The Winter King

by C. L. Wilson

  “I’m fine.” She tugged her arm until he released one wrist, and she laid the free hand against her forehead, massaging the flesh gingerly. “Besides, what do you care?” She gave him a dark look.

  “I’ve told you before. You are my wife and my queen. Your well-being is my responsibility.”

  “Right up to the time you have me put to death, you mean?” She jerked away from his hand. “I told you I’m fine. And I don’t want to be your ‘responsibility.’ ”

  His teeth clenched. He gripped her jaw and forced her to look at him. “Just shut up and let me look at that.”

  She glared up at him. “A little whack on the head isn’t going to affect my ability to bear your heir. Of course, how, exactly, I’m supposed to conceive that heir when you avoid my bed like the plague is a complete mystery.”

  The minute the words left her mouth, she knew she’d made a mistake. Wynter went completely still, and his gaze suddenly went sharp as a blade.

  “Is that what this is all about? My recent absence from your bed upsets you?” His voice was silky smooth, his eyes searingly intent.

  Not for all the world was she going to dignify that with an answer. “No, your lying to me upset me. If you won’t keep your oaths, then I won’t keep mine either.”

  “When have I ever lied to you?”

  Her mouth curled. “Don’t take me for an idiot. I know you took your harlot with you when you left. Did you think I would just sit here playing the sweet, long-suffering wife while you and Reika Villani fornicated your way across the kingdom?”

  His eyes narrowed. “You think Reika and I . . . ?”

  “Not just me. The whole court. You weren’t the slightest bit discreet. Did you think we all were blind and deaf? Did you think you could just ride off with her for a fortnight, and no one would put two and two together?” When he didn’t answer, she slapped at his hands and shoved at him in irritation. “Let me up, Wynter. You’re squashing me.”

  “No,” he said slowly. “No, I don’t think I will.” He caught the wrist he’d freed earlier and pinned her back to the ground. The white Wolf on his wrist brushed against her Summer Rose.

  Khamsin gasped. The throbbing pain in her temple evaporated as another, far more powerful and irresistible sensation swept over her. “Stop that.”

  “Stop what?” His voice had gone low and throaty.

  “You know what. You think you can manipulate me with your . . . your wiles.”

  “You think I have wiles?” He brushed his lips against the soft skin behind her ear, making her shiver violently. “So you are wroth with me for being absent so long from your bed? Is that the real reason you came here? Because you wanted to get my attention?” He blew a soft, icy breeze down her throat. The chill against superheated flesh made her shudder with delicious sensation. Her nipples tightened to hard points, and her mouth went dry.

  “I—I—” She couldn’t put two coherent words together. She settled for one. “Stop.”

  His tongue touched her ear lightly in a swift, teasing caress. “I thought you would appreciate my husbandly consideration. Lady Frey said you needed time to heal, so I gave it to you.”

  “That was weeks ago.” His skin smelled so good. Rich and seductive, the scents multilayered: cool crisp winter freshness, underlain with a darker, earthier, masculine scent, and something else she couldn’t name that made her body throb every time she smelled it. She told herself she would resist seduction, but she couldn’t resist that. She pressed her face to the skin of his neck, breathing him in. Her eyes rolled back in pleasure.

  “If you hungered for my touch, you need only have asked.” His teeth grazed her skin. Her eyes closed as his mouth found her breast and he bit down lightly, through the crushed velvet of her overdress.

  She moaned, her breath starting to come faster. It wasn’t fair, the effect he had on her. He pressed his wrist to hers, lowered his voice to that sultry, seductive growl, and every cell in her body started screaming in need.

  “How was I supposed to do that when you avoided me at every turn?” She fixed her eyes on the pulse in his strong throat. A blush rose in her cheeks. She’d admitted her weakness . . . confessed that she’d wanted him . . . that she yearned for him. “And then you left. With Reika Villani.” The last popped out of its own volition, the tone hurt, wounded. Ah, gods, she was all but weeping.

  He pulled back, his gaze searching her face. “You are jealous?”

