The Tears of the Rose

by Jeffe Kennedy

  To his credit, he didn’t laugh. “Ah, I see.” He pushed his manhood into me and I whimpered. “This part?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this area?”

  “Ash!” I let go of the blanket and seized his hips, trying to pull him inside of me. “Yes, already! I told you I didn’t have the words.”

  “I know. I’m sorry for teasing you. I only . . .”

  He trailed off and I paid attention to his expression, wondering why his mood changed, a whiff of desolation creeping through. I lifted my hands and framed his face. Turnabout.

  “Tell me.”

  He sighed and leaned his forehead against mine. “I realize this is only for tonight, but . . . I have to know that you remember this is me. That you’re not . . . dreaming of a ghost.”

  He’d known somehow, that I’d drifted, before. The expression on his pitted face seemed stark, the naked hope and fear of the wounded animal. His skin, all the uneven lines and scars, made me realize, more than anything, that this was him. And I knew what to do.

  “Then take off your shirt. Get as naked as I am.” I told him. “Let me see and touch you.”

  Sitting up, he looked at me, splayed before him, and hesitated. “I have scars. Lots of them.”

  “I’ve seen—remember?”

  “Touching is different. Most girls—other women, I mean—are repelled. It’s not pretty.”

  “I’ve had pretty. Now I want you.”

  He stilled at that, fingers flexing on his shirt, and for a moment I thought I’d blurted out the wrong thing again. But no—he laughed, soundlessly, and shrugged out of the shirt. Tossing it aside, he pulled off his boots, stood, and pushed the narrow black pants down his legs. His manhood stood out straight from his body and I found myself staring, aware I’d never seen Hugh this way either.

  So much we hadn’t done with each other. But, though the thought made me sad, no ball of iron thorns followed it; my throat didn’t seize with grief. We’d thought we’d have all our lives and lost all those years in an instant. Over time, we would have come to know each other better. Maybe Hugh had treated me as he thought I wanted him to. Glorianna knew that I’d never said otherwise. I’d been delighted to be petted and cosseted. It wasn’t his fault that we hadn’t had the chance to grow up some. If I had learned nothing else, I knew that—time could be cut short.

  “Show me one of the other ways,” I told Ash, standing up and boldly putting my hand on his . . . what? “And what do I call this?”

  “Cock,” he answered. “There are as many names as stars in the sky, but that will do.”

  Keep your head with your big sword, not the little one, young cock. The drill instructor had said that to the soldier in the yard and now I understood her subsequent apology.

  Ash’s hands settled on my hips, under the fall of my hair, and he pushed his cock through the circle of my hand so the furry hairs of his chest tickled my nipples. That part of him, his cock, wasn’t rough or scarred, but felt smooth and velvety. Tender, even.

  “You can do it harder than that.”

  I liked harder. I tightened my grip and he gasped, the cock flexing in my hand. He pulled away from me and took my hands in his. Lying back on the blanket, he drew me over him, positioning me so I straddled him. Lifting his cock in one hand, he pointed it up and moved me by the hips so the tip was just inside me.

  “I want to do it,” I said.

  “Then do it,” he nearly growled.

  Wrapping my fingers around it again, I savored the sweet texture of his skin there, so hot, with muscular hardness beneath.

  “Can I put my mouth on you, as you did to me?” I was more wondering out loud, but he clapped his hands over his eyes, grinding the heels into the sockets, making a horrible groaning noise.

  “You will be the death of me.”

  “I just wondered.”

  “No.” He dropped his hands to my hips and sank clawed fingers in. “Not now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you look like the goddess of sex sitting over me, your juices dripping down my cock, and I can’t hold off a moment more.” With a burst of speed and strength, he pulled my hips down and flexed his body, driving up and into me.

  I rode him like a steed, plunging up and down, the excruciating pleasure arrowing through my pelvis and up through the top of my head.

  Throwing back my head, I laughed, straight to the moon. I felt like the goddess of sex. Ash sat up, following the arch of my body and winding his hands in the length of my streaming hair, making me bend backward while his mouth plundered my breasts and that fierce cock drove up, pinioning me with such sharp thrusts that I convulsed.

