Instead, he moved to the right, silently inviting her to sit with him in the middle of the fog. Even that small gesture was definitely against his own better wisdom.
When she sat next to him, it was close enough that their shoulders almost touched.
“I’m surprised you’re outside already,” he told her. “Your foster parents would not be pleased.”
She tilted her head in his direction and gave a little laugh. “Are you going to tattle on me for going outside in this bad weather?” she asked him mischievously.
“I imagine that you are a very hard girl to keep inside,” he replied with a grin. She was so full of energy, she didn’t seem like she could sit still. “Thank God I wasn’t your teacher. I imagine it has to be an impossibility to get you to just sit down for even a moment.”
“Papa could tell you some battle stories, I’m sure,” she said with a bit of a blush appearing on her cheeks as she crossed her feet underneath the bench after a restless kick. “How long are you planning to stay here?” she asked. “When do you have to go home?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have to go home. I haven’t been home in ten years. I’ll probably stay until I feel Hoel has tired of my company; I have a lot to learn from him. Besides—his study is enormous, and half of those books are sole editions, some centuries old…”
She nodded but then said, “Well, there are some good walking trails nearby, too… If you wanted to come with me when the weather gets better?”
He swallowed. “Yes,” he said, his throat feeling intensely dry. “I think I’d like that.” Alone in the woods with her? God help him, it was going to be a test of his strength of will to keep from reaching up into her skirts!
Why had she smiled at him, damn her! Now he was wondering if she’d even let him up her skirts!
He looked at her, and she returned his gaze, letting him look into her haunting blue eyes. They were like small pools he wanted to drown in. He found himself leaning forward, then took in her scent. Cinnamon and vanilla. Her lips parted, seeming also to be drawn toward him.
“Damn it all,” he growled and reached out for her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and held her tightly as he pressed his mouth onto hers.
The fog consumed them helpfully with a wave of his hand, swathing them like they were in a blanket of white cotton. He stopped worrying about Hoel, and the fact that she was married. He stopped thinking about Charlotte, in fact. He was so intent on savoring this moment, tasting her mouth, holding her warm body in his arms…
His hand grabbed her waist tightly, holding her still as he moved his lips away from hers and trailed wet kisses down her neck and down toward her delightfully low neckline. Her skin was so soft, and he realized that his gut no longer felt sick. In fact, he’d never felt better.
She was so eager, so easy to move exactly how he wanted her. He laid her out on the stone bench under them like she was an offering, her expression looking glassy and drugged with desire. Her back arched, and she confronted him with her firm breasts. He felt her fingers comb through his hair and moaned. He loved her touch; her fingers so warm even with the cool air around them. He grabbed at her breast, cupping it into his hands before he lowered his mouth there. He pressed his tongue against where he felt the hard nipple poking at the fabric covering it.
Maili gasped when he tugged on that nipple, and he grinned. The sensitive little minx… He continued to nip at it through the dress with his teeth, not caring if he wet the fabric.
He began to pull up the hems of her skirts, but she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she began to grind her thigh against his fingers as he tugged at the fabric. His hands felt like they were working on his own, his mind completely disengaged from the task, and he pressed his knee between hers, splaying her thighs further apart.
He had lost all control, and he couldn’t stop if he tried.
“Ow…” she suddenly yelped, and her hands fell away from his hair. “Ow!” She was suddenly trying to jerk her leg away from his.
Now he felt pain—liquid fire felt like it was melting into his thigh!
He jerked his leg back and stood up, pressing his hand into his pocket. It was burning his damn hand!
Snapping back into the present, where he was amazed suddenly that he’d been doing what he was doing, he suddenly realized what the burning was… it was his damn fire-coin! Of course, it had been cold the whole year until just now.
Thank the gods, because he couldn’t imagine anything else that could have stopped what he was about to do.
He straightened and started cursing, trying to grip the coin with the thick fabric of his robe.
