Flames take him. “Tell me if you want more pressure or less.” What did he care if he didn’t appear an expert? He wasn’t. He barely knew her body. It was only the second time he’d put his fingers on her.
“You… you…” And then her hands were over his, fierce as she moved him.
“Like that?”
“You’re very… good at…” She moaned, arching her back, writhing against his chest.
He claimed her mouth.
She cried out against him, and he swallowed her noise.
It became a rhythm again, like the kissing before, but now there was an added element to it—his fingers sliding over her in time to the way his tongue slid against her tongue. She was still holding his cock, but she was only holding it, not even squeezing it anymore. She was distracted, he thought, and he felt pleased at the thought, powerful as he wrung the pleasure from her.
It went on, and she moved her mouth down to kiss his neck, which made him feel even looser and more aroused.
Then her noises deepened, and her mouth stopped moving against him. She went slack, and then taut. Then, her movements became more pronounced, her forehead digging almost painfully into the spot just below his shoulder, but he liked this too. He liked that she was tunneling into it, that he was affecting her this way, that she was losing herself.
Suddenly, she gripped him tightly, squeezing him, and she started to pant.
She raised her head, her nose brushing against his. “I’m close. Come with me?”
“Yes,” he muttered.
She teased him expertly—she was an expert—and he faltered against her, afraid he would ruin it, but she was panting, urging him with little moans and the occasional “yes,” or “please” or blazes knew, he couldn’t understand her.
He still came before she did, but probably only by two seconds, and he couldn’t have held it back any longer. He crested and exploded, and then he felt her body jolt against his fingers, and she was kissing him again.
For long, long moments, all they did was kiss, and everything twitched—the world twitched—the room twitched. Then it was less and less… and less….
Just kissing.
He realized her face was wet.
He touched her cheeks. “You’re crying.”
“No,” she said in a thick voice.
“What did I…?” He cupped her cheek, as if he could look into her eyes, but it was too dark. She was nothing but shadows. “I did something wrong.”
“No, nothing,” she said. “You… I’ve never… no one has ever done that.”
“Done what? What did I do? I’m sorry for whatever—”
“Don’t be sorry, you idiot.” She laughed, but it sounded like a sob. And then she was gone, off his lap, taking her blanket with her.
He simply sat there. He was a mess, and he didn’t have anything to clean himself with, so he stripped off his trousers and mopped himself up. His cock was softening, but it twitched again when he wiped himself. “I’m very confused right now.”
“So am I.”
He got up and made his way through the darkness. He was getting better at navigating the room, even without being able to see. He tossed his soiled trousers in the basket for laundry, chagrined that someone was going to see that on them, and then he found another clean pair in the wardrobe to put on.
“Where did you go?” she whispered.
“Where did I go? You got up first.” He was stupid. This was stupid. He wasn’t supposed to be bedding her, and maybe he hadn’t… it was just as if he had, though.
“You’re angry with me.”
“I’m not.” But he sounded a bit petulant, he had to admit.
“Why?”
“I’m not.”
“I’ve had… I’ve done it in front of men before,” she said.
“Done what?”
“Don’t be daft,” she said. “My…” Her voice dropped in pitch. “Climaxing like that.”
“Oh,” he said. “Of course you’ve done it before.”
“But not like… but never…”
He was still confused.
“You just sat there and touched me and didn’t want anything from me except to… to please me.”
“And this is a thing that you find fault with?” He was extremely confused.
“Not, not fault. It was…” Her voice was thick again, teary. “I wish you would hold me.”
“Oh,” he said in a different voice. He was starting to realize that he was wrong in his assessment of her reaction. She was affected to tears because it was good. He hesitated and then crossed the room to her as quickly as he could, feeling through the darkness until he found her.
She buried her face against his chest.
He pulled his blanket around her. He clutched her to him.
They were quiet and still for several moments.
She sniffled. “I’m so embarrassed right now.”
“Are you?” His voice was a rumble of wonder.
“I don’t…” She pulled away. “And you probably think I’m faking it.” It was an accusation.
“I know you didn’t fake it,” he said.
She snorted.
“I felt your quim convulse,” he said. “I know you—”
She kissed him.
He kissed her back, but carefully, softly, and then he pulled back. “I should have realized that the men you were with cared very little for your pleasure. That should have been obvious to me. I’m sorry I didn’t think about it. I do, though. Men do.”
“They don’t. You’re different.” She caressed his chest.
He tugged on her, leading her back through the room, to sit down on his bed. “I don’t think I am.”
She just laughed again, a bemused sound that was somehow also bitter. “Maybe you… you tried harder because you thought poorly of yourself because you were insecure about being skinny or what-have-you.” She patted his chest. “I’m just lucky that you acquired that skill before you got this body, because you never would have needed to if you’d always looked this way.”
“I can’t see what the enjoyment of coupling with someone who wasn’t also enjoying it would be,” he said.
She sighed and she flopped back onto his bed.