  “Not jealous. Betrayed.” She tried to cling to some measure of dignity. “You swore an oath of fidelity.”

  “And I kept it. Reika Villani’s father is dying. I gave her escort to her father’s estate, nothing more. Or did you think I was lying in my note when I vowed to remain your faithful husband?”

  “Note? What note?” He was nibbling at her ear now, and her thoughts began to scatter like autumn leaves.

  “The one I left on your dressing table.”

  “There was no note—ah!” His hips moved against hers. Even through the thick layers of her skirts, she could feel the hard ridge of his flesh. Her hips bucked involuntarily, issuing a wordless demand. Big hands slid beneath her skirts, skating up her stocking thighs to the soft heat between her legs. Fingers stroked across hot, slippery flesh, driving her wild.

  “Do you hunger for my touch?”

  She hadn’t even realized he’d undone her laces until her bodice parted, and he used his teeth to lower the front of her chemise, baring her breasts. His tongue swirled around first one nipple, then the other, bathing each in icy fire.

  Her hands roved across his back and chest, pulling impatiently at fur and cloth to reach the silky skin beneath. She groaned as the hard, velvety head of his sex pressed teasingly against hers. She reached down to grab his buttocks to pull him closer, wanting him inside her.

  His hips didn’t budge. And the mouth doing such dizzyingly seductive things to her breasts stopped, too.

  She opened her eyes to scowl at him, and found him pushed back on his hands, watching her.

  “Do you, wife? Do you want this?” He gave a little buck of his hips. The tip of his sex pushed just inside her, then retreated, leaving the inner muscles of her channel clenching at unsatisfying emptiness. “Do you hunger for it? For me?”

  She was done with trying to pretend indifference. He knew it for the lie it was. She wrapped her legs around his waist, her arms around his chest, and surged up against him.

  “Yes! Yes, damn you, yes!”

  He smiled, and it dazzled her. Then he drove into her, and all coherent thought splintered. She gasped with the sharp ache of pleasure. Her arms tightened around him. Her nails clawed at the layers of fabric still separating her hands from his flesh. Her hips tilted up to meet each of his thrusts, taking him as deep inside her as she could.

  Gods, help her. She’d missed this. Missed it more than she had ever let herself admit.

  Kham shivered under him—not from the cold ice against her back, but from the heat that boiled inside her with each devastatingly erotic, slow-motion thrust of his body against hers.

  “Take this off.” She yanked at his vest. “Take it off. Now.” He pulled back to shed the furred vest, but she was too impatient to wait for him. She reached for the soft, woven-silk shirt beneath, gripped the sides of the reinforced yoke in her hands, and yanked. The silk ripped with a satisfying noise, baring a broad expanse of silky-smooth golden skin stretched across temptingly well-defined muscle.

  Her mouth found his skin. She licked the salty-sweet flavor of his flesh, bit at him, found the hard, tightly gathered coin of his male nipple, and drew it into her mouth. He groaned, and the sound rippled inside her. Her muscles clenched and released and clenched again. She bit down on the pointed tip of his nipple. He gave a guttural roar, and his hips slammed forward, driving her up and back. Stars exploded, bright, blinding flashes of light, and she screamed as wave af
ter wave of sensation crashed over her. Her hands clutched at his shoulders. Her legs locked around his waist, shaking in helpless abandon.

  Wynter held his wife on his chest, his clothes wrapped around her. He’d longed for a long, hot soak in a steaming tub, but this was so much better. The weariness, the irritability, the anger and frustration had all melted away from him the instant he’d buried himself in his little Summerlass.

  He ran a hand across her hair, marveling at its soft texture, the way the ringlets curled around his finger, loving the little threads of white shot through all that darkness. Midnight Storm.

  “Why did you come here, after promising you wouldn’t?”

  She glanced up, her gray eyes still touched by passionate silver, looking like shining moons against her dusky skin. “I wanted to know what you were hiding. And I thought you’d broken your own oath, so I saw no reason to keep mine.”