“What is it?” she asked, panting. She was raising her skirts and already looking at a small, thin burn that the edge of the coin had left behind on her lower, inner thigh.
“Moriarty!” was all he could grit out, both thankful toward the man from keeping him from making the biggest mistake of his life and also for the current hell-fire that kept burning him.
He had no choice but to run through the fog—which he had made thicker to shield them from any passerby. Now he ran face-on into a bush.
Chapter Ten
“Goddamn it! Fuck all!” Ashcroft yelled at the large, trimmed shrubbery that had still managed to poke him in the eye. He dropped something to the ground; a gold, dark disk.
“What is that?” she asked, startled by everything that had happened, pulling her skirts down, but she already knew what it was.
She didn’t know if she should be mortified or horrified by what had just occurred. Dear lord; she was going to let that man do whatever he wanted to her… and she was going to let it happen happily.
There was something about his smell, the way his hair felt between her fingers, and his taste that felt so familiar. She felt like she had been there before; being held in his arms, being kissed by his powerful mouth, held by his groping hands… it didn’t seem scary, it didn’t even feel new. It felt just wonderful, like his touch was something well-worn, broken in.
And did she like that feeling! Of course, that all ended with the fact that apparently a fire-coin burned her leg. What was he doing, walking around with one of those things in his pocket, anyway?
She was surging with disappointment and frustration that it had to end that way. Surely, in a few moments one of them would have pulled back—Ashcroft wasn’t the type to deflower a girl about five feet away from the door of the demigod who had adopted her—but the end of the tryst would have been a little slower, a little gentler.
Now the damn thing was burning the grass around it! He was rubbing at his eyes and trying to grasp for the thing, looking confused and jerky and lost.
She grumbled and swooped down, picking the coin up with her skirts. With a step and a flick, she threw it onto the bench they had been lying on. He turned and began to grab for it.
“Ash—you bring paper to a fire-coin—you don’t bring the fire-coin to the paper!” she snapped at him, then ran into the house. She’d seen people with concussions who were acting less confused than he was, but bringing an active fire-coin indoors was a good way to burn a house down. Hoel had a few that he kept in vials of water so that they would merely start to bubble over when they heated to this extent until the nozzle on top would screech from the outpouring steam like a teapot.
She moved through the fog bank and was surprised that, after a foot or two, the fog wasn’t nearly as bad as it been moments ago, while they’d been kissing. She could see lights from the study coming through the murky haze.
She opened the French doors wide as she scurried into the study. Hoel was reading a book and looked up, startled, before she grabbed a sheet of paper then ran back out of the doors without explaining herself, although she did hear him puff out questions that sounded like, “What the devil is…?”
When she went outside, the fogbank had dissipated from around Ashcroft. She could see him rub against the scratches on his face from ten feet away. “Here,” she said, adjusting the paper around her hand and th
en quickly laying it on the fire-coin.
She had seen them work before, and just like those times, handwritten words began to spill out from the coin to the paper as if the coin had been holding an inkwell inside of it. The writing on the page was messy, and although it was in the same language, it was very unlike any style she had seen. It was scratchy and looked more like something a child might write.
Ashcroft suddenly turned Maili toward himself and pulled her cloak tighter to her bosom. She realized that was because he had basically been suckling her breast through her dress fabric, and it was evident. “You should go clean up,” he told her quietly, and then glanced over her head, as if looking for danger.
She blushed and pulled the cloak tighter to herself. She felt like he was trying to sweep her under the rug, as if he was ashamed of what he’d done. And then, when she looked into his eyes, she realized that that was exactly right. He was ashamed.
“Thank you,” he told her in a dismissive way, just as she heard the heavy footsteps of Hoel walk up behind her. Ashcroft grabbed the sheet of paper off of the coin and shook it in the air to get the ink to dry, despite the cold, damp air.
“Fire-coin?” Hoel asked.
