the best you can,” she added soothingly with a watery pat to his chest.
“Don’t call me a baby. Hold your breath,” he warned her, and drew them both down under the surface briefly for a soaking when she complied. They came back up, and he blinked water from his eyes, not bothering to wipe it away, because his skin still needed moisture. “If you were wondering how long this treatment will take, we have to stay in here until our skin finally prunes.”
“Ah. So that’s how we know when we’re done soaking,” she murmured.
He held up his hand, showed the skin of each one taut and unwrinkled, despite the fact that they had already been soaking up to their throats and higher for a good half hour. “See? Not yet.”
“So you’ll only make love to me when I’m more wrinkled than a great-granny, is that it?” she teased lightly, her cheek resting once again on his shoulder.
Love? His heart skipped a beat as he studied her snuggling into his chest. Yes…it is love, isn’t it? It was a terrifying thought. Only a small corner of it was for the Curse, though. The real Disaster, Saber realized, was if something actually happened to her. I think I finally know what Father felt like, preferring to die rather than live without Mother. And I don’t for the life of me know how my feelings for this out-worlder happened.
He loved her strawberry-gold hair, her occasional flares of temper, her freckles, her unceasing demand in everything she did to be treated as an absolute equal. He admired her independence, her fiery streak, her quick grin, and the way she bit her lower lip. He loved the way she was unafraid to discuss just about anything, and how she was a maiden, yet sat naked in a tub with an equally naked him, without shrieking or shrinking away. He just…loved her. Damning though it was.
“So. Do you have any idea what Disaster you’ll bring when we do eventually make…love?” He lingered
slightly on the last word, meeting her eyes when her water-spiked lashes flicked up quickly in surprise. Saber couldn’t resist. Dipping his head, he brushed his mouth against her lips, once, twice, then forced himself to pull back again. They really couldn’t do anything for the rest of the day, and in his case, maybe even through the night and into tomorrow.
“Not a clue,” she breathed. Then licked her lips, twisted up over his arm—pressing her breasts into his chest and bicep, making him close his eyes and stifle a groan—and poured more juice into one of the mugs his brothers had brought. She dropped back down and drank half of it, then pressed the mug on him so he could drink the rest. She watched him swallow, then put the mug back. “Saber, is it really—?”
“Do you think you could—?” he asked at the same time, and broke off. “Ladies first.”
She nodded and looked down at the water. Seeing a rippling image of her breasts, his manhood, and quickly fixed her eyes elsewhere, across the room. “Is it really love? The verse you recited said ‘true love’…I’ve never been in love before, so I’m not sure how to tell.”
“Can you forgive me for being an ass when you first arrived?” he asked her, instead of answering more directly.
That returned those aquamarine eyes back to him with a frown. “Don’t be an idiot!” Kelly paused, blinked, then grinned. “I actually mean that; don’t be an idiot, next time. And I’ve already forgiven you. I know I wasn’t the most likable person when I arrived, either. Can you forgive me?”
He brushed back a wisp of her shoulder-length hair from her cheek, where the water had adhered it and her need for the liquid had begun to dry it. Teasingly, he tugged on the lock. “You had every reason to be a termagant.”
