8
VAELIS
My hand is on her neck and she is walking.
Not because I'm forcing her. The hand isn't force—it's cold, and firm, and it sits against her nape in a way that the pre-heat interprets as a command before her mind has a vote. The submission response. She has been fighting it for thirty-one days with a precision I have genuinely admired, and right now she cannot fight it, and she knows she cannot fight it, and she is walking beside me with her jaw tight and her gaze fixed on the middle distance as though if she stares hard enough at the manor wall it won't be happening to her.
Two of my court staff come around the corner of the east path and stop. Their eyes do what eyes always do—her neck under my hand, the state of her, the hard outline still visible against my breeches—and I don't break stride or look at them. Let them see. By tomorrow it will be self-evident to every person in this manor, and I find I am entirely unconcerned with that.
She doesn't look at them either. That pride. I intend to do a great deal with it this evening.
I walkher through the manor and up to my rooms, take my hand off her neck, and watch her step inside and turn around.
She still has the professional face. I didn't expect it—thirty-one days of pre-heat and the morning she's just had, and she is still holding Clara's mild expression, stretched thin at every seam, but present. Hanging on with everything she has.
Remarkable woman. I mean it without irony, which is unusual for me.
"My lord," she says.
"Close the door," I say.
She closes it. I look at her for a moment—the flush spreading from her throat toward the neckline of her dress, the pressed thighs, the slick I can smell from across the room, thick and warm and omega-bright in a way that has been a specific low weight in my balls for thirty-one days. Both cocks hard against the cloth. They have been since the garden. The ache has graduated from patience to something considerably less comfortable and I am done ignoring it.
"Kneel," I say.
A beat. The calculation running behind the professional face: Clara would kneel, a merchant's assistant in a lord's private rooms doesn't refuse, refusing breaks the cover she will not break. She knows this and I know she knows it and we both know that is precisely why I said it.
She kneels.
The sight of her does something particular to me. I have watched her hold herself upright for thirty-one days—the spine always straight, the chin always at exactly the right angle, the composure so absolute it was sometimes easy to forget it was aperformance at all. And now she is on her knees in my rooms in the morning light, her skirts pooled around her, and she is still holding the chin right and the composure intact, and both my cocks throb with the specific satisfaction of watching her manage it from the floor.
I walk around her slowly, letting the cold of me reach her from every angle. I watch the pre-heat track me—the small shiver each time I pass behind her that she cannot stop, the change in her breathing when I come close without touching. I stop behind her and look down at the back of her neck, the fine hair at her nape, the line of her spine disappearing into her dress, and feel my cocks throb in sequence. Heavy. Slow. Very aware of what is kneeling at my feet.
I put my hands on her shoulders.
Cold through the fabric. She goes rigid—and then underneath the rigidity, her body contradicts her entirely, a slow shudder working down from her neck through her spine, the pre-heat answering the cold of me with no input from her at all. Six centuries and it still does something particular to me, that shudder. The body's honesty when everything else is performance. I prefer it to the cover, but I am also not going to tell her that.
"Still," I say.
"I'm still." Not quite Clara's voice.
I slide my hands down her arms slowly, feeling her warmth through the cloth, the fine continuous tremor she cannot suppress. I find the laces at her back and begin undoing them.
"My lord?—"
"Still," I say. Pleasantly.
She goes still. The laces come loose and I push the bodice open and slide my hands inside, around her ribs, feeling the heat of her skin against my palms, and pull her back against my legs. She gasps. Suppressed immediately, but I have it—a smallcaught breath, halfway between protest and something else she won't name.
I bring my hands up and cup her breasts.
Cold palms against warm skin, and the sound she makes she doesn't catch in time. A whimper—short and furious and real—and her hands come up and grip my wrists and don't pull. Just grip. I work my thumbs in slow circles and feel her nipples harden against my palms, feel her back arch slightly, just slightly, the body's argument again. Her scent sharpens considerably. I breathe it in.
"How strange," I say, over her shoulder. Conversationally. "The Merris line carries no omega blood. You told me so yourself." I press my palms together, feeling the warm weight of her, and her breath hitches. "And yet."
She says nothing. Her knuckles are tight on my wrists.
"The pre-heat reads as fully developed." I roll my thumbs and feel her shudder. "The scent. The slick. The submission response." A pause. "Remarkable thing, biology. So much more honest than people."