  Over and over, my whole body spasmed and I dug my nails into the wiry muscles of his shoulders, the ridges left by the lash like a puzzle to be reassembled. With a last cry, I collapsed, falling backward into the pull of his grip on my hair.

  He followed me, barely allowing a breath of distance between our slick skins. My knees bent under me, my spine still arched by his merciless grip, I became the horse he rode, pounding into me with all the ferocity I’d fantasized about. My body screamed with it.

  I did, too. Lost in a world of such extremity that I knew nothing but his flesh in mine.

  With a final shout of what sounded like victory, he slammed home, grinding hard and pushing my straining hips wide. I split apart, sundered by him.

  Lost to the night.

  But morning found me anyway.

  Rosy fingers of Glorianna’s dawn rippled over the sky, turning it and the lake the perfect pink her priests strove to re-create. I sat up to see better, wincing at the intense ache between my thighs. I’d been wrapped up in the blanket, as securely as if it were a bandage and all my skin abraded.

  Ash sat nearby, fully dressed, long arms wrapped around his knees.

  And brooding.

  “Good morning.” I worked a hand free to tuck my hair behind my ears. It was curling madly, tangled, and no doubt standing out around my head like a bonfire leaping out of control. Out of habit, I looked around for my brush, wherever I’d tossed it last night.

  “Looking for this?” Ash’s voice sounded more full of rocks than usual. Maybe broken glass mixed in. Pain and regret salted the soil. I sighed for that and held out my hand.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  He shook his head, more at some thought than at me, but didn’t hand it to me. Instead he came to sit behind me and gently worked the snarled mess from under the blanket. I froze, uncertain if he intended what I thought. Tentatively, he drew the brush through it. Far too gently.

  “You can do it harder than that,” I teased him and was rewarded by his sharp intake of breath at the reminder of how I’d worked him with my hand. My body warmed at the memory.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.” He sounded funny. Smelled guilty.

  “You’ve groomed horses, right?” I kept my voice light. “Imagine this is a tail.”

  “I never did enjoy getting mule kicked,” he observed wryly, which was better. More, he dug in a bit harder. Still not quite enough.

  I held my hand over my shoulder for the brush. “Here, let me.”

  “No,” he snapped, and I flinched a little at the frustration in his tone. He drew in and blew out a long and deliberate breath. “I want to do this for you. To make things up to you.”

  “Even my hair has been mussed once or twice,” I told him, mild and even. “I survived.”

  He tugged harder and I braced myself, being careful not to show any twinge.

  “Not that.” The brush snagged, then got wrapped up. He cursed, but his tugging got him nowhere. I turned, working my other arm free of the blanket, and took over. In a few moments, the brush came free and I set to teasing out the rest of the tangles. He watched me, bemused. “How do you do that so easily?”

  “Lots and lots of practice. See, you have to start at the ends, this way.”

  “Last night you brushed from the top down.

  “It wa
sn’t all knotted up then.” I smiled, because he still looked unhappy. “And I didn’t know you were watching that closely.”

  “I’m always watching you, Ami.” His gaze wandered over me, unwillingly, I thought. “It’s as if I can’t look away.”

  “Should I apologize for that?” I hadn’t forgotten how he’d said that he hated wanting me. Like a poison.

  His gaze flicked to mine, haunted. “No. I should apologize to you. Once you’ve . . . tidied yourself—you can bathe in the lake—I’ll heal you. I can do that much at least.”

  “I don’t need healing.” I paused in the brushing, surprised. “My thighs are fine.”

  “Not that!” In an excess of impatience, he yanked the blanket down, baring my bosom. “Look at yourself. Look at what I did to you.”

  Shocked and rather overwhelmed, I took in the sight of my breasts, blooming with bruises, scraped here and there. On the high, round curve of one, a set of teeth marks showed dark red amid a flowering patch of yellow.

  “You look as if a wild animal has been at you.” The bitter roil of disgust poured out of him and into the ground, sour with self-loathing. “You should see the rest.”

