The Bride of Larkspear (8 page)

I find my voice somewhere. “My lady, your consideration is boundless. I am touched and humbled.”

To be more accurate, I am flabbergasted. Things are moving at a pace I could not have foreseen.

She smiles at me. My blood boils and freezes at the same time; I am aroused
and
chilled.

“So, what color sashes have you chosen for tonight?”

“Green,” I said, pulling them out of my pocket. The sashes unwind, their ends falling gently to the carpet, a deep, jeweled shade like that of malachite. “The color of your eyes.”

She twists a strand of her hair. “How romantic.”

“Anything for you, my lady,” I mumble, at a volume that might be too soft for her to hear.

“How should I place myself tonight? On my back or”—she rolls over and graces me with an incomparable view of her bottom—“on my stomach?”

My feet, of their own volition, move toward the bed. “How would
you
like to be placed?”

“My goodness, you do care what I think,” she teases me. “My answer, of course, depends on whether I will be blindfolded.”

“No blindfolds.” No blindfolds ever again. I always, always want to see her eyes.

She turns onto her back and lifts a hand over her shoulder, making her already taut breasts sit up even more pertly. Her nipples are hard. “Then this way. So I can see you. Watch you.”

Dear God, what have I unleashed? I am still dazed. Stunned. What
is
she doing?

As much as I want to believe that she might have come to care for me a little, and even with my heart’s proclivity for flights of hope, I cannot quite accept this complete change in her attitude.

It is not about what she feels for me. She is testing something. But what?

She holds out her hands to be tied, this woman who can never truly be tied down—not to bedposts, not to conventional expectations, and certainly not to the typical boundaries of marriage. But I fasten her wrists to the headboard, because she lets me.

Because she wants me to.

Her skin is dusky in the candlelight. I trace my fingers up the side of her rib cage, over her shoulder, then up the length of her arm to her bound wrist.

“Don’t you want to be touched?” she asks with a trace of mockery in her voice.

“I do. But I don’t want to be scratched.”

She laughs softly. “What is a good time in the marital bed without a few scratches on your back, Larkspear?”

The ground has shifted beneath my feet sometime this day. Now
she
is in charge of the games we play. Except these are not games, but battles I wage for this marriage. For our future.

“If only I could be sure that a few scratches will satisfy you.”

“Why shouldn’t they?”

“You will want more. You will want your foot on my neck.”

“Hmm, don’t give me ideas.”

I disrobe next to the bed. Her gaze licks me like a hot flame. “Look at you, so gorgeous and fit.”

I have no idea how to react—never before have I received a compliment from her. So that I wouldn’t seem too flustered, I bend my head and bite her upper lip. Her breath caresses my chin. As I pull back, her gaze slides down my body. “Ready again, I see.”

“Ravenous.”

“Such interesting nights you give me, Larkspear.”

I settle myself between her thighs. “Do you think of me during the day, Lady Larkspear?”

She smiled. “Never, my dear.”

“Liar.”

“You can’t prove it.”

I thrust deep inside her, without any preliminaries. But none are needed: She is as wet as if I’d spent hours kissing and caressing her.

Her lips part. Her eyes close briefly, but the next moment they are wide-open again. “Do you think of
me
during the day, Larkspear? Of my hard nipples and pretty cunt? And all the different ways you’d like me to take your cock?”

“Yes.” I punctuate my answer with a long, hard plunge into her. “Yes.” Another plunge. “And yes. Every minute of every hour. You are all I ever think about—your eyes, your hair, your lips, your smile.”

Her breaths become unruly. She stares into my eyes, as if searching for some truth deep inside my soul. I take her lips with mine. And for the first time since we become husband and wife, she returns my kiss, her tongue entangling with mine.

Then she pulls back, alarm on her face. Does she worry that she has allowed me too much intimacy, when she has set out only to tease and test me?

“Tell me more about my nipples and my cunt.”

In other words, not about her eyes and her smile, nothing that will seduce her into kissing me again.

“Gladly.” I pull her nipple into my mouth, licking, rolling, sucking, even as I thrust again and again into her tight, hot core. “I spend half of my days in a daze, thinking about how much you love to be fucked. How you moan when my cock fills you just right. How you throw your head back when you can take it no more. And how your cunt grips my cock and milks every last drop from my balls.”

She moans, the sound engorging my cock further. I withdraw almost completely, then thrust deep. She lifts her legs and wraps them about me. Her willingness almost undoes me. I grimace and hold back from coming.

“Did you finger yourself today, thinking about how flustered and randy I would be to find you already naked?” I demand.

“Yes.” She pants.

I thrust relentlessly into her. “Did you pinch your nipples and imagine my eyes on them?”

Her voice rises. “Yes.”

“And when you were in your bath, when no one could possibly see where your fingers were, did you touch that other place and imagine what it would be like to be sodomized by the entire length of my cock?”

She grunts animal noises and screws up her face, but does not speak.

I fuck her even harder. “Answer me. Did you?”

“Yes!” The word emerges wild and unsteady.

I can’t hold on much longer. I want to—I need to—spill everything inside her. “And did that thought make you come harder than you’ve ever come before?”

She shudders and thrashes, coming harder than she has ever come before.

As do I.

I
UNTIE HER WRISTS AND
hold her in my arms. To my further shock and amazement, she lifts one hand and settles it in my hair.

I want the moment to last forever.

All too soon, however, she begins to pull away. “I should like to rest now, with your lordship’s permission. Playing with Grisham all day was hard work.”

I do not want to go. I feel like Odysseus, home at last after ten long years at sea. How can I ever leave again?