  “I don’t break my oaths. At least until this year is up, the only woman to share my bed will be you and you alone.” He could have reassured her again that there was nothing between Reika and him, nor ever likely to be, but he found he liked that hint of jealousy in his hot-tempered wife. No woman had ever felt the need to warn other women away. Elka had known he would never stray and taken his fidelity as her due. He had assumed she was just as faithful, and he’d grown . . . complacent.

  “So why did you keep coming when you knew the Atrium contained nothing of value to anyone but me? Oh, yes,” he admitted in answer to her look of surprise. “I know you’ve been here every day for at least the last week.”

  “You have someone spying on me?” She rolled her eyes. “Of course you have someone spying on me. Probably every person in the palace.”

  Of course he did. He’d given his foreign bride all the freedom she could desire, or rather, all the rope in the world with which to hang herself. He’d been a blind fool for a woman once before. That was a mistake he would never make again.

  “Why did you keep coming back?” he pressed. “What were you expecting to find?” If she was the one sending messages to her brother, she’d had an entire palace to search, places with far more valuable caches of information. According to Fjall, she’d never gone near any of them. She’d come here and kept coming here.

  “What was I looking for?” Khamsin’s curling black lashes swept down over her eyes, as she surrendered the truth. “The same thing you were looking for when you had this place created, I imagine.”

  Wyn frowned in bemusement. “What do you mean?”

  Her slender fingers trailed across his chest, stroking his skin and stopping over his heart.

  He waited, but when no answer was forthcoming, he rolled to one side. She slid off his chest and into his waiting arms. He covered her body with his, bearing his weight on his forearms. The long, unbound strands of his hair fell around his face and hers, secluding them in a veil of silvery white.

  “What do you think I look for when I come here?”

  She looked up at him. She had only to lift her head a few inches to cover his lips with her own. For a moment, he thought she might try to distract him with a kiss, but instead she only lifted a hand to his face and ran a thumb across his lower lip.

  “Love.” Her voice was so low, he had to strain to hear it.

  He caught her thumb between his teeth and touched his tongue to its tip. “You think I come here looking for love?”

  “For the memory of it, yes.” She met his gaze directly, and the clear, unwavering honesty in her gray eyes stilled him. “I’ve been coming here to imagine what it must have been like.”

  “To love?”

  “To be part of a family. To belong.”

  It had been a very long time since Wynter wanted to gather another person up in his arms and offer them comfort. But the wistful sadness in that hoarsely whispered confession tore at the gentleness he didn’t realize still existed in his heart.

  As if regretting the vulnerability she’d just revealed, Khamsin pushed against him and tried to wriggle free. He didn’t budge.

  “You have a family.”

  “Do I?” Her lips curved in a sad smile. “My mother died when I was three. My father hated me from the day I was born. My sisters and brother harbor some measure of affection for me, but that doesn’t mean I’ve ever been part of a family. Not really. Not like what you’ve preserved here in this room.” Her voice grew husky. She clamped her lips closed and turned her head away, but not before he saw the shimmer of tears spangling her lashes.

  The sight of those tiny, glittering drops filled him with both icy rage and terrible, consuming sadness. What miserable excuse for a man would deny his own child, as Verdan Coruscate had denied his fourth daughter?

  Wynter brushed his wife’s tears from her lashes. She could not be the traitor Valik suspected. No one could be so convincing. He’d been blind to Elka’s perfidy because he loved and trusted her. But Khamsin was and had always been the daughter of an enemy king. She’d deliberately deceived him into wedding her when he thought he was marrying her sister. He wasn’t blinded by love or trust this time. And when she said she’d come here because she wanted to know what it was to belong to a family—a loving family—he believed her.

  He rolled off her and got to his feet, pulling her up with him. He took a few minutes to help her rearrange her clothing and draped his furred vest around her shoulders.

  “I made this place for my brother,” he admitted. “He was only five when the Frost Giant killed our parents. I didn’t want him to grow up not knowing who they were or how much they loved him. It started as just a single sculpture of our parents, but Garrick liked it so much I made more.”