He didn’t move.
“Lie down with me.”
He hesitated. Then he did it. He gathered her into his arms and she lay her head on his chest.
“I may have been skinny and insecure—I may still be insecure—but I was a cownt. So, I didn’t have to try hard. I could have married someone, probably anyone.”
She scooted into him. “But you didn’t?”
“I didn’t want someone who didn’t want me,” he said quietly. “I didn’t want to be a disappointment to some poor girl.”
“And you learned how to give girls pleasure,” she said. “So as to not be disappointing.”
“I’m not a cownt anymore,” he said.
“No, thank the blaze.”
“Don’t you want me to be one? After I help Haid steal whatever it is we’re stealing, don’t you want me to take it all back with you at my side and make you a cowntess?”
She giggled. “No, I want to sew dresses. I want to be a seamstress and have my own shop.”
“Ah,” he said. “That seems a wondrous idea.”
She raised her head from his chest. “Did you just ask me to marry you?”
He chuckled, wincing. “I… uh—”
“No, you accused me of trying to trap you in a marriage.” Her voice was dull.
“I did not,” he said.
“Did you like being a cownt?”
“I loathed it.”
“Well, then, don’t do it,” she said. “Do something else.”
“But what? I have no skills.”
“Well, you’re very strong.” She ran a hand over his arm. “I’m sure you’ll find some way to be useful.”
“Sure, are you?”
“Positive,” she said. “I like you a lot, Cadon.”<
br />
“Yes, I like you, too.”
“But we don’t truly know each other,” she said. “We’re supposed to be moving slowly.”
“Yes, we seem to be dreadful at that, don’t we?” he mused.
CHAPTER FOUR
SEFONI WOKE FIVE days after Haid left to the discovery that she was not, in fact, with child.
Hastily, without truly understanding why she was doing it, she hid all the evidence, balling up her soiled underclothes and going to seek out rags on her own without notifying the servants.
But later, when her maid came to dress her, Sefoni realized she was not going to be able to keep this concealed from everyone, so she swore her maid to secrecy and then they handled it all on their own, hand washing everything together in her bedroom.
Her maid went along with it, but she was puzzled. Why didn’t Sefoni want anyone to know about her bleeding?
“It’s just my husband,” she said. “I’d rather he…”
What?
She wanted to trap him in the marriage with her because he would feel obligated for the sake of his unborn child—an unborn child that had not been conceived?
She couldn’t want that, couldn’t want to trap him.
Surely, it would be better to tell him the truth and to give him the option of choosing to be with her. Tricking him, it was going it about it all the wrong way.
She actually remembered once, when she and Lynette, her cousin the queen, had first come to the palace, that Lynette had faked a pregnancy and later a miscarriage, all for the express purpose of turning Henrik away from an affair he was having with a member of Lynette’s ladies in waiting.
It had worked, and Henrik still didn’t know that Lynette had never been with child, never once, though he sometimes spoke of it as proof that he could father children, even though he’d never impregnated anyone else, and even though it was likely he actually couldn’t.
The effects of that ruse were far-reaching, because Henrik used that fake pregnancy as evidence to blame Lynette for their childlessness. After all, she was the one who’d lost the child.
Tricking Haid would be wrong, and he had specifically told her he wanted things to be right between them.
It was only…
Thinking about Lynette made her think of that world in the palace, the one she’d left behind. It was a world of propriety and danger, where one wrong step meant a loss of reputation and everything tumbling down. It was a world in which everyone watched everyone else’s every move, waiting in delight for them to make a mistake so that they could destroy them.
She didn’t want to go back.
Here, with Haid, she was useful. Her shanj playing, which was her deepest joy, was necessary and encouraged. She was free.
And that was to say nothing about the fact that the past few nights, she had fallen asleep only after shutting her eyes and touching herself between her thighs and thinking of Haid’s voice at her ear, I know what you need.
Even now, she shivered in delight at the thought of it.
If she was pregnant, he would give in. He would take her to his bed again, and they would be together. He liked her. He wanted her. He had his own sort of honor, and even if she was never carrying his child, if she was thoroughly his, he wouldn’t let her go.
He’ll keep me, she thought.
And another shudder went through her.
Once the bleeding was complete, and all evidence of it washed away, she went to visit Pairce, who received her in her sitting room, seemingly delighted to have someone to entertain.
She had a full spread of sweetbreads, and she made Sefoni try each and every one.
Finally, however, Pairce became curious. “You can’t have come to see me to sample my sweetbreads.”
“I did want to ask you for something,” said Sefoni. “That preparation to drink the tea every day to stop your cycle?”
Pairce raised her eyebrows. “What would you want that for?”
“Well, if I’m not bleeding, it will look as if I’m…”
Pairce’s eyes widened. “You’re not pregnant.”
“You can’t tell Haid,” said Sefoni. “I can trust you with this?”
“Why are you hiding that from Haid?”