I give her more room but do not get up. “Let me tell you a good-night story. You deserve one after playing with Grisham all day.”

She casts me an amused glance. “Let me guess—your story is about what the prince
really
does to Sleeping Beauty when he finds her.”

“No. It will be an entirely original one, written by me.”

“Featuring a slew of carnal acts?”

“Featuring nothing you cannot read aloud to a child in a room of his elders.”

She snorts. “You, writing a story that is safe for children? Go ahead; tell it. I will be on the lookout for hidden depravities.”

I have written a number of stories that are not only safe for children, but intended specifically for children. This one, however, has always been intended for her.

Until now, I have been dropping hints of my sentiments for her. Fairly broad hints at times, but still, hints that can be plausibly denied. Once I tell this story, however, everything will be laid bare and there will be no going back.

“Well,” she prompts me, “are you going to start your story before I fall asleep?”

I realize with a startling clarity that she has been testing just those semi-revealed sentiments tonight, trying to gauge the depth and intensity of my affection for her. Well, now she is about to learn just how deeply and intensely my feelings run.

I turn more fully toward her and begin. “Once upon a time, there was country named Pride. It was a proud country; everyone, from the king and the queen on down to the lowest street sweeper, was proud. But no one was prouder than the prince of the realm, a handsome young man by the name of Narcissus.”

“And he was so enamored of his beauty that he couldn’t stop looking at his own reflection?”

“My dear,” I admonish, “how little faith you have in me. Would I bother to recount such a hackneyed story to you? Trust me; you have not heard of this one.”

The skepticism on her face tells me she is not entirely convinced of my originality, but she says, “Go on then.”

“The most fashionable mode of travel in the country of Pride was a dirigible powered by none other than its owner’s personal pride. The prouder the person, the bigger his or her dirigible, and the higher and faster it flew. No one in all of Pride had a greater or fleeter dirigible than Prince Narcissus’s, which was, aptly enough, called
Narcissus’s Pride
.”

“And which will be thoroughly punctured by the end of your tale?”

I tsk. “Only ignorant foreigners would propose such a repellent deed. In Pride one would no more think of puncturing another’s dirigible than one would sell one’s mother on the town square.”

“And are you absolutely sure that the practice of mother selling isn’t a popular pastime in Pride?”

I burst out laughing at her ridiculous proposition—and choose not to dignify it with an answer. “The prince devised his own contest for ladies who wished to win his hand. For seven years running, the prince’s contest had been a three-day dirigible race, which he won handily each time. The entire country began to grow anxious for their prince, for he was of an age when he should settle down and beget heirs.

“Unbeknownst to the world at large, Narcissus had long been in love with a young woman of Pride named Fidelia. Fidelia knew Narcissus existed, of course, but that was the extent of her awareness of him. The prince and his fancy dirigible mattered little to her. In fact, from time to time she would make fun of him to her friends, mocking the size of his dirigible, and what one man could possibly do with so much hot air at his disposal.”

My bride’s eyes narrow a little. She is beginning to catch the drift of my story.

“Word would get back to Narcissus and he would pace the high towers of the palace, unable to sleep. From time to time he turned the telescopes in the astronomy tower to Fidelia’s bookshop in the city, to watch the light in her upstairs window, wishing he could be in her room with her, reading together.”

My bride’s expression changes when I mention Fidelia’s bookshop. She is, of course, no lowly bookseller—her brother is a peer of a higher rank than I. But the parallels are too obvious to dismiss.

“My,” she murmurs, her tone meringue-light, “for a moment I thought he meant to tie her to her bookshelves.”

“Please, he is nowhere near as romantic as I am. Now, where was I? Ah, every three months Fidelia went on a book-buying trip to several nearby lands. The prince always watched for her return—when she came back from those trips was when she would come to the palace with a crate of her best finds for Narcissus to inspect, and he waited for those meetings with a yearning only those who’d known unrequited love could understand.”

She sits up slowly, yanking a sheet about her shoulders.
Unrequited love
, those formerly unmentionable words, have at last been spoken.

It is more difficult to go on with her staring at me, but I do. “Pride was a country of largely predictable weather. They were in the middle of the dry season. Fidelia’s freight of books was loaded on drays normally used for barrels of ale, and not the covered wagons she’d have used in rainier seasons. But as the prince watched her progress on the dusty plains outside the city walls, what should he see but a storm on the horizon, fast approaching.

“He immediately called for
Narcissus’s Pride
, his wonderful dirigible. But by the time he reached her drays, the storm was nearly on top of them. There would be no time to transfer her books for safekeeping inside the gondola of the dirigible.

“The prince did not hesitate. Much to Fidelia’s openmouthed shock, he pulled out his dagger and sliced into his dirigible, opening it up into an enormous water-resistant tarp to place over her books. Fidelia, recovering her composure, found large rocks to place all along the edges of the tarp to keep it from flying away during the storm.

“They finished and ducked inside the dirigible’s gondola just as rain came down in torrents. ‘Why have you destroyed your beautiful dirigible?’ Fidelia at last asked. ‘They are only books.’

‘Maybe,’ answered Narcissus. ‘But they are
your
books.’”

My bride blinks at Narcissus’s fervent declaration.

“To this day people talk about how the prince won the hand of his beloved only when he first took a knife to his
Pride
. They were married the next spring and lived and ruled happily together for many years.”

Utter silence. My bride gazes somewhere toward the mantel. I cannot tell whether my story pleases her or merely makes her feel as if she’s been run over by an omnibus.

“A happy ending,” she murmurs. “That is depraved indeed. What will you think of next?”