“Yes—my steward has the other coin,” Ashcroft said, now not looking toward Maili on purpose. “But this is his wife’s handwriting…”
“Maili.” Hoel’s hand closed around her upper arm, directing her toward the doors. “Go inside.” His tone didn’t broach any argument, and she bit her lip. Did Hoel know what they’d done? His tone hadn’t denoted any humor.
She didn’t hesitate to obey him. She didn’t even look up, keeping her eyes settled on the grass. She ran into the house and toward her room before Anwen saw her—because Anwen would most certainly see right through her like she always did. The first mirror she caught herself in told the story—she had red, kiss-swelled lips, mussed hair, and the front of her dress was both moist from his affections and stretched in an unbecoming way.
Then again, she looked undeniably worse after she had been sitting outside in the rain earlier, crying.
She didn’t know why she had been so sensitive, but in truth she hadn’t been feeling right all week. Not since she met Ashcroft. It didn’t help having an evil wizard out there with a vendetta against her, but she knew deep down that Damen didn’t have anything to do with the way she felt. It was Ashcroft.
He was the most frustrating wizard in history, and he murmured too much. He was mysterious, introverted, and a homebody. He was her opposite in every way! Still, she couldn’t help but feel utterly fascinated by him… Alright, not fascinated. That was the wrong word—half the time Ashcroft seemed to delight in being extremely boring and pedantic.
However, sometimes—normally when he was outside of the study, which brought out his more archivist-esque tendencies, which was to be either reading or to be annoyingly intellectual—he would let down his guard and be amazing. When he wanted to, he could be wise, but based on experience. He could tell the best stories—Hoel was ancient, but he rarely left Westeryn, when Ashcroft had spent centuries wandering and trying to learn from others, often fighting and creating allies and enemies. He had amazing insight.
Maili opened her window, letting the cold air blow inside, trying to see what was going on below in the gardens by sticking half her body out of the window and craning her neck over to see.
All she could see was Ashcroft and Hoel talking about something very serious before Ashcroft turned and quickly marched inside. She couldn’t hear what they had said to each other or what had transpired from the letter.
She didn’t hear the maids come in behind her until one reached around her and nearly closed the glass panes of the window in Maili’s face. She knew it wasn’t one of her regular maids before she even turned around to glare at the aging mortal. “Let’s get you into your bedclothes,” said Nissa. Nissa was Anwen’s maid—not her own. Maili’s maids were the younger girls, the oldest of them being seventeen. Nissa was in her fifties and was nothing like a girl; she was built more like an ox. She was a mortal who seemed to demand respect and cooperation.
“It’s not even eight yet,” Maili argued anyway.
“Her ladyship doesn’t want you catching a cold, and you’ve been doing everything you can to do just that.” She tugged Maili into standing and then turned her around so she could begin unfastening the buttons on the back of her neck. “You’re lucky that you’re moving into a hot desert. That’s the only thing that’s going to save you. It’s not proper—a lady going outside that often!”
Nissa was the type of woman who, for a working woman, always had a very stubborn outlook as to what ‘ladies’ needed to do; Maili imagined that the woman wouldn’t be happy unless Maili was doing exactly what Anwen did at all times.
For the second time that day, she was stripped of all her clothing and bullied into a hot bath. She chewed her bottom lip as she felt her teased, sensitive nipple burn with the touch of the water. Nissa disappeared during her bath, which suited her just fine, but then when she came back with towels, she told Maili’s maids, “Finally we don’t have to worry about that wizard anymore!”
Maili suddenly froze, her eyes wide. “Wh-what?” she asked, hoping beyond hope that she’d misheard, or even imagined, what she thought she’d heard Nissa say.
“The wizard is leaving, and good riddance, I say! I certainly don’t like that sort underneath this roof!”
Maili sprang out of the tub, grabbing a towel and slinging it around herself. She didn’t care that she was getting water all over the place—she had to get down there! She had to see why he was leaving, and for how long.
