I can't answer. My mouth is full and he knows it.
"I can smell it from here," he says. "How much you want this." His hand tightens just slightly—not cruel, just present, inescapable. "Thirty-five days of hating yourself for wanting it." His eyes stay on my face. "Here you are anyway."
I sit back on my heels. Both cocks clean. His seed gone, just the cold of his skin and his taste in my mouth and my jaw aching.
"Good girl," he says.
Two words. They land somewhere below my sternum and settle there like something that was always going to be put down in exactly that spot, and I hate how much I want to hear them again, and he knows that too, the way he knows everything. I have run out of things to hide.
He stands. Reaches down and gets one arm under my knees and one behind my back and lifts me like I weigh nothing, andthe cold of his chest against my side and the heat going absolute at the contact, and I don't fight it. I am done fighting things that have already been decided.
"My skirts," I say. Still pushed up to my waist. His seed drying on the backs of my thighs.
"Yes," he says. Doesn't touch them.
He carries me out of the room.
The east corridor. The main corridor. The grand staircase. He doesn't hurry and he doesn't hide it—my skirts bunched at my waist, my thighs bare, the state of me visible to anyone awake in this manor. He carries me the way he does everything: like the outcome was never in question. I press my face against his chest and breathe his scent and let the heat take what it wants, which is this, which I think has always been this, and I think maybe I have known that since before I crossed the boundary.
His chambers. The door. The dark room with the fire burned low.
He sets me on the bed.
Looks at me.
"Claire," he says. My name. Not Clara.
The heat breaks completely.
I reach for him.
10
CLAIRE
He sets me on the bed and says my name and the heat breaks completely and I reach for him.
Not gently. My hands find the front of his coat and pull and he comes down over me and the cold of him is everywhere at once—his chest, his hands, the cold of his mouth finding mine—and the heat reads it asyes, finally, thisand I stop being able to think in sentences.
He pulls back.
Looks at me. The fire burned low, his face half in shadow, and he is looking at me with that expression—patient and total—and I am spread across his bed with my skirts still pushed up and his seed on my thighs and I look back.
"Ask," he says.
"I already did. Twice."
"Here. In this room. Ask."
My jaw tightens. He waits with that patience that has been dismantling me for thirty-seven days. I hate the patience. I hate it less than I hate that it works.
"Please," I say. Wrecked. "I want you to fuck me. Please."
Something moves in his expression. He moves down the bed.
He undresses me first, and not fast—with the authority of a male unwrapping something he has already decided belongs to him. My bodice. The skirts. My underthings pulled down over my thighs with cold hands, and when the last of it comes away and the room air reaches my bare skin I inhale. He sits back and looks at me. Not a glance—inventory, total, unhurried, moving from my throat to my bare breasts to my thighs and back. His jaw tightens once.
In the low firelight I can actually see him. Dark brown skin, the silver of his braided hair catching the light where it falls over one shoulder. Six centuries in a face that looks thirty-five at most. He is looking at me the way he looks at the sphere when it shimmers, with that specific deep attention, and I feel it everywhere.