Sefoni’s lower lip trembled. “Do you want to go back to where you were before you met Haid?”
Pairce blinked, saying nothing.
“Well, neither do I.”
“You lived in a palace as a laidy in waiting to the queen.”
“And here I am his wife, and I can play shanj whenever I want, and I can shoot pistols, and I have a purpose. He needs me to help him steal things and—” She shook her head. “Never mind. I know it’s nothing the same. You had things much worse than I did before, but he did rescue me in some ways, and… and…”
Pairce licked her lips.
“And besides,” said Sefoni, looking down at the empty tea cup in her hands, “I don’t know if he’ll go to bed with me again if he thinks there’s a chance he can set me aside, and I…” She swallowed. “I want him to.”
Nothing from Pairce.
Sefoni raised her gaze to the other woman.
Pairce was smiling in a knowing way. “Oh, you do, do you?”
Sefoni flushed, and she felt the heat scorching her skin.
“You won’t be able to keep this up forever,” said Pairce. “And I don’t think it’s fair to trap him.”
“He trapped me,” Sefoni pointed out. “He forced me to marry him.”
“Yes, true.” Pairce shrugged. “All right.” She got up and left the room.
Several moments later, she came back with both a piece of paper scrawled with directions for brewing the tea and a small tin of the stuff.
“I thought,” said Pairce, “you might need some to get started? Most kitchens stock it, though. It’s useful for a household to have enough on hand for servants. Cheaper to buy tea than to lose a maid every time she’s careless, after all.”
“Thank you,” said Sefoni.
“I might point out that he did trap you, but on the other hand, you seem to enjoy being trapped so much that you are willing to engage in subterfuge to stay with him.”
“What’s your point?”
“Only that it’s not perhaps the same thing,” said Pairce, handing over the tin and paper.
“You think he doesn’t want to be with me?”
“Oh, no, he’s in love with you, like I said.” Pairce shrugged. “So, honestly, you’re probably just making this needlessly complicated. Tell him the truth. Tell him you want him. Tell him you want a real marriage.”
“But… what if he says no?”
“Well, it might take him a while to come around, but we have five months until Rzymn.”
“Four and a half now.”
“That’s a long time. If you trick him, you might make him angry, and you might lose him forever.”
Sefoni didn’t say anything.
“I’ll leave it to you, however,” said Pairce. “I won’t say a word. It’s your decision.”
TRISTANNE ONLY MANAGED sleeping on the ground for three nights before she insisted they find an inn. She said she’d pay for it. She had the coin.
Haid ridiculed her for it, but she knew he was happier once they were sharing rooms on their journey—ale in their bellies, a fire dancing in their rooms.
The further north they traveled, the colder it got, and the more difficult it became to find the kind of lodging that Tristanne liked.
One night, after climbing through a windy mountain path all day, they finally found a place with a room for rent, but it was only one room, with one bed.
Tristanne tried to convince Haid he should be a gentleman and sleep on the floor, but he assured her that there was no danger of his trying anything with her and that they should be fine in one bed. No matter how she protested, he insisted.
So, that was how they ended up lying together under the blankets as the cold wind howled outside, just a bit tipsy from the ale t
hey’d drunk with their meal that night.
“You know,” Tristanne said, yawning, “you’re the one who said you pictured me with other women.”
“I did not say that. I said that if I happened to picture you doing that, it wouldn’t be an unpleasant picture.” His eyes were closed.
“Because you think I’m attractive.”
“You know you’re gorgeous,” he muttered. “I am, however, not attracted to you.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense,” she said.
“You can observe a person’s appeal without succumbing to it,” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Tristanne, furrowing her brow.
“Maybe it’s more like this.” He turned on his side. “When I first met you, before I knew you, I was attracted to you, but then I stopped feeling that way.”
“What?” Tristanne was horrified. “Get out of this bed. You don’t stop being attracted to people.”
“You do if you find out they don’t like men and you’re a man.”
“No, I find out all the time that women are not attracted to women, and I’m still attracted to them.”
“You’re my friend. Stop making this strange.” He half-sat up to glare at her and then flopped back down.
She sat up completely, folding her arms over her chest. “I think you’re secretly interested in lying with me, Haid.”
“I’m not,” he groaned, pulling the covers over his head. “I’m really not. I swear, if I think of lying with anyone, it’s not you, it’s only Sefoni, constantly Sefoni.”
She was quiet, musing over that. “I suppose I understand that. I have the same problem with Mairli these days. I haven’t so much as kissed anyone besides her since I killed Melehen.”
“Can’t say I’m not relieved.” He pulled the covers down to peer over them. “Because if you told me that you think about lying with my wife, I would probably have to strangle you.”
“Guess I won’t tell you that, then,” said Tristanne lightly.
He pulled the covers down further, glaring at her. Then something seemed to occur to him, and he raised his eyebrows. “Wait a moment, didn’t you say that you only wanted things to be casual with Mairli?”
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