He couldn’t be going back on his word, he just couldn’t! Why on earth would he go? He was just telling her that he was in no rush to leave…
It must have been her! She didn’t think she had done anything unspeakably wrong—he was the one who kissed her, not the other way around. She had only let him.
Had Hoel found out what they’d done in the garden? It certainly hadn’t been a great deal, but it would have been enough to get Ashcroft a quick dismissal from the home if he had… She had been so stupid to let any of it happen! It was so abrupt, however—it just busted forth like a sleeping volcano suddenly erupting from pressure into chaos.
She was yanked violently back into the room just as she had thrown open the door to rush downstairs.
“Have you gone completely mad?” Nissa asked, spinning her into the room and then shutting the door again. “You can’t go walk around in naught but a towel!”
“I have to go down there before he leaves!” she snapped, and tried to push past the woman.
“No, you don’t!” Nissa said, keeping a firm hold on her shoulders, keeping her away from the door. “You’re going to get in your dressing gown and get into bed, young miss! That’s what’s going to happen! Don’t make me call her ladyship!”
She and Nissa had a short-lived wrestling match until Nissa had her tucked under her arm like a tantrum-throwing two-year-old. Maili was out of breath from the struggle.
By the end of it, a maid walked into the room, leading Anwen in behind her. “Maili!” Anwen quickly admonished, and grabbed her out of Nissa’s hold. “What’s the meaning of this?”
“I have to talk to Ashcroft!” she panted as Anwen planted her feet on the floor.
“In your towel?” Anwen replied, raising her eyebrows.
“If that’s what it takes! He’s leaving!” She shook her head back and forth and demanded why.
Anwen’s mouth pressed into a firm line. “Yes, Maili, but that is no reason to go running naked through the hall, is it?”
“Yes!” she snapped. “He promised to stay!”
Anwen snapped her fingers at a nearby maid, wordlessly demanding Maili’s nightgown. “Drop the towel,” she said, grabbing the cloth into her hands and bunching it up in her hands.
Maili did what she was told, although not happily. She thought everything they were doing now was nothing
but a waste of time; she needed to find a way to keep Ashcroft from leaving.
“Did papa make him go?” she asked as she slid her hands through the gown.
“No, of course not. Hoel likes that wizard very much. Ashcroft said there is a personal emergency he has to see to. He’s apologized for the suddenness.” She tugged her nightdress the rest of the way down.
Maili bent and grabbed her white slippers. “Mama—you have to let me see him,” Maili told her.
Anwen put her hands on the sides of Maili’s face. “Maili, I know you like the wizard, but you’re a married woman. I think it’s time you put this little game behind you, don’t you?”
Maili narrowed her gaze at the goddess. “It’s not a game.” She reached up and batted Anwen’s hands away. “Don’t you understand? This isn’t a game. This is my life, mama.” She pulled out of Anwen’s grasp and once again marched toward the door.
“Maili!” Anwen cried, as if Maili was being unreasonable or embarrassing.
Maili could not, would not, be called back. She would be scolded later, spanked, and she didn’t care. There was nothing they could threaten her with that was worse than Damen.
She ran quickly through the house, looking in room to room to see where Ashcroft was. Finally, she opened the door that led to the stables, running smack-dab into a chest.
She looked up and saw Ashcroft looking down at her, looking more frazzled and intense than she’d ever seen him. Still, she slapped her palm against his chest. “You can’t go.”
He grabbed her upper arm in his fist and then pulled her outside with him and off to the side of the house. “Let me go, Ashcroft! Stop acting like you’re going anywhere! You made a promise!”
“Do you think I want to break my promise?” he demanded, his expression tight as if he thought she was insulting him. “I have no choice—I have to go. And by going quickly means that I might return quickly.”
“Might?” she asked flippantly. “Might return quickly? Might not?”
“Before Damen comes? I might not,” he replied honestly, but still tightly, like she was being rude by making him admit this.
Her Master's Hand Page 13