  “Okay.” I tossed the brush aside and stood, dropping the blanket entirely. He cursed under his breath, but—true to his words—seemed unable to look away. My hips ached and the fiery burn on my thighs turned out to be some sort of rash. I fingered it, finding it was composed of hundreds of tiny scrapes.

  “From my beard stubble.” The words grumble out of him. “Go bathe so I can heal the damage I did.”

  “I don’t want healing. But I will bathe.” Snagging the brush again, I strode naked down to the lake, savoring the feel of my bruised body as I moved. You look as if a wild animal has been at you. That’s how it felt, too.

  I loved it. The new me.

  But I let him stew anyway. I hadn’t changed that much.

  21

  When I returned, still naked, because I liked the way he stared at me, the scent of his desire percolated up through the rest. He’d packed up our few things and had laid out a shirt and pants for me that had survived his mauling, mainly because I hadn’t been wearing them.

  His gaze crawled over me, full of the lust I loved from him, threaded through with guilt and anxiety. Enough of that. I tossed back my hair and fisted my hands on my hips.

  “Skip the apologies,” I said.

  His mouth thinned. “No apology is sufficient, Princess Amelia, I—”

  “Glorianna save me!” I burst out, thoroughly annoyed with him, and he gaped at me. Enough that I laughed. As I’d laughed last night, howling at the moon, while he drove his cock into me and neither one of us worried about small things like bruises and being royalty or a convict. “Ash—I don’t want your apologies because I’m not sorry. I’m not fragile and I don’t want to be treated like some hothouse rose whose petals might crumple. I enjoyed last night and I’m not letting you remove a single bruise or scrape. They’re . . . trophies.” Evidence of emotion that showed on my skin finally. Not like those seeping, bleeding wounds inside that no one saw.

  “I’m only sorry,” I continued in the face of his silence, “that I fell asleep so early.

  “You flat passed out, Ami.” He was back to angry. Far better than that oily guilt.

  “Mmm, yes. And slept harder than I have . . .” Since I heard Hugh had died. “In forever. I don’t mind that. But I wanted to try my mouth on your cock and find out how that feels, too.”

  He made a choking sound and rubbed his forehead.

  “What? Am I not supposed to use the words now?”

  “It’s not that.” A muscle in his jaw clenched and he seemed to be grinding his teeth. “Why don’t you put your clothes on?”

  “Why? Am I so ugly that you can’t bear to look upon me?”

  “It’s not that.” He stared over my shoulder, at the lake or nothing at all. I tossed my hair over my shoulder, and sure enough, his gaze dragged unwillingly to my breasts and down the rest of my body. I sauntered toward him and he took a step back, holding up his palms, as if to ward me off. “Stay away, Ami. Get dressed.”

  I kissed the center of one palm and he yanked it away as if I’d burned him. Taking advantage, I slipped close and began unfastening the buttons of his shirt. More than one way to get inside a man’s guard. If this was indeed my weapon, I planned to learn to wield it well.

  “Stop that.” He gripped my wrists, holding them tight in place. But it lacked the force of his usual demands. And the smoky scent of his desire thickened.

  Deliberately I pressed against him, testing, my naked belly brushing against the upthrust line of his cock straining against his pants. “It won’t take that long, will it?” I looked up at him through my lashes, swaying against him. “You feel ready to me.”

  He groaned, casting his gaze up to the sky. “This was the worst mistake I ever made. If I could take back what happened last night, I would.”

  Cold washed through me, a blizzard taking all the sweet warmth of our combined desire with it, leaving the air sterile, without life.

  “Ah.” Shame found me, and I was embarrassed to be naked. “Good to know that, Monk.”

  I pulled away, but he held me, grip strong on my wrists. The emotions bleeding out of him tasted muddy, swirling with doubt, longing, self-hatred, jealousy, and an under-riding current of helplessness that made the ground shift like sand beneath me.

  “It’s not what you think.” He searched my face, the scars deepening on his. “I didn’t mean what I said.”