  He had succeeded in surprising her. “You made this place? You’re the sculptor?”

  He shrugged. “Ice carving is something of a national pastime in Wintercraig. I started when I was very young and got fairly good at it.”

  “Fairly? Wynter, there are famed artists in the Summer Court who couldn’t match what you’ve created here.”

  He flushed a little at her praise, then corrected her misconception that he alone was responsible for the Atrium’s sculptures. “They aren’t all mine. Garrick did his own carving when he was old enough. It was something the two of us did together.”

  She gazed around the crystalline world of ice and snow. “Would you . . . tell me about them? Your family?”

  A hand squeezed his heart, and Wynter found himself wishing Verdan Coruscate was standing here before him now, so he could choke the life out of him.

  He was careful to keep his voice calm as he said, “It would be my pleasure, min ros.”

  He walked his wife through the numerous trails of the extensive ice forest that he and his brother had created, pausing often to point out a particular piece, or tell her about the memory that had inspired a particular scene. He’d brought Elka here once. She’d admired the beauty of the place, the skill of his and Garrick’s sculpting, but she’d never felt the love. She’d never drunk in the memories with eyes that shone like silver moons, or paused so often to laugh over funny little details. Nor had she ever come here on her own to enjoy what he and Garrick had spent so many years sculpting. But Khamsin’s enthusiasm and her obvious appreciation for their work was too honest, too compelling, to be false.

  What would Garrick have said about Wynter’s Summerlander queen?

  Khamsin stopped by a sculpture of his laughing father holding an infant Garrick over his head. Young Wynter and his mother were holding hands nearby, dancing in the grass.

  “Tell me about this day,” she begged. “What was it like? You all look so happy.”

  Garrick would have liked her, Wynter decided. He would have liked her very much.

  CHAPTER 18

  A Surfeit of Snow

  The next morning, as Wynter sat in his office reviewing the documents that had stacked up in his absence, i
t occurred to him that he’d never gotten either the long soak in a steaming tub nor the night of undisturbed sleep he’d been looking forward to. The soak had been shared and short-lived, with most of the steaming water ending up on the floor of his bathing chamber before it had time to cool. And his sleep—what little he’d gotten—had been in Khamsin’s bed rather than his own.

  He should have been exhausted today. Instead, he felt more invigorated than he had in months. The few hours he had slept, with Khamsin draped over him, had been deep and dreamless and utterly restorative. Despite a second bath they’d shared again this morning, he could still smell her on his skin, and the scent kept distracting him as he attempted to plow his way through the mountain of papers awaiting his review.

  The fifth time his mind went wandering while attempting to read the same single paragraph in a report, Wyn gave up. The paperwork would have to wait. He pushed back from his desk and summoned Deervyn Fjall. After explaining what he wanted and sending Fjall to see it done, Wynter went in search of his wife. He found his Summerlass in the grand dining room with Lady Melle Firkin and a dozen ladies of the court.

  Wyn paused just outside the doors to observe them. Though the ladies were sitting scant feet away from his wife, there was an invisible but distinct gulf between them. The ladies chatted amongst themselves, never addressing Khamsin except when prodded into conversation by Lady Melle, and even then their voices were cold and clipped. Khamsin’s lovely, expressive face was drawn in a blank mask, all her bright vitality and passion tamped down and hidden away, leaving a lifeless, wooden caricature of Wyn’s wild summer Rose. The sight made his hands clench, and he had to wrestle his temper and his magic into submission before he stepped into the room.

  “Your Grace!” The gathered ladies jumped to their feet and dropped into swift but graceful curtsies.

  “Your Grace.” Khamsin executed her own, much slower but equally graceful curtsy. “I wasn’t expecting the pleasure of your company this morning.”

  “Were you not?” He bent down and dropped a kiss upon her upturned lips, aware of the ladies watching with avid interest and no small surprise. “I spent the better part of the last two months staying away until you were fully recovered from your illness. I am resolved to make up for lost time. I thought we might go for a ride.”