  “You meant it, all right.” I said it with all the flat coolness he’d used to deflate me with those words the day before. And it worked equally well on him. He relaxed his hold and let me slip away. “I’ll get dressed and we can go.”

  “Ami . . .”

  I yanked on the pants and buttoned up the shirt, then tightly braided my hair and tied it off with a strip of the torn silk. It suited my mood, to have it out of my way. Gathering my things, I cast one long look at the beautiful place. No longer sure how I felt about anything at all, I nevertheless appreciated that Andi had offered me this sanctuary. It no longer seemed so impossible that my daughter would want to come here. Maybe I would come with her.

  As if in answer, a bit of life turned inside me, a little starburst of someone else there. I laid my hand over my belly and turned my gaze farther west.

  “Thank you, Andi,” I whispered. I almost told her that I would return. Or that I might. In the end, I left it at that, trusting that she heard me.

  I flicked a glance at the White Monk, who stood nearby, fists clenched around the straps of the pack he wore. He’d retreated behind that implacable and stern mask, eyes like cloudy glass.

  “I’m ready to go,” I said and headed into the larger world.

  This time I bundled up again before crossing the border, but winter still hit me with an unexpected blow. Without pausing, the White Monk clomped through the snow, breaking a trail for me. When we passed the altar for Hugh, the flower as verdant as Annfwn itself, I drew Glorianna’s circle in the air and spoke the benediction for the dead. My body ached in delicious ways from being with another man, and yet I felt no guilt.

  I almost thought Hugh would approve of the woman I was becoming. The one he never had a chance to get to know. And I would never know what kind of man he would have become. That was the greatest tragedy.

  “Do you want to stop, Princess?” the White Monk inquired, formal and solicitous of his charge.

  “No. You may proceed.”

  He’d drawn the double cowl deep over his face, so I felt the glitter of apple green more than saw it. He didn’t much appreciate me turning the distance on him.

  Still, this would be better. We could not be together as lovers outside of that bubble of paradise, no more than Hugh’s forget-me-not could survive more than a moment outside the magic dome. Even if I built a hothouse to hide ourselves away in, the glass would eventually shatter and we’d be exposed to t
he cruel elements of our world.

  No. The High King’s daughter and the future Queen of Avonlidgh could not associate with an escaped convict and Tala part-blood. We both knew it. For the first time I felt the bite of duty. This was what came of claiming my own power—responsibility. Our reality wasn’t something I could pout or tantrum away.

  Ash would be better off returning to Annfwn—his true desire, regardless—and making a life for himself there. I would keep his secrets. For myself, I would forge ahead, playing my role in the fate of Annfwn and the Twelve Kingdoms. It wasn’t the happily ever after I’d envisioned when Hugh and I wed, but it could be a good life. An important one.

  And maybe I would find other men to enjoy.

  I owed the White Monk that much. If my power lay there, then I would apply myself to the study of it. If Glorianna was the goddess of love, then perhaps she was also the goddess of sex. I could take as many lovers as I wished and none would gainsay me. As long as they were no threat to the thrones, I could dally with anyone. Girls, too, as some of my ladies amused themselves that way.

  Perhaps I’d lost my chance at true love, but I could have happiness, thick on the ground or not.

  The descent went quickly, especially as we walked without speaking, each absorbed in our own thoughts. I sensed the staymachs moving through the foliage, but their flitting shadows no longer frightened me. The White Monk was frankly brooding, judging by the taint he left in the footsteps I followed in. The farther we got from Annfwn, however, the less I sensed his feelings. Maybe a whiff in the air now and then, but barely in the earth at all after a while, as if the soil outside Annfwn lacked something, like desert sand that held no water.

  It troubled me, this sensation that the very ground of the Twelve Kingdoms was somehow failing. Was this why the crops and livestock were doing poorly? Maybe our answer lay not in conquering Annfwn for Glorianna, but in restoring some kind of vital magic to the rest of the Twelve Kingdoms. I started to send a prayer to Glorianna for guidance and paused in midthought. Maybe she had already guided me and I needed